There’s a neat/horrifying feedback loop with Walmart parking lots in particular.
Walmart enters a town and undercuts all of the small businesses due to their scale
Small businesses go bankrupt and that town is reduced to a Walmart colony with a dollar store shanty town on the outskirts.
Walmart doesn’t pay enough so it immiserates the employees that have no alternatives
Walmart employees end up spending their food stamps at the company store while living in a Walmart parking lot because it’s the only safe place in a town totally decimated by the Walmart
We need to protect the Walmart parking lot because that’s where all these Calvinistically-destined homeless people live and that keeps us safe from them.
And it just continues snowballing as a local problem becomes a regional problem and a regional problem becomes a national one. Locally the homeless populations are concentrated between the two largest local monopolies- Walmart for general goods and Kroger for groceries. The whole psychogeography of that area is shaped by how far you are from either of those businesses.
There’s a neat/horrifying feedback loop with Walmart parking lots in particular.
Walmart enters a town and undercuts all of the small businesses due to their scale
Small businesses go bankrupt and that town is reduced to a Walmart colony with a dollar store shanty town on the outskirts.
Walmart doesn’t pay enough so it immiserates the employees that have no alternatives
Walmart employees end up spending their food stamps at the company store while living in a Walmart parking lot because it’s the only safe place in a town totally decimated by the Walmart
We need to protect the Walmart parking lot because that’s where all these Calvinistically-destined homeless people live and that keeps us safe from them.
And it just continues snowballing as a local problem becomes a regional problem and a regional problem becomes a national one. Locally the homeless populations are concentrated between the two largest local monopolies- Walmart for general goods and Kroger for groceries. The whole psychogeography of that area is shaped by how far you are from either of those businesses.