When you shop at big box stores, the money leaves the community and goes to the wealthy 0.01%ers.

But the evil of their methods is that typically once they move in there’s literally no other options left. Everything else either goes out of business or your wages drop so low you can’t afford anything else.

These are a blight on American society.

These types of stores didn’t used to be possible for various reasons. But regulations and a focus on car-centrism have enabled this hellish combo of monopolistic box stores that can pop up, kill the competition and leave a wasteland behind in which it is both financially and legally impossible for the local population to bring back local stores.

Local stores tend to be in the older town areas where dense-buildings were legal. These get bought up and flattened and replaced with a mcdonalds or a gas station while the walmartification is in full swing. Then once walmart implodes there because no one can afford it anymore, walmart closes and the other chains close as well. No one can afford to replace walmart or the gas stations at scale for the obnoxious amount of land they use, but they also can’t replace them with more dense buildings because its literally illegal.