It’s strenuous living in a small town with really few businesses to choose from.
There are only two automobile dealerships here, a single hospital, a single grocery store, & two pharmacies. When I was in university, it was impossible to hide anything in this tiny community from public scrutiny. If someone’s teenage child got pregnant, all the people found out. On the flip side, if a classmate lost a parent due to a tragedy, the level of support from our community was unbelievable. There was consistently a good side & bad side to living in a town this small, but more than anything the lack of choice is what I hated the most. My friends & I had few choices on locales where all of us could hang out beyond a park or by the lake. If I wanted a job in high university, the options for employment were scant, & that’s an understatement. I managed to get part time work on a farm before I left for university, but it wasn’t steady employment & the pay was as low as it gets. Whenever my parents needed work done on the house, all of us didn’t have a lot of options with corporations & tradespeople. There were only two heating & cooling companies at the time for us to choose from. But just love most of the city, only two of those companies were worth hiring. Both of us all had bad reviews for a single of those two Heating, Ventilation & A/C suppliers, & before long it was an open secret that they were incompetent & untrustworthy. If you’re given two options & a single of them is terrible, going with the other isn’t actually a choice, is it?