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I thought the bad parts of company towns only work when the town is isolated and your paid in google points. If you can just drive 10 minutes to a non-company

• Pharmakon 8y ago
  The combination of your home and job, coupled with the surveillance and likely TOS aspects. It’s not a perfect analogy, but in some ways it’s even worse.
• jplayer01 8y ago
  Proximity, convenience, habit and time generally incentivizes people to behave in certain ways. I have a supermarket that I go to only because it's 50m away from where I live. Its selection is marginally worse and if there were a better one right next to it, I'd go to that instead, but there isn't. The next one is just enough distance/time away from my regular route to work that I don't feel it's worth the effort unless there's something really specific that I need. This is the kind of calculus that everybody uses to decide where to buy groceries. In a Google "town" with conveniently placed Google markets with a sufficient selection to cover most or all demographics and even a marginally higher cost would manage to capture the vast majority of residents.
  • woolvalley 8y ago
    That isn't the economic trap of living in a company town, that is like living in the more expensive area of town. So the company town effect doesn't happen. They can only raise their prices too much before the cost of goods outweighs the cost of inconvenience. I really doubt that any sort of real 'company town' effect will happen.