We Participate in Extraction

Whenever I travel somewhere other than a large city, I am struck by the amazing lack of diversity. Not ethnic, there is always more diversity than there is in Black Forest. I am talking about options on where to spend money. Most of the time, everything is the same everywhere.

Hotels. I will spend the most money no matter where I go on sleeping arrangements. Especially in small cities, there are very few, if any, options that are not chains. Any hotel that is nice and/or mildly successful is bought by a chain. Other than the few management positions and some mostly minimum wage jobs, all the money is extracted from the region.

Restaurants. The other place I spend money when traveling. At home, I have lots of independent restaurant and cafe options. When I travel to a small place, I have found it incredibly depressing that most of these are chains. Sometimes even small chains. But either way, most of the profit leaves the area.

The best, and most depressing, example I saw was Roswell. 1 not-chain hotel. 1 hole in the wall thai restaurant. The rest was chains. The very small towns (closest one was 2 hours away) had independent restaurants and hotels. Roswell does a solid business as a regional capital, for aliens, the New Mexico Military Institute, and ranching mecca of the region. Most of the money spent leaves again, depriving the area of investment that would definately benefit the region.

What brought it home was Rome and Utica New York. All the store fronts are closed. A few have restaurants in them, mostly bars. In Utica, the 2 nice hotels that we stay at used to be locally owned, but they were purchased by (the same) management company, and franchised under DoubleTree and Marriott. On the outside of town, there are rows and rows of chain restaurants. Truly depressing.

Surrounded by the productive farms and land, and knowing about the ongoing crisis in dairy farm country, there is not better juxtaposition to the extraction, the rent collecting, on every transaction in rural America that moves capital out of the area, and back to the cities. Once in the cities, it is doled out to the working and middle class, and we are grateful for the opportunity to work for it. But we will never work as hard as those who work the land.