It's been getting like that for decades. At least where I lived - you had mom and pop grocery stores in residential areas (small, family owned grocery stores,

It's been getting like that for decades. At least where I lived - you had mom and pop grocery stores in residential areas (small, family owned grocery stores, where you paid a bit more but it was convenient) - now it's been taken over by massive corporations like Wal-Mart and 7-11, etc. who have contracted out silicon valley companies to pay a pittance to contract workers who deliver you your groceries, when you could not that long ago just shop local, not need to drive, etc. etc. You had many more opportunities to pick which grocer you liked, which butcher you preferred, where to get your fruits and vegetables, but global corporations like (again) - Wal-Mart, Safeway, McDonalds, etc. signing contracts with individual/large farmers - you can't compete as an individual/small business with companies that would be able to pay many times more than you just because of the cost of scale alone. Globalization was a mistake for a _lot_ of things. The west has had it's manufacturing sector absolutely destroyed over the past half-century or more due to corporate interests/espionage/whatever. We rely on other countries to make our crap and ship it to us - how carbon efficient is that _really_? We'll never know because the corporations that own both the news/media and will tell us that it's okay, not to think about the consequences of actions, and to keep spending. "We're not going head-first into a really bad recession! No way!" (/s) The west has basically taken all of our (soft? hard?) power and given it away to other countries (to simply save a buck? to intentionally weaken the western economy over decades by malicious actors? who knows?)