For 10 years, I've watched from my gas station register as corporate chains replaced every small business. This isn't "progress." It's a corporate occupation, and I have the receipts.
What percentage of the population even thinks about this? Certainly less than thought about it in the 90s. Of that small percentage that’s left, how many are willing to actually do anything beyond complain? I’ve spent the last 35 years trying to buy American and still do, but how much is made here? To change this culture of cheap foreign crap is going to take time and pain. It’s been clear since 2022 that 90% of the population learned nothing about how fragile supply chains are. If the China flu disaster wasn’t enough to wake people up, I’m not sure what will.
I think a lot of us do however we are squeezed so hard by our limited funds, seniors, disabled and unemployed we have few if any other options than the lowest costs available or plummet into debt. I try never to buy from Amazon or Target. I do shop at Walmart and hate myself when I do but I can’t afford Whole Foods( now Amazon owned) Harris Teeter etc. I buy used off FBMP when I need something. It’s not perfect but I’m barely getting by.
Lack of choice is sometimes a conscious decision. We live very rural, and the closest supermarket of any type (Walmart) is 50 miles away. After that it’s another 35 miles, and then another 60 miles to do shopping. It’s the same with services, hardware, housewares or appliances. A trip to town seldom involves buying one of anything, and it’s usually multiple stops. Of course it’s our choice to live where we do, and in spite of the inconveniences it’s worth it. At home we are away from the cesspools that cities have become. I’ll take four legged animals as trespassers over the two legged varieties any day .
Doesn’t a food coop have the same effect on the local neighborhood independent grocery store.
My little book in Amazon makes a case for using the freedom we still have, Daring Mighty Things: The Simple Way to Start. Collecting Startup Stories for fully revised 2.2 Edition
Same in Canada. Small towns here are were joined by a highway. At least the traveller stopped in town to get fuel and food. The superhighways now bypass the towns further hollowing them out.
There’s no bigger ’chain’ than the churches, no greater source of control. There’s no greater distraction and no greater abandonment of responsibility than ‘prayer’. If you think the solution lies in ‘faith’ they’ve got you just where they want you.
Brilliantly summarized, Sera. I’m going to copy (blatantly steal) your comment for later use…🙂. Religion has been politicized and weaponized.
But people of genuine goodwill can organize around principles of kindness and community. If Stacy wants to toss a prayer on top of that, It may not help, but it certainly can’t hurt.
I don’t think that what we’re seeking necessarily exists in a different country. We can build it - rebuild it - right here. It might be easier to do in a small town but America isn’t done, yet.
If a few who left the comfort and safety of life in the 18th century’s superpower country can win their independence from it, we can surely declare our independence from our modern overlords. They no longer wear crowns, they sit at the top of private equity firms. Just take a look at who owns the companies behind your favorite brands and make sure your money stops going their way.
We won’t have to fire a single shot, but it will take intention, strategy, and sacrifice. It will take a shift in mindset from us all in concert, like the fish in the net on Finding Nemo.
Convenience, familiarity, and price are all things we may have to forego, at least until we can decentralize from big box/private equity. It’s nice to be able to pick up a bunch of random necessities in one go like we do at Target and Walmart, and the time and money they can save adds up. But we see what they’re doing with it. Are we losing time and money by supporting our neighbors or are we keeping it from Big Retail?
It’s uncomfortable to stop scrolling and work overtime or a side hustle (I’m struggling with this, myself) but I have to remember that this is what it takes. I have to let this energize me.
And “therein lies our dilemma.Part that mosts bothers me is the “ now sharing of the info”…eg. Since 1991 this horror was shared by some;& the rest of us unaware. So imagine the twilight zone hitting your/my neighborhoods. 💡⏳We would have jumped off our seats & thrown bbq’s, just to hear everyones take on it. How many distractions did we get to focus our 🔄attention’s in opposite way⁉️🚩❔
Great piece. Thank you. This strategy has gone hand in hand with a psyop that glorifies "rugged, bootstrap individualism" and denigrates any kind of organization or solidarity as "loser socialism". They want you isolated and powerless. You're not being slowly strangled. You're just a temporarily embarrassed millionaire. Those three gig jobs will get you there if you believe and work hard enough. And if you never make it, it's because you're a weak loser. Maybe you should just try owning nothing and liking it. Again, they need you isolated and powerless.
Magnus, thank you. This is a perfect and critical synthesis.
You've absolutely nailed the other blade of the weapon. The article describes the action (the "culture war flashbang" to provide cover for the "heist"), but you've perfectly deconstructed the ideological psyop that makes us all so vulnerable to it.
You are 100% right. They've spent decades glorifying "rugged, bootstrap individualism" and painting any form of solidarity as "loser socialism" for one reason: to keep us "isolated and powerless."
It's the psychological programming (Layer 3) that stops us from uniting to fight their "Killing Game" (Layer 2).
A brilliant fragment. Thank you for adding it to the forge.
Look at Walmart shareholders being DIRECTLY subsidized by taxpayers providing SNAP benefits and Medicaid to the employees that they refuse to pay a living wage. "Rank collectivism" for me but not for thee. Tech giants and the H1B visa scam, ... it goes on and on.
You are 💯 percent correct. The worst part of it is we are to blame. The American consumers looking for a great bargain. Once the competition from all the mom and pop stores vanished because they were forced out of business, the conglomerates started to raise their prices little by little. Now little by little the mega big corporations are buying out the smaller corporations, so now we have just a handful of big mega billion dollar corporations that own everything.
Yeah I pretty much ignore graphics on any social site unless I know I'm talking to an actual artist. Starting to ignore and not bother reading a lot online also because everything is AI mish mash anymore. Real books. Real art objects, not "virtual".
The PBM angle you mentoined is whats really insidious about CVS. They control 75% of drug pricing through the middleman busines while also owning the retail pharmacies. Its vertcal integration on steroids and completely anticompetitive. No wonder independent pharmacies cant survive.
Yep, and it’s convoluted… and much of it stems from our government representatives.
The big corporations need to be granted access into these locations to be able to set up shop, and local officials change land-use designations, authorize construction/business permits, and more. Those corporate entities can’t enter state, county, city jurisdictions without being allowed to… and government officials allow it.
Now, how is it that all these government officials are allowing the same thing all over different states/cities? Weren’t they chosen and elected by the people in that region to serve the people’s best interests? …or were they? Or were they strategically placed in those positions to open up pathways?
You all know the answer, and you know the implications of that answer. Yeah, it’s that bad… it’s that big of an issue, and it is that corrupt! It’s worse than people can imagine!
As Sydney Powell said, “ fraud, vitiates everything”… but I don’t know how that’s going to work, for the damage has been done! You corrupt an election, place in a puppet candidate, and they mangle things. We can catch them, but how do we undo the damage that has been done?
I was watching a review of Wetherspoons in the UK. This article made me think about that. It's a pub conglomerate in the UK that have thaken over most towns and are outselling most small mom and pops pubs in England and the UK.
Plus, they make themselves "indispensable" in the smaller villages and towns that may not be close enough to a city where you can hop in your car and go buy everything you need. Amazon will go to the ends of the Earth practically to deliver a package to you.
So TRUE! The person I’m married to constantly buys off Amazon and it pisses me off because I mentioned something to him a few years back during convid or plandemic (however you want to phrase it) that if he keeps buying from them it just makes them richer and us poorer, he told Me I didn’t know what I was talking about, yet he continues to feed the beast and there’s NOTHING I can do about it!
I see packages arrive from Amazon once a week if not twice because he’s too lazy to get off his 🫏 or stop by somewhere to look for what he wants, then when he does it’s either Wal Fart of Target!
I haven’t shopped at either for quite some time for the reasons mentioned in this article!
He just wants to “live his life” as I’m constantly reminded 🤬🤬🤬🤬
there are so few alternatives if you want to buy batteries at a decent price, or groceries. You do not have to buy Walmart paint, there are good paint stores,
Another bunch of textbook examples can be found by looking at the UK and Australia.
In the UK Tesco the largest of the supermarkets bought Booker, the country’s biggest cash-and-carry wholesaler that supplies thousands of corner shops and independent retailers. Overnight, the UK’s largest supermarket also controlled one of the main wholesale lifelines for its supposed “competitors”. If you’re an independent shop buying stock from the same company that wants you out of business, you’re not in a market – you’re in a trap.
And while Britain appears competitive — Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Asda, Morrisons, Waiterose plus discounters like Aldi, Lidl and Iceland— prices remain surprisingly high compared with other European countries where regulation limits how much power any one retailer can hoard.
UK pharmacies aren’t any better. Chains like Boots (owned by Walgreens Boots Alliance) and LloydsPharmacy dominate high streets — shrinking room for independent chemists, restricting local choice, and steadily steering pricing and supply power toward big corporates.
Then we can look at Australia. Two supermarket giants — Woolworths and Coles — dominate much of the grocery market, squeezing suppliers, demanding shelf “fees”, and using loyalty schemes and loss-leading to bury smaller rivals. The result: fewer independents, weaker competition, and consumers paying more for the privilege.
Even Australia’s chemist sector is surprisingly consolidated. Priceline Pharmacy is not a loose collection of mom-and-pop chemists — it’s mostly a franchise network under Australian Pharmaceutical Industries (API), now owned by Wesfarmers, with hundreds of stores operating almost uniformly under the Priceline banner. Independent in name, corporate in reality — franchisees must follow strict purchasing and merchandising requirements dictated by API, reducing real independence.
Then there’s Chemist Warehouse — another major player. Their model (and recent moves to further consolidate via wholesale and retail integration) show how even the retail-pharmacy “market” ends up centralised.
Different countries, same playbook: buy the supply chain, franchise or absorb the storefronts, crush the little guys — then tell the staff to smile politely while prices keep climbing for us simple idiots.
James, this is high-value intelligence. Thank you for laying this out.
The Tesco/Booker example you cited is one of the most brutal illustrations of a "Vertical Trap" I have ever seen. When the "competitor" owns the supply line, the independent business isn't a rival anymore—they are just a tenant paying rent to their executioner.
You have perfectly mapped the global playbook of The Rust. Whether it's Walgreens in the US, Tesco in the UK, or Woolworths in Australia, the mechanic is identical: capture the supply chain, rig the pricing, starve the independents, and then present the resulting monopoly to the public as "efficiency.
Cheers mate. I write about a lot of different things, but I have written specifically about supermarkets twice in the last year. These are by no means my best articles, but given what we’re speaking about here you and others might find these interesting.
I’m so thankful that the small town I grew up in has not succumbed to this poison. In fact, within the last few years, a local deli replaced the Subway that had previously been the only fast food chain in town. All the businesses in town are locally owned not chains, except the gas station and the unfortunate addition of a Dollar General on the far edge of town.
Thank you, great article. This reminds me very much of the movie Mortal Engines. A stark wasteland where everyone lives on these mobile cities and the big ones (London being the biggest baddie) devour the smaller ones for fuel, parts, and people to serve their agenda.
Very billionaire-coded actions and a perfect metaphor for these community-devouring monopolies. It seems like a bit of an uphill battle for us wee folks on the bottom. Bleak, but I'm glad some people out there are doing something about it. I'd like to as well. It's a massive challenge not to lose hope 💔
Your perspective is perfect. Your summary is amazing. Great work!
What percentage of the population even thinks about this? Certainly less than thought about it in the 90s. Of that small percentage that’s left, how many are willing to actually do anything beyond complain? I’ve spent the last 35 years trying to buy American and still do, but how much is made here? To change this culture of cheap foreign crap is going to take time and pain. It’s been clear since 2022 that 90% of the population learned nothing about how fragile supply chains are. If the China flu disaster wasn’t enough to wake people up, I’m not sure what will.
I think a lot of us do however we are squeezed so hard by our limited funds, seniors, disabled and unemployed we have few if any other options than the lowest costs available or plummet into debt. I try never to buy from Amazon or Target. I do shop at Walmart and hate myself when I do but I can’t afford Whole Foods( now Amazon owned) Harris Teeter etc. I buy used off FBMP when I need something. It’s not perfect but I’m barely getting by.
Lack of choice is sometimes a conscious decision. We live very rural, and the closest supermarket of any type (Walmart) is 50 miles away. After that it’s another 35 miles, and then another 60 miles to do shopping. It’s the same with services, hardware, housewares or appliances. A trip to town seldom involves buying one of anything, and it’s usually multiple stops. Of course it’s our choice to live where we do, and in spite of the inconveniences it’s worth it. At home we are away from the cesspools that cities have become. I’ll take four legged animals as trespassers over the two legged varieties any day .
Doesn’t a food coop have the same effect on the local neighborhood independent grocery store.
My little book in Amazon makes a case for using the freedom we still have, Daring Mighty Things: The Simple Way to Start. Collecting Startup Stories for fully revised 2.2 Edition
Life’s short. Start now!
Same in Canada. Small towns here are were joined by a highway. At least the traveller stopped in town to get fuel and food. The superhighways now bypass the towns further hollowing them out.
I was hoping that Canada was different. Where do we go from here?
Pray our nation repents and God hears.
There’s no bigger ’chain’ than the churches, no greater source of control. There’s no greater distraction and no greater abandonment of responsibility than ‘prayer’. If you think the solution lies in ‘faith’ they’ve got you just where they want you.
Brilliantly summarized, Sera. I’m going to copy (blatantly steal) your comment for later use…🙂. Religion has been politicized and weaponized.
But people of genuine goodwill can organize around principles of kindness and community. If Stacy wants to toss a prayer on top of that, It may not help, but it certainly can’t hurt.
Thanks for sharing, Sera. Stacy, I’m praying with you and for you.
I don’t think that what we’re seeking necessarily exists in a different country. We can build it - rebuild it - right here. It might be easier to do in a small town but America isn’t done, yet.
If a few who left the comfort and safety of life in the 18th century’s superpower country can win their independence from it, we can surely declare our independence from our modern overlords. They no longer wear crowns, they sit at the top of private equity firms. Just take a look at who owns the companies behind your favorite brands and make sure your money stops going their way.
We won’t have to fire a single shot, but it will take intention, strategy, and sacrifice. It will take a shift in mindset from us all in concert, like the fish in the net on Finding Nemo.
Convenience, familiarity, and price are all things we may have to forego, at least until we can decentralize from big box/private equity. It’s nice to be able to pick up a bunch of random necessities in one go like we do at Target and Walmart, and the time and money they can save adds up. But we see what they’re doing with it. Are we losing time and money by supporting our neighbors or are we keeping it from Big Retail?
It’s uncomfortable to stop scrolling and work overtime or a side hustle (I’m struggling with this, myself) but I have to remember that this is what it takes. I have to let this energize me.
And “therein lies our dilemma.Part that mosts bothers me is the “ now sharing of the info”…eg. Since 1991 this horror was shared by some;& the rest of us unaware. So imagine the twilight zone hitting your/my neighborhoods. 💡⏳We would have jumped off our seats & thrown bbq’s, just to hear everyones take on it. How many distractions did we get to focus our 🔄attention’s in opposite way⁉️🚩❔
Great piece. Thank you. This strategy has gone hand in hand with a psyop that glorifies "rugged, bootstrap individualism" and denigrates any kind of organization or solidarity as "loser socialism". They want you isolated and powerless. You're not being slowly strangled. You're just a temporarily embarrassed millionaire. Those three gig jobs will get you there if you believe and work hard enough. And if you never make it, it's because you're a weak loser. Maybe you should just try owning nothing and liking it. Again, they need you isolated and powerless.
Magnus, thank you. This is a perfect and critical synthesis.
You've absolutely nailed the other blade of the weapon. The article describes the action (the "culture war flashbang" to provide cover for the "heist"), but you've perfectly deconstructed the ideological psyop that makes us all so vulnerable to it.
You are 100% right. They've spent decades glorifying "rugged, bootstrap individualism" and painting any form of solidarity as "loser socialism" for one reason: to keep us "isolated and powerless."
It's the psychological programming (Layer 3) that stops us from uniting to fight their "Killing Game" (Layer 2).
A brilliant fragment. Thank you for adding it to the forge.
Look at Walmart shareholders being DIRECTLY subsidized by taxpayers providing SNAP benefits and Medicaid to the employees that they refuse to pay a living wage. "Rank collectivism" for me but not for thee. Tech giants and the H1B visa scam, ... it goes on and on.
You are 💯 percent correct. The worst part of it is we are to blame. The American consumers looking for a great bargain. Once the competition from all the mom and pop stores vanished because they were forced out of business, the conglomerates started to raise their prices little by little. Now little by little the mega big corporations are buying out the smaller corporations, so now we have just a handful of big mega billion dollar corporations that own everything.
The AI generated graphics illustrates your article beautifully even if they are incredibly ironic. AI is a big part of the battle.
Yeah I pretty much ignore graphics on any social site unless I know I'm talking to an actual artist. Starting to ignore and not bother reading a lot online also because everything is AI mish mash anymore. Real books. Real art objects, not "virtual".
The PBM angle you mentoined is whats really insidious about CVS. They control 75% of drug pricing through the middleman busines while also owning the retail pharmacies. Its vertcal integration on steroids and completely anticompetitive. No wonder independent pharmacies cant survive.
Yep, and it’s convoluted… and much of it stems from our government representatives.
The big corporations need to be granted access into these locations to be able to set up shop, and local officials change land-use designations, authorize construction/business permits, and more. Those corporate entities can’t enter state, county, city jurisdictions without being allowed to… and government officials allow it.
Now, how is it that all these government officials are allowing the same thing all over different states/cities? Weren’t they chosen and elected by the people in that region to serve the people’s best interests? …or were they? Or were they strategically placed in those positions to open up pathways?
You all know the answer, and you know the implications of that answer. Yeah, it’s that bad… it’s that big of an issue, and it is that corrupt! It’s worse than people can imagine!
As Sydney Powell said, “ fraud, vitiates everything”… but I don’t know how that’s going to work, for the damage has been done! You corrupt an election, place in a puppet candidate, and they mangle things. We can catch them, but how do we undo the damage that has been done?
Pray for repentance and that God hears.
For Revelations is at hand.
I was watching a review of Wetherspoons in the UK. This article made me think about that. It's a pub conglomerate in the UK that have thaken over most towns and are outselling most small mom and pops pubs in England and the UK.
Dottie, we need to study how they did that. Then form templates for replicating here in the US!
Plus, they make themselves "indispensable" in the smaller villages and towns that may not be close enough to a city where you can hop in your car and go buy everything you need. Amazon will go to the ends of the Earth practically to deliver a package to you.
So TRUE! The person I’m married to constantly buys off Amazon and it pisses me off because I mentioned something to him a few years back during convid or plandemic (however you want to phrase it) that if he keeps buying from them it just makes them richer and us poorer, he told Me I didn’t know what I was talking about, yet he continues to feed the beast and there’s NOTHING I can do about it!
I see packages arrive from Amazon once a week if not twice because he’s too lazy to get off his 🫏 or stop by somewhere to look for what he wants, then when he does it’s either Wal Fart of Target!
I haven’t shopped at either for quite some time for the reasons mentioned in this article!
He just wants to “live his life” as I’m constantly reminded 🤬🤬🤬🤬
Why are you married to him?
Well, like everything in life, it’s a long story
I was being a little flippant. I know nothing. But we only have one life to live and everyday is a day we will not get back.
Yea, Well not much I can do at this point! I’m no longer that spring chicken!
there are so few alternatives if you want to buy batteries at a decent price, or groceries. You do not have to buy Walmart paint, there are good paint stores,
I agree about Amazon though
The same goes for mechanical contractors being bought up by power companies. Trump's mission is to speed the whole thing up.
Thank you. Your dedication and carefully crafted narrative is inspiring. Words can create a movement away from apathy.
“Common Sense” by Thomas Paine is proof.
Great article, it nails the industry perfectly.
Another bunch of textbook examples can be found by looking at the UK and Australia.
In the UK Tesco the largest of the supermarkets bought Booker, the country’s biggest cash-and-carry wholesaler that supplies thousands of corner shops and independent retailers. Overnight, the UK’s largest supermarket also controlled one of the main wholesale lifelines for its supposed “competitors”. If you’re an independent shop buying stock from the same company that wants you out of business, you’re not in a market – you’re in a trap.
And while Britain appears competitive — Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Asda, Morrisons, Waiterose plus discounters like Aldi, Lidl and Iceland— prices remain surprisingly high compared with other European countries where regulation limits how much power any one retailer can hoard.
UK pharmacies aren’t any better. Chains like Boots (owned by Walgreens Boots Alliance) and LloydsPharmacy dominate high streets — shrinking room for independent chemists, restricting local choice, and steadily steering pricing and supply power toward big corporates.
Then we can look at Australia. Two supermarket giants — Woolworths and Coles — dominate much of the grocery market, squeezing suppliers, demanding shelf “fees”, and using loyalty schemes and loss-leading to bury smaller rivals. The result: fewer independents, weaker competition, and consumers paying more for the privilege.
Even Australia’s chemist sector is surprisingly consolidated. Priceline Pharmacy is not a loose collection of mom-and-pop chemists — it’s mostly a franchise network under Australian Pharmaceutical Industries (API), now owned by Wesfarmers, with hundreds of stores operating almost uniformly under the Priceline banner. Independent in name, corporate in reality — franchisees must follow strict purchasing and merchandising requirements dictated by API, reducing real independence.
Then there’s Chemist Warehouse — another major player. Their model (and recent moves to further consolidate via wholesale and retail integration) show how even the retail-pharmacy “market” ends up centralised.
Different countries, same playbook: buy the supply chain, franchise or absorb the storefronts, crush the little guys — then tell the staff to smile politely while prices keep climbing for us simple idiots.
James, this is high-value intelligence. Thank you for laying this out.
The Tesco/Booker example you cited is one of the most brutal illustrations of a "Vertical Trap" I have ever seen. When the "competitor" owns the supply line, the independent business isn't a rival anymore—they are just a tenant paying rent to their executioner.
You have perfectly mapped the global playbook of The Rust. Whether it's Walgreens in the US, Tesco in the UK, or Woolworths in Australia, the mechanic is identical: capture the supply chain, rig the pricing, starve the independents, and then present the resulting monopoly to the public as "efficiency.
Cheers mate. I write about a lot of different things, but I have written specifically about supermarkets twice in the last year. These are by no means my best articles, but given what we’re speaking about here you and others might find these interesting.
https://open.substack.com/pub/jamesmacleod/p/congratulations-your-supermarket?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
https://open.substack.com/pub/jamesmacleod/p/the-price-is-a-lie?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
And this one about surveillance pricing:
https://open.substack.com/pub/jamesmacleod/p/deltas-surveillance-pricing-the-future?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Hope you find them interesting and continue knocking out your own hits!
I’m so thankful that the small town I grew up in has not succumbed to this poison. In fact, within the last few years, a local deli replaced the Subway that had previously been the only fast food chain in town. All the businesses in town are locally owned not chains, except the gas station and the unfortunate addition of a Dollar General on the far edge of town.
Thank you, great article. This reminds me very much of the movie Mortal Engines. A stark wasteland where everyone lives on these mobile cities and the big ones (London being the biggest baddie) devour the smaller ones for fuel, parts, and people to serve their agenda.
Very billionaire-coded actions and a perfect metaphor for these community-devouring monopolies. It seems like a bit of an uphill battle for us wee folks on the bottom. Bleak, but I'm glad some people out there are doing something about it. I'd like to as well. It's a massive challenge not to lose hope 💔
I’ve always said that hollowing out of America began with the advent of Walmart.