[herodotus]

In the early 1990's, during my days as a Comp. Sci. prof, I was so excited about the emergence of the internet. When I saw the Mosaic browser (a precursor to Netscape and later Firefox) I knew the world had changed for the better. Now I have such mixed feelings. Magazines (like the Farmers Almanac) either go online completely or just disappear. They just cannot compete for advertising dollars with Google. And small family run local retail stores, offering not just goods, but a social hub for people are shutting their doors because how can they compete with the convenience of Amazon. Much has been gained from the internet, and much has been lost.

[gaoshan]

The aspect of small local stores functioning as a social hub really hits hard. The social hub, such as it is now, can be so much larger and less personal that it really does feel like a loss (a negative even).

Is the social hub now something like Instagram or a specific forum/subreddit/space for a school or neighborhood? These are really insufficient replacements and people that grew up knowing nothing else likely do not realize just how insufficient they are.

[localhost]

But why do social hubs need to be places of financial transactions?

I was in Delft recently and I really loved their library/community center. Full of music practice rooms, people playing board games on the ground floor, a coffee bar and it was full of people at 8pm. It is open from 9am - 11pm M-F.

You walk or cycle there (free indoor bicycle parking). There is a movie theater across the "street" (no cars).

[breakpointalpha]

They didn't need to be transactional spaces, they need to be spaces that attract people regularly.

The local chicken farmer who works 16 hours a day to keep his farm running isn't going out of his way three times a week to visit the community center for board game night.

He's definitely in the local Tractor Supply store three times a week though...

It's about creating community where people naturally gather, not creating a gathering space then hoping people show up.

[anonymars]

Consider this little anecdote from Kurt Vonnegut: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/kurt-vonnegut-envelope-quo...

DAVID BRANCACCIO: There's a little sweet moment, I've got to say, in a very intense book — your latest — in which you're heading out the door and your wife says what are you doing? I think you say — I'm getting — I'm going to buy an envelope.

KURT VONNEGUT: Yeah.

DAVID BRANCACCIO: What happens then?

KURT VONNEGUT: Oh, she says well, you're not a poor man. You know, why don't you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet? And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I'm going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope.

I meet a lot of people. And, see some great looking babes. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And, and ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don't know…

And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And, what the computer people don't realize, or they don't care, is we're dancing animals. You know, we love to move around. And, we're not supposed to dance at all anymore.

[thesuitonym]

Rare miss from Vonnegut, it's not the computer people. We know, and we care a lot. It's the owning people.

[AuthAuth]

It is the computer people. The 'owning' people were computer people that founded these companies. Its computer people that sit in these meetings and go through designing these changes and building these systems. I'm a privacy person and yesterday my boss asked me to pull up records on a users device to see a record of what they were doing and I did it even though its disgusting micromanagement that I hate.

[lumost]

I suspect this is the major reason for lifestyle premium fitness gyms popularity in recent years.

[quxbar]

Getting into climbing was secondarily a health choice, but primarily a social endeavor for me.

[spijdar]

I don’t think it’s about being “places of financial transactions” so much as it’s about places of shared necessity. Everyone has to eat, so everyone goes to the grocery store.

Community centers are great and I’m not going to argue against having “non-commercial recreation”, but the thing about having local stores as social hubs is they might be the only universally shared place of a community. Not everyone is going to want (or be able!) to visit a library, but everyone does need food and other consumables/goods.

[bunderbunder]

The "shared necessity" factor also means that you regularly meet acquaintances there by accident. It just doesn't happen at the Wal-Mart or Home-Depot 15 miles away anywhere near as often as it would happen at the town general store or the local main street shopping district. Possibly because nobody actually spends time at a big box store or strip mall; they're such deeply unpleasant spaces that you basically just do what absolutely must be done and get out. So now a little extra stroll around to window shop has been replaced by extra time in the car to drive 15 miles across town in the other direction to go to some other big box store.

It's not just a small towns thing, either. The main street shopping district I had in mind just now is in the middle of Chicago. And it doesn't happen so much there, either, anymore, in the post retail apocalypse era. Now it's all bars and restaurants so people go there for a very reduced range of reasons.

[localhost]

I would say that "don't let perfect be the enemy of the good" here. Would universal be better? Sure. But what I saw is so much better than what we currently have here in the US.

The point is that OPEN (the name of the Delft library) is really a community center and not a library. Yes, it happens to have books. But it also has a stage for musical performances, art rooms, tables, wifi, washrooms, coffee. I would say that the only thing that is missing is a gym; there are small dance rooms in there but that's not quite the same.

But the essence here is walkable communities. Suburbs and exurbs are hostile to even small local stores because you have to drive everywhere to do anything. There is no community in visiting my Costco or even my QFC.

Take a look for yourself: https://www.opendelft.info

[hollerith]

Quality Food Centers, Inc., better known as QFC, has 59 stores in western Washington and northwestern Oregon.

[ghc]

We decentralized information, and in doing so we centralized culture. I fear that we are only now coming to understand what we have wrought. I am sure that new social structures will arise to replace the old, but who is to say what lies between? It is not out of the question that even a project with noble intentions such as the web may precipitate a dark age for humanity. I don't say this as a pessimist, but as a wide-eyed realist wondering what happens when human civilization no longer requires humanity.

[unnamed76ri]

I attend a church where most of the folks are older and they don’t seem to get it that younger people won’t just find our church like in the old days because people aren’t connected by local businesses like they used to be. I don’t mind saying on here that I attend St John’s. It doesn’t matter because there’s over 1000 other St John’s in the country. No one can find us using modern means.

[MichaelZuo]

But if it’s so valuable… why aren’t people willing to pay for it?

Forgoing luxuries like a vacation to support local stores full of people you know and trust, that might charge 20% more for the same product, seems like an obvious thing…

That almost no Americans do in reality.

[_DeadFred_]

Huge sections of America/American's are incredibly poor.

Add that the highest income people were the first to switch to Amazon, and are more online first than community first. It didn't take losing too many of those customers for the economics to fall apart.

I live in a tourist town that has had a huge influx of new, higher wealth people post COVID. Surprising to me our businesses/restaurants are doing worse with this new population with more money, not better. They live here for the amenities, but other than on the mountain biking trails/ski mountain/lake (on their boats or remote beaches, detached from most people) you never see them. They work from home, but our walking trails are the sparsest I've ever seen them. None of them seem to go out to eat, especially not lunch. It's awful. And now that they are here, property prices have gone up, so more locals (and the children of locals definitely) will be priced out and replaced by work from home types who... just disappear into their houses. They buy all their gear online instead of supporting the local shops, the local knowledge, the places help organize/arrange for trail maintenance, more land into conservancy. From my one town observation modern upper middle class American's appear to be a net-loss for the local community. They are the types so into their sport they do all the own maintenance, then expect the local shop to do the 1 or 2 things they can't/don't want to do. The local shop can't survive on that little bit of work on your 'all internet bought, self maintained' stuff. They just don't get it.

[MichaelZuo]

If they have money to afford a vacation every few years or a RV, they are significantly richer than the vast majority of people on this planet.

So it seems like a flimsy excuse.

[cogman10]

Lots of things have happened that have ultimately harmed these small communities.

A major problem is consolidation. A small town hardware store may have had access to multiple suppliers at one point. Those all merged together and ultimately started raising their prices in a "go away" sense to small time purchasers. That's made it incredibly hard to be a store. A big box store gets a lot more foot traffic and has more leverage against distributers which allows them to ultimately outprice a small time store.

My hometown went through this. As a kid, it had a restaurant, a grocery store, a hardware store, and an automobile repair shop. 1 by 1 those all died. The restaurant died because the community never ate there. It became a thing where you'd literally call the owner the night before so they could prepare you a meal the next day. Otherwise they had no traffic. They were too expensive for my small town so nobody would buy a lunch there. The grocery store and hardware store died from being priced out. At one point, just to keep the shelves stocked the owner literally had to buy products from Walmart to sell at the store. No distributor would sell to them.

[pksebben]

I think to tease out the core of the problem with large businesses, capital, and society (esp. as regards the dissolution of small businesses), you need to autopsy the concepts of value and liquidity.

Money is meant to be a store of value, 'value' in this case being literally anyone considers valuable. However, it's an abstraction that doesn't quite fit over the thing it attempts to abstract - it really only captures that value if the value is something that is easy to transact. You might value a good conversation with your local grocer, or the smile you get when you pass someone you recognize in your neighborhood, but those things are left out of the money equation. Things the abstraction captures well - transactions of goods, legal representation, contracts, and lobbyists - are all of a particular stripe. Many of these are related to a projection of will; the ability to make things happen the way you want in spite of potentially mitigating factors.

One of the things that money allows is exploitation. Because of the delta between actual value and the abstraction of value, one is capable of strategically manouvering such that they capture more of the abstraction than a straight value:value transaction would warrant. This is compounded when you get tricky with laws and litigation and contracts - hard edges in the problem space become anvils you can use to hammer things to a shape that you like. Cynical strategies are quite successful here.

It is my belief that due to the recursively self-reinforcing nature of this system, it is bound to fail eventually. Because the leaks in the abstraction of value are actually a boon to some few powerful entities, the rules that govern the abstraction will fail to change and adapt and at some point the whole system becomes too heavy to support itself. As a whole, the system will eventually eat it's way to a heart attack.

Liquidity is the velocity of this process, and thus the velocity of consumption. There are pressures and systems and factors that metabolize the effects of the flow of capital, but the higher liquidity is the more burdened those systems become. We are currently in a place where the liquidity factor is > 1, by which I mean money can be spent before it is earned and most of it is (we have something like 5-20x debt to the pool of money, depending on how you measure it). This means that those deficiencies in the abstraction are accelerated and compounded by the same amount, which translates to an equal difference between the things we actually value as humans and the things we are capable of valuing as economic units.

[senderista]

Possible counterpoint: consumers will price in these intangibles when making purchasing decisions.

[Spooky23]

They dont get a choice. You really can’t operate a small store anymore. The distribution networks were all destroyed by the top-5 retailers.

Regional supermarkets are capped by this. The lack of third party distribution means they have to have their own sourcing and distribution. They can’t grow and are slowly being picked off of PE and bigger chains.

It’s even hard for restaurants. When I worked in restaurants in college in my region, we had 6 local produce distributors. Now you have Sysco, US Foods, two regionals, one of which just went PE, and the vertically integrated Chinese markets that prefer to do business within their circle.

I think we are going to have significant political unrest, and the rollup of everything will continue until that federal power is exerted against it. Otherwise, welcome to WalmartKrogerHomeDepot.

[MichaelZuo]

After 50 years of such choices being made it’s not suprising that it’s exponentially harder. The real question is why did Americans decide to do so en masse so many years ago.

[Spooky23]

We decided in the 1970s that all must be sacrificed on the alter of maximizing shareholder value.

[llbbdd]

What happened in the 70s?

[wat10000]

Because if I do that, I lose my vacation and I don’t gain a local store full of people I know and trust.

Collective action problems aren’t solved by individually performing the action, and therefore the fact that people aren’t doing it doesn’t show they don’t want it.

[ryandrake]

> Collective action problems aren’t solved by individually performing the action

This is a truth that a lot of the west, particularly Americans, struggle to accept. We keep trying "the free market and individual incentives must solve all problems" over and over, and fail over and over.

Huge problems require collective action to solve. Collective action requires good coordination, strong institutions, leadership, and most importantly, the societal willingness to not always optimize for the individual's freedom/desires/expectations. None of these are currently present in America.

[wat10000]

It's a very attractive idea. It gives you an immediate counterargument (people must prefer it this way because they're all doing it), and gives you the satisfaction of calling the other person a hypocrite (you think it's better yet you aren't doing it).

I've lost count of how many times I've had someone tell me, "If you think you should pay more taxes, you can always send the IRS some extra cash."

[olelele]

Thank you

[DFHippie]

Any problem with externalized costs or benefits is a collective action problem. You get a benefit everyone pays for or you incur a cost which everyone pays. The individual incentive is to freeload on the resources of others. It is functionally theft.

Regulation and other government actions can solve these problems by internalizing these costs/benefits. Any solution to these problems involves collective control of individual actions, which is to say, government at some scale.

There is some irony in the people who say "taxation is theft" ignoring the theft of the commons counteracted by taxation and the government services it supports.

[wat10000]

"Pollution is theft" would be a nice way to put the libertarian case for environmental regulation, but it doesn't have quite the same ring to it.

[sowbug]

You think you have a choice to buy local. It's more complicated than that.

"Local stores full of people you know and trust" is what advertising tries to approximate. Instead of forming lasting human bonds with shopkeepers and employees, we are informed by ads who we should patronize. And we pay, indirectly, for that service.

Private equity also takes its pound of flesh. Try hiring a local plumber. They'll always say they're locally owned and operated, which is a partial truth. But when you're charged $400 for 15 minutes of labor, remember that a lot of that revenue goes to private equity, far far away from your hamlet, whether you like it or not.

[boznz]

the McDonald's in our town says "locally owned and operated", same with the stores where everything (literally) is made in China. These sums up the absurdity of the phrase for me.

[xp84]

It's true that it's locally O&O as someone else pointed out. The McDonald's corporation just likely owns the land and collects rent and a sales royalty from the owner. This is pretty standard and honestly, seems to me to be much more human than the big box retail business model where there is no local ownership of any kind.

Side note: Grocery Outlet if you're in the places they operate, is a completely franchised grocery store chain. In my experience in multiple towns, the local owners do a great job, and one near me donates to some excellent local charities.

[SoftTalker]

The franchise is either locally owned and operated, or it's a corporation-owned store. McDonald's doesn't permit owner-investors as franchisees, only owner-operators (at least that was the case last I knew).

[etchalon]

Most people struggle to just to stay in front of their bills. It has nothing to do with "willing" and has everything to do with "able".

[petsfed]

A lot of reasons, but the two big ones are:

1) the American cult of self-reliance. The idea that people will not value something they did not themselves work for, even if its given to them by a close friend or family member, is basically synonymous with "the American dream". "Socialism" is so bad to Americans that they would rather have diabetics die because they can't afford the lifesaving medicine they need, than to give handouts to such people, just for them to develop a "dependency". There's even an entire health-influencer industry built around the idea that all health problems not directly caused by trauma are because the person suffering just isn't trying hard enough to be healthy, and not, you know, because of a social and economic system that's actively corrosive to human health. "You're sick because you're too lazy to avoid trans-fats" basically the gist of RFK Jr's ideology.

2) Americans are so opposed to thinking more than 3 months ahead that all they see with that 20% price increase is the impact it has on them right now. The easy access to instant gratification is steadily eroding our ability to be patient or suffer any hardship. This has been growing for a long time (c.f. fresh fruits and vegetables of all stripes, year round) but has reached a sort of fever pitch with the advent of same-day delivery for a vast array of bits and baubles.

[SoftTalker]

Those hubs still exist for things that the internet cannot replace. Barber shops, coffee shops, cafes, and other local dining, pubs and bars. Local parks, especially if you have kids, and other kid-centric events such as sports, scouts, and other activities. Adult rec leagues, gyms, volunteer orgs, etc. But certainly many have gone. There are still bookstores and specialty retailers here and there but not like we used to have.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

> They just cannot compete for advertising dollars with Google.

If print (and other) media had not been designed around advertising revenue in the first place, things might have gone very, very differently.

[1vuio0pswjnm7]

Both Google and Amazon are, generally, just middlemen (intermediaries)

There is no way for producers and consumers to "compete" with intermediaries

If the internet must^1 be full of intermediaries to link producers and consumers, then at least there should be competition _amongst intermediaries_

Google and Amazon have no significant competition from other intermediaries

1. It's possible that intermediaries are unnecessary