Circuit City Gives Up

What you do not understand is that the very reason there are so many people struggling is because of places like Walmart. Small, local businesses did require customers to pay more. In turn, they paid their employees better wages and often had benefits.

Places like Walmart came along, paying horribly low wages, offering few to no benefits to their employees, using sweat shop conditions for manufacturing, and because of it, they would sell things for a lower price. Being short sighted, people flocked to these stores to save a few bucks, and local businesses ended up going out of business.

The result? Far less jobs paying a sustainable wage and far more people struggling to get by. Not to mention horrible customers service and lower quality products because a huge multi-billionaire company does not care if they lose a few customers. And they also know they have created a cycle of poverty that will keep most customers coming back because they don't have any other choices.

This also causes the flow of money in communities to be very out balanced, which means less money in individual communities for education and other important resources. In a locally owned business, the profits from that business almost entirely go back into the community...the owners purchase real estate in that community and pay taxes on it into the community, and they spend their money at other local businesses. The money stays there in the community, which is beneficial to everyone. In national chains, the vast majority of the profits are never put back into the community. The people receiving the majority of the profit are not purchasing property in the community and are not purchasing products from anywhere within the community. They make a flow of money OUT of the community rather than a balanced cycle of money flow within the community.

All of the situations you listed are largely the result of the shift in our economy to huge national chains.