It’s tough living in a small town with very few businesses to choose from.
There are only two car dealerships here, one hospital, one grocery store, and two pharmacies.
When I was in school, it was impossible to hide anything in this tiny community from public scrutiny. If someone’s teenage daughter got pregnant, everyone 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 always a good side and 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 and I had few choices on places where we could hang out beyond a park or by the lake. If I wanted a job in high school, the options for employment were scant, and that’s an understatement. I managed to get part time work on a farm before I left for college, but it wasn’t steady employment and the pay was as low as it gets. Whenever my parents needed work done on the house, we didn’t have a lot of options with contractors and tradespeople. There were only two heating and cooling companies at the time for us to choose from. But just like most of the city, only two of those companies were worth hiring. We all had bad reviews for one of those two HVAC suppliers, and before long it was an open secret that they were incompetent and untrustworthy. If you’re given two options and one of them is terrible, going with the other isn’t really a choice, is it?