Re: The Big Secret Of A Small Town Download Youtube
Landers Hoang
Your project is not the center of their world.
You care a lot about your project or your non-profit. Well, guess what? Your successful small business owners do not care. They care about their business. From their point of view, that is how they got to be successful in the first place.
I suggested that the business owners might react better to someone who came in, learned about the people and their businesses. Only then would it be time to talk about events. More importantly, it would be time to listen to the kind of events that would work for them, and work together to create something even better for both the nonprofit and the business.
Next thing I know, she has put together a local music festival highlighting the teenagers in rock bands who never get invited to perform at other community music events. It happens June 1st and looks like it will be a huge success. That young lady has blossomed and is already talking about what she wants to conquer next. She has also engaged new folks to get involved with our organization who never considered it before.
As a result of this meeting the school district and SEDCOR (Strategic Economic Development Corporation) have formed a partnership in which SEDCOR helped the school start a welding program, teaching students a trade before they even leave high school. The students weld together metal bins which the local cannery, NORPAC, uses for produce. We also started a community clean up day. Businesses donated $ and prizes to be given away to the community members that donated their time one Sat. picking up trash and pulling weeds along the main streets.
Becky started Small Biz Survival in 2006 to share rural business and community building stories and ideas with other small town business people. She and her husband have a small cattle ranch and are lifelong entrepreneurs. Becky is an international speaker on small business and rural topics.
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Howdy!Glad you dropped in to the rural and small town business blog, established in 2006.
The idea of a commercial space aping the design of a city is somewhat familiar when it comes to the suburban shopping mall. Malls were famously designed after urban downtowns or shopping districts by the European-born architect Victor Gruen, who envisioned them not as churches of consumerism but as weather-free, and traffic-free, diminutive cities.
Last year, I was in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, helping a relative move into college. We made several obligatory Walmart stops, with all of the traffic-choked, 15-minute one-way drives that entails in the vast suburbs between the Research Triangle\u2019s core cities.
And not just this picture, which is Chapel Hill\u2019s historic downtown core, courtesy of Google Earth. I mean in general. The interior of a Walmart looks like the street grid of a classic small town.
Downtown Chapel Hill is much bigger than a Walmart. But nonetheless, the relatively small Walmart in the city\u2019s outskirts would fill about a third of the downtown\u2019s busiest commercial block right off campus. In my hometown of Flemington, New Jersey\u2014with a smaller downtown and a larger Walmart\u2014the store would fill more than half of the old commercial core. The largest big-box superstores approach or exceed 200,000 square feet, which is about the size of a very small classic downtown.
It\u2019s the traffic-free that especially interests me. The mall, as a collection of stores connected by \u201Cstreets,\u201D looks and feels like a commercial abstraction of a city. There is an echo of the glamor of urban downtowns in their heyday, with the department store serving as a link between the two forms. While an ordinary person might not think, \u201CThe mall is sort of like an indoor city without cars,\u201D that appeal isn\u2019t very far below the surface.
The big-box discount store, on the other hand\u2014with its exposed steel ceiling, utter lack of ornamentation and warehouse atmosphere\u2014makes no pretensions. You might go to the mall to take a stroll, or for a taste of elegance; you go to Walmart when you run out of milk or need kitty litter, as well as for the low, low prices. So it is striking that even in such a utilitarian setting, and such a quintessentially suburban one, the old urban DNA still survives.
This is not just a curiosity or a bit of trivia. We all know the why of Walmart\u2019s destructive competition with small businesses. We might argue over whether big-box retail represents efficiency and progress, or concentration of economic power. Perhaps it is both. But almost everybody agrees that a store like Walmart is cheap and convenient, compared to the old model of going into town and patronizing a number of distinct and separate enterprises.
But the how of this process, which contributed to the desolation of numerous American Main Streets, is about more than just low prices and logistics and computerized inventory control. Walmart\u2019s various business innovations were and are important, and many are now industry standards. But the conceptual core of Walmart is about design.
Walmart didn\u2019t just compete with the small town. Maybe it didn\u2019t exactly compete with it at all, per se. Rather, it replicated it. And, in stripping the frills and ornamentation of the indoor mall, it managed to replicate it quickly, cheaply and at scale. And so what the big-box discount department store effectively did was consolidate and transpose almost every classic Main Street enterprise\u2014clothing, toys, crafts, decor, electronics, hardware and groceries \u2014and place them all under one roof, under one corporate enterprise, in a massive, car-oriented property on the edge of town.
That map of the Chapel Hill Walmart resembles a town not only in a land-use sense\u2014its \u201Cstores\u201D and \u201Cstreets\u201D\u2014but also in a business sense. Nearly every department\u2014shoes, toys, pharmacy, etc. \u2014represents what would once have been an independent specialized store. More than physical size or market share, this is the real sense in which Walmart has consolidated economic power.
But about that \u201Ctraffic-free\u201D bit: By segregating the cars completely outside and making the \u201Cstreets\u201D car-free\u2014something often deemed suspect or radical when attempted in actual cities\u2014the shopping experience becomes safer and more convenient to the customer. The ease of strolling down the \u201Cblock,\u201D crossing the \u201Cstreet\u201D whenever you like, popping into whichever \u201Cstore\u201D you want, not worrying that kids will run off and get run over \u2014those are the key conveniences of the mega-store. The essence of suburban big-box retail is classic car-free urbanism. Put it this way: If we could transpose the commercially vibrant walkability of a modern Walmart back to the downtowns it killed, those towns would be better off. They would, essentially, be their old selves.
This suggests that, despite the political framings and stereotypes around transportation and land use issues, the desirability of commerce in a walkable setting transcends political lines. Shorn of its urban setting and context, we don\u2019t even realize we are doing it. The American small town\u2014itself just one version of a nearly universal pattern\u2014lives on, in some sense, in the very enterprises that helped destroy it.
Between the hidden urbanism of big-box retail and the numerous tax breaks, incentives and subsidies that such enterprises wheedle out of local governments, one can imagine a pro-market argument for favoring a more distributed kind of commerce in classic cities and towns. Is there really a free-market imperative to let chains build ersatz private downtowns, stripped of their fundamentally civic and public nature? Likewise, is there one to favor a business that isn\u2019t amenable to coexisting economically with the community in which it is located, or to tear the web of local commerce in deeply settled places, and in turn diminish the opportunity for ordinary people to participate in entrepreneurship?
If the big-box superstore has preserved the land-use element of the classic town, it has jettisoned its distributed and participatory economic element, leaving in its raft of departments, some of the form but none of the substance of a real Main Street economy. Maybe the people wanted it this way. After all, they vote with their feet and their wallets. Maybe they\u2019re voting for low prices uber alles. Or maybe they\u2019re voting for car-free walkability. And if they are, maybe we should give the people more of what they want.
Though Lifetime's newest original movie, Secrets in a Small Town, is technically based on a true story, exactly which story is an even bigger mystery than the plot. The official description says the film is "inspired by a true story," but doesn't provide any further details, and an internet deep dive doesn't yield any more answers. It's possible that Secrets in a Small Town takes elements from several real-life incidents and dramatizes them for television, or that the network has a private reason for not revealing the actual case.
Secrets in a Small Town originally premiered in March at Canadian Film Fest, under the title Nowhere, before making its way to Lifetime. It stars Kate Drummond as Claire, a recently widowed woman who relocates to a small town with her teenage daughter Sarah. However, things taken a turn for the worst when Sarah disappears after her basketball tryouts. The police tell Claire that the case is basically a dead-end, forcing her to take matters into her own hands. She starts to question several people in the town, including the girls' basketball coach, and ends up uncovering a series of dark secrets to reveal the truth about her daughter's disappearance.
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