Can Tech Save Small Town America? 219
theodp writes "Declaring that small town life no longer has to be separate from financial success thanks to technology, Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos told North Dakota state officials to take hope in people such as Napster's Shawn Fanning. Interesting remarks, considering that Fanning conceived Napster in small-town Boston and the jobs Amazon's brought to rural areas don't exactly scream financial success."
Real Question, based on headline! (Score:4, Interesting)
And now, for no additional charge, I provide the answer!
No!
These articles drive me nuts (Score:5, Interesting)
Yet the small town was the reason I had to leave the business. They wanted more sales tax revenue (which made me less competitive than the dotcoms once you factored in almost 9% additional cost). They wanted to raise minimum wages, which made it impossible to stay competitive with the dotcoms. They wanted me to add a bathroom once I doubled my square footage (I was the most successful ma-and-pa retail store in that town's history). They wanted me to add an additional handicapped parking spot (which ended up occupying more than 22% of my total available parking spots even though I had never had one handicapped customer in 4 years of business -- we sold sporting equipment).
In the end, I wouldn't surive even if a paperwork error forced us out of business anyway. The demands of small town USA made it so I couldn't be make it in small town USA.
People move to small towns often to get away from the high overhead of living in the urban areas. Rural living can often mean rural salaries. Yet the rural communities that I ran 2 out of my 3 retail stores in were trying very hard not to be rural. Taxes went up (sales, property and residual regulatory user fees). Citizen services went WAY up (volunteer fire and ambulance squads because taxpayer funded unions).
In the end, small town USA will destroy itself by pretending it can mimic the high debt, high tax world of the big city. The only thing they don't realize is that they will chase away the customers that drove to small town USA to save a buck or three. Who will pay for the "gentrification" changes then? Tech companies? Ha!
Small-town ISP's, call centers, etc. (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, this state is in the midwest. It is not impossible to be successful in a tech business in the midwest. There are a lot of success stories you don't hear about. One area that has a lot of potential and success stories is call centers. People from the midwest have a very neutral accent and make good people to talk to on the phone - and have a far lower cost of living than many other areas of the country (exclusing possibly the south - not a shot at the south, its where I'm living now).
-everphilski-
Re:still mostly an exception (Score:5, Interesting)
Technology, but not electronic (Score:3, Interesting)
If we want to keep what we had, we have to find new ways to bring about how we were doing it in the first place.
Yea, that's really success. (Score:4, Interesting)
The folks get to ride a bus for 3 hours each day to/from work. Their shift is really a 12-hour shift because of this, since they get it at 15:00 and get home around 03:00. The day shifters get 9.50$ US/Hour, and night people get 50 cents more (a whole 4$ more/day; 1,040$ more/year).
Given 52 weeks with 5 business days, 8 hours/day, gives a salary of $19,760 before taxes for the day shifters. Is that above the US poverty line? In Saskatchewan (where most of basic healthcare is taken care of, and things like food are a bit cheaper), our poverty line is around $16,000/year. Any medical problem in the US is going to cost hundreds (if not thousands) of dollars -- I've seen what your drugs cost at the corner store. If you adjust it, I'd say they're probably pretty close to the poverty line.
Adjusting the 8/hour wages for the true 12/hour day with commute, the poor folks are actually earning $6.34 an hour, which is a lot closer to minimum wage. You can argue that the time on the bus isn't lost to them, but I don't see them being able to pursue most hobbies, clean their houses, or be there for their children in that time.
So, in fact, tech is not saving small town America. These folks are just as poor and not well off as any inner-city folks who have to bus for hours to work for almost nothing, while their children are home alone. They live in poverty, and they have no time to themselves for self development.
They did a study here. (Score:3, Interesting)
They basically found that it helps people find jobs in the cities faster, thus accelerating the exodus from the rural areas.
So yeah, I guess it helps small towns - by reducing the unemployment rate and breaking the cycle of despair and addiction that plagues so many of the people that live there.
Cultural Capital Issues (Score:3, Interesting)
Look at places such as Binghamton/Owego NY (I'm sure you have your local equivalents); even with a moderate-sized public university present, approximately 3 hours from NYC and Philly, very reasonable property, and a skilled workforce downsized from IBM, you can't attract enough investment to do better than limp along here. No local tech business of any size has been started to replace what's been lost, and the local governments aren't willing to take any meaningful steps to either encourage entrepeneurs or relocation by established businesses. Extrapolate this experience to some former wheat depot in Kansas, and you begin to see the problem.
I would put more money on relocation to the inner-city, gentrification, and reuse of brownfields than I would outsourcing to rural america. A cleaned-up Joiliette or Gary, IN, would be far more attractive than Snakenavel, KS.
Exhibit A = me (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:These articles drive me nuts (Score:2, Interesting)
Check again in a year. For 3 years now I have been interviewing small business owners all over the Midwest (urban, suburban and rural). In over 2000 face-to-face interview in 3 years, over 70% said they were taking out loans to support their businesses in hopes that things turn around.
In Illinois it is $6.50 an hour, that is only about $13500 a year! How can you possibly say that is alot of money? A one bedroom apartment with utilities can cost almost half that even in rural areas, how poor do you want your workers to be?
One employee at $6.50 an hour in a local business with a fixed customer base is not competitive with $6.50 in a state with lower regulatory costs that can keep people busy 24 hours a day.
How poor do I want my workers to be? I want them to be wealthy enough to spin off and run their own store/business. What a company pays an employee is directly related to how much the company's customers are willing to pay for the service or item they're selling. Local service businesses will find it more and more difficult to compete with the distance-support businesses that can offer the same product at a cheaper price.
Over the past 10 years I've seen people give up face-to-face service on many items in exchange for cheaper telephone (or even worse, mail) service plans. Not just in IT, mind you, but in almost every service imaginable -- vaccuum cleaners, electronics repair, etc. Of course I believe this is good for the overall economy by driving costs down -- including wages -- to those who can perform work more efficiently. The downside is that some workers will have to change their careers in order to survive, but that's actually a plus of the free market.
Business owners have never exploited employees, I believe it is vice versa. Wal*Mart succeeded by bringing less expensive goods to the consumer, but the consumer had to give up the information and service they used to receive from brick and mortar stores. The consumer made the decision to lower wages and incomes in their own area, Wal*Mart just met their desire for less expensive goods and lower overhead.
Over time, costs want to drive to zero -- this is normal. If our country stopped subsidizing the auto industry and the steel industry in this country in the 70s-90s, it would have allowed many of those assembly line workers to find new careers supporting cheaper and better cars from Asia. Imagine instead of 100,000 works subsidized to make cars inefficiently we'd have let them find new careers -- maybe as mechanics or installers of third party parts on these imported cars. Asia can make the cars cheaper and better but they sure couldn't support them.
Exploiting the worker is really just consumers of a market deciding they've found better deals elsewere. The worker should acknowledge that they're no longer efficient at their job and find something else to do. That's a reality. Horse shoers are long gone, when was the last time we saw an anvil? Yet you'd probably fight to make sure they make more money than the poverty line even though they aren't needed in their market any longer.
I don't mind that my shops had to close up -- I feel bad for my employees that my customer would no longer support. You'll see more "Main Street, USA" shops close down in the next 18 months, guaranteed. Some folks will run their lives into bankruptcy trying to beat a dying marketplace.
Re:Small-town ISP's, call centers, etc. (Score:3, Interesting)
But to cite some references, here are some (inbound) call centers in the midwest:
Company I used to work for went from a local ISP consisting of 4 guys in a basement (I was guy #4 at the time, 15 years old, my mom drove me to work) to outsourcing technical support for over 100,000 in addition to its own client base in three years. There are true midwest tech success stories; I know of others; they just don't get trumpeted on
Re:Money in Vs. Money Out (Score:1, Interesting)
Clearly gas stations provide some external revenue and pay at least a few local salaries, but the citizens of the town buy gas there too. Then there are the slightly bigger towns with a national chain or two, or even a Walmart. Again, they pay a couple dozen local salaries, but everyone buys stuff there. If it weren't for the 1-2% local sales taxes, I'd venture to say that the national chains would are a drain on the local economies they "serve."
p.s. I neglected to mention that most of these small towns actually see income from the sale of livestock.
Re:still mostly an exception (Score:3, Interesting)
Second, what would I do? Small towns offer a limited number of potential jobs, particularly if you're educated and want challenging, interesting work. There are also fewer and fewer jobs, mainly because of technology. Because of better technology like hydraulics, radar, sonar, GPS, sodium lights, refrigeration etc. the fishing boats can now operate more effectively in more weather conditions, any time of day or night, and stay out for longer, and are better at catching fish. That means you need fewer boats and fewer crew to catch the same amount of fish, and fewer jobs in town. Same deal with farming towns: more labor-saving machinery means you just don't need as many farmers. I suspect that's why small towns are drying up: the jobs aren't there to support them.
I don't think it can (Score:3, Interesting)
Another problem is the attitudes frequently found in small town america. There are people who worry that success will drasticaly change the atmosphere, either through large jumps in population, building and the likes, or that prosperity itself will destroy the values and way of life they appreciate. There's even a few who worry that prosperity will bring an increase in taxes. You can see the influence taxes wield in small town america just by looking at the local school district budget. Expecting entrepeneurs to spring forth from this environment is silly. For most of the guys I know that come from small towns, they'd just as soon live in a large metropolitian area and make a million dollars a year than do the same in their hometown. And even if there was a couple entrepeneurs thinking of a product on the national level, there simply aren't enough local human resources compared with the suburbs a few hours drive away. Try finding a competent graphic designer for hire. Or webmaster. Better yet, try finding an unemployed network engineer that lives locally. And you'd really have troubles convincing a potential hire with a family of three to move.
Napster was successful because he saw a common problem and came up with a fairly common solution. Napster didn't invent mp3 trading; he took the already prevailant method of ratio uploading and FTPs and mp3 search engines and combined them all, removing the designations between client and server. And he couldn't have done it without access to subsized internet from his University dorm room. Furthermore, all the guy did was invent a better way to steal things; there wasn't even a profit motive! Universities are the one place small america can look to for a pooling of young mobile talent; but Uni towns rarely resemble the small town america we know. Firstly, they're not exactly small. 30 thousand students alone means we're starting to break the definition, and doubly so once you figure in people in jobs serving those students etc. Manhattan, KS for example, has about 40 thousand people living in it. Sadly, the cost of living is almost the same as the suburbs of KC in Johnson County. If you've got an idea that needs a lot of part time people though, Manhattan's your place.
Oh but I do. (Score:2, Interesting)
I've visted Caldwell County, Kentucky. A few places in Alabama. There is no culture. Life revolves arround church and the highschool sports teams. The towns would shut down during a fucking highschool football game. I mentioned in passing that I liked De La Soul. I got some weird looks, and someone said they didn't like Mexican music. Good thing I didn't tell them that De La Soul is black!
If you like simple, salt-of-the-earth people, then good on you. But sorry, marrying your highschool boyfriend and pumping out babies ASAP is no way to advance our species. For some reason they kept asking me how many siblings I had...everyone down ther ebreeds like three or four. I mentioned my only sibling, and that I would likely only have one or two children. Suddenly I was being lectured for being 'selfish'.
Yeah. Selfish. Whatever. I have no interest in people like that who just live for the purpose of existing and making more of themselves. Get a fucking goal.
Re:Translation (Score:4, Interesting)
I would LOVE to live in a small town. I was born and raised in one, and I hate the big city life. I would gladly trade a third of my salary for the same job in a small town. No commute, no traffic, no crime, affordable homes, friendly people. Someone, please exploit me!
Re:Saving..? (Score:3, Interesting)
Technology put new life into the town where I live. To the west is a major computer manufacturer and to the west is one of the largest semiconductor companies in the world. Both have drawn other tech companies as the industry has grown locally.
The small rurual communities around me were dying out, but now they're booming - and still maintaining a sense of small town America as well. Maybe it's an anomaly, but it's worked out here.
-h-
To an extent.. yes (Score:3, Interesting)
Microsoft has an office here (we acquired Great Plains Software, which was a reasonably successful company in its own right) so it was a move I could make and stay with the same company (MS), but get a different setting/lifestyle.
If anything happens to this Microsoft office, or even my job personally, I am screwed. There is nothing anywhere near here paying MS salaries for software development. The closest would be Minneapolis, a 3 hr drive, and then you've got cost of living problems similar to the Seattle area.
That said, as long as it works, it's great. Lots of people here live on hobby farms 30-45mins away that are enormous. There's no traffic, people are friendly and non-uppity (try finding that in Seattle).
As far as technology in AG equipment.. yeah, its pretty cool. Multiple guys i work with wrote embedded software for AG machinery. Also, anyone that grew up here grew up on a farm so i've gotten to see what farm life is like via some friends i've made. Even the family farmer can debt finance used equipment that has onboard GPS. A friend of ours has a variable-track front-boom sprayer. This thing is like Optimus prime.. it unfolds and transforms and all kinds of stuff. It auto adjusts the fluid pressure in the boom to compensate for vehicle speed, and when it turns it slows down delivery to the inboard side of the boom (because it moves over crops more slowly). It uses GPS to partition your field into rows of travel and will tell you if you're veering off course (which can be helpful when you're driving through a sea of crops). The latest equipment will essentially drive itself along calculated GPS routes to cover an entire section of land.
This particular friend of ours also has a satellite weather/data terminal system. Pretty neat.. its a dedicated box that a normal PC mouse/kb/monitor plug into.. hooked up to a sat dish. It gives him 24/7 weather information, futures trading info.. crop yield reports from other markets, basically anything that would be interesting to a farmer.
Still, as much technology is available to the farmer, the family farm still struggles more often then it succeeds. Lots of operations are going with contract-harvesters.. companies that buy the biggest combines brand new, show up, and harvest your whole operation in a day, then move on to the next guy. This is good because the cost of these machines is outrageous.. and because they show up on the used market a few years later. It's bad because it's a loss of self-sufficiency for farmers.. and it suggests that equipment will continue to get more and more expensive even though technology is supposed to make things cheaper.
There are companies now that sell satellite thermal / IR data of field flybys.. you can say something about the productivity of a certain section of soil for a certain crop.. and take that data into account for how you do future rotations and plantings. If you correlate the previous years yeild data vs how much seeding you did there vs how much spraying you did etc etc, you can start to make some wise decisions about what plants will do best in what sections of land, on a rotating basis.
There's a lot of really, really interesting software work that can be applied to old fashioned problems, but nobody sees the glamour in writing software to do these sorts of things. The idea of "software developer" in my head is someone that lives in a big city, spends too much on coffee, has an Aeron chair.. and gets paid entirely too much money for what boils down to web surfing at work all day. It's less like that now that the
Re:techies head back to the land (Score:3, Interesting)
At the time I worked for Andover News Network (later Andover.net, bought by VA Linux, which become VA Software and renamed Andover OSDN, then OSTG), which was in a small town not terribly far from Boston. I lived in Elkridge, MD, a small town near Baltimore.
Andover bought Slashdot. The original Slashdot crew moved from Holland, MI, to Dexter, MI, another small town near Ann Arbor.
I moved to Bradenton, FL, pop. ~55,000. Retirees are courted like mad here because they *don't* use a lot of civic services. Realize that schools are about the most expensive civic service we have, and retirees rarely have school-age children.
This area has a substantial number of creative loonies [roblimo.com]. I wrote about that phenomenon on my personal site.
I have friends in tech businesses here who are doing fine.
When Tropicana -- based in Bradenton -- got bought by Pepsi Cola and all the executive positions were transferred to Chicago, not many Tropicana execs made the move. They decided to stay here. And they found jobs.
In fact, this area has a negligible unemployment rate, down around 3%.
Not all small towns are the same.
And not all small towns are in the middle of nowhere. I live about 3 miles from Interstate 75, which runs to Atlanta and from there, eventually, to Detroit. Not only that, we have a local airport 10 minutes away and Tampa International less than an hour away. Tomorrow I'll fly from Tampa to Raleigh, NC on business. It will take me less time to get to the airport than it would take me to get to LaGuardia if I lived in Greenwich Village -- and I'll pay a lot less for parking, too.
I can be anywhere on the East Coast in four hours or less, including driving and airport wait time. I can be in San Francisco in seven hours or so.
If I have large quantities of physical goods to ship in or out, we have a huge container shipping port right up the road, and another one across the bay in Tampa.
I don't feel I'm exactly in the middle of nowhere, even though I don't live in one of America's largest population centers.
Our nearest Gulf Coast swimming beach is about 8 miles, and the nearest launch ramp for my sailboat is 1.4 miles.
Since "I'd rather be sailing," this smallish town is a far better place for me to be than NYC, just as skiers would rather live in New Hampshire or N. Dakota than in San Francisco.
We all have our own tastes. I was born in Los Angeles, and I've lived in San Francisco, Baltimore, and the New York (Long Island) burbs. I learned that I liked a smaller place better than a big one. And I like having salt water nearby. So I live where and how *I* want, which may not be how and where *you* want.
- Robin
Obviously, he never grew up in a small town. (Score:3, Interesting)
But when I made it to Austin for college, I found that the kids from Houston and Dallas who were also into Computer Science had already formed networks, knew about the internet, USENET, irc, the demoscene. They had access to the cutting edge, whereas I had access to mere leftovers. And the reason was because this kind of high-end knowledge happens where the technology centers are. Unless a small town is somehow already a tech center, with both academic and industrial support for it, there won't be the adults, which means there won't be the kids, to grow up in that enivornment.
Small towns just don't have the right environment to develop a Shawn Fanning. That person is much more likely to ditch the small town and move on to a bigger town where his/her interest is likely to have peers.
So no, tech will never save the small town. Not without cutting-edge high-tech industrial support in the form of both industry and academia, and the small towns that have that (e.g., Austin) have already benefitted from it.
I want my children exposed to everything. (Score:2, Interesting)
I want my kids to go to school with all sorts of people, so they grow up accustomed to the fact that everybody has their own view of the world, and that those who are 'different' are not 'lesser' or 'evil' or 'damned' or whatever.
Oh, and nice talk-radio talking points dude. I'm socially liberal but fiscally conservative. Sorry I don't fit your mold.