Area Trade-Centers
The automobile allows rural residents to travel farther, in less time, for goods and services. This, along with decreasing rural population, reduces the importance of the rural store. As businesses relocate from other communities, one town will become the trade center for its region, sometimes constructing a shopping mall.
Generally, businesses in a trade-center town, except for those in competition with the mall, will benefit from the mall's presence as shoppers spill over. However, business in nearby towns will suffer as shoppers converge on the town with the greatest variety of stores.
Examples: West Burlington, Iowa; Wickenburg, Arizona.
Read more about this topic: Types Of Rural Communities
Famous quotes containing the word area:
“If you meet a sectary, or a hostile partisan, never recognize the dividing lines; but meet on what common ground remains,—if only that the sun shines, and the rain rains for both; the area will widen very fast, and ere you know it the boundary mountains, on which the eye had fastened, have melted into air.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)