big stores bring jobs and money. yeah
Like the hardware superstore that was built in my mum's town. It created 180 new jobs, by putting out of business 3 smaller hardware stores resulting in 240 people being retrenched. Then, with the competition gone, they jacked the prices through the roof and there is nowhere within 150km where you can get a piece of wood that wasn't loaded onto the boat only half-cured and is hence warped like a pop-art sculpture by the time it is on the shelves.
Same with the big cloth store in same town that put all the local fabric shops out of business then trippled its prices overnight (really, it was overnight of the final competing store closing its doors). Then a few months later the ceiling of the store fell in in heavy rain and everyone has to travel 1 hour up the coast to get fabric for the next 6 months. And the idiots amongst the locals that went all starry-eyed over the 'big city' convenience they were getting can't understand what has happened or why the local economy is so bad lately.
I do wonder where all this money that these big stores supposedly bring to places that didn't have them before is supposed to magically spawn from, so I can go camp there ;-D