A mini-mart is the biggest retail business. You know the litany.
Kids flock to the city.
Old-timers get older. Wal-mart sells cheaper. You can see a bit of the future here in Meta and hundreds of places like it. This is a place where relatively low-skill workers toil at labor intensive jobs to turn out the products of other Americans buy without a second thought. Rex Campbell, a University of Missouri professor of rural sociology, says that Meta defines what he calls the end of the friction of distance.