This is the second time in less than a month that I’ve tried to go get a product for a blog post in my town to come up empty handed. I literally have two Bi-Los and a Walmart that can’t keep their shelves stocked with the items they carry that Bi-Lo doesn’t. Let’s not forget that our local bowling alley, Movie Theater, and our arcade room is all shut down. There is NOTHING left to do in my home town.
What’s really sad about it, is it’s a decent size town. We have a mall, a Supercenter Walmart, a KMART (that is pretty much dead all the time for good reason), and plenty of fast food places to eat at. Shoot we even are blessed with a Ruby Tuesdays (that doesn’t know how to cook a steak), two Waffle Houses, IHOP, and a Ryan’s. It’s not like we are some small hick town where the only thing in it is a gas station and a post office like what I grew up in for four years of my life. (Although, that hick town is one of my favorite towns in SC. If you’re taking offense to the word hick-DON’T! I’m a PROUD HICK!)
I LOVE working with major brands like Kraft, TruMoo, and many others. It makes me very happy to get the chance to work on food product reviews because I’m always eager to try something different with my family. However, I’m also SCARED to death to accept those wonderful offers because of FEAR that I won’t have the product in my local town to get them. The Holly Molly Wholly Guacamole post I did was a LOT of fun because they sent me the food in a cooler. In fact I fell in love with one of their salsa’s only to get disappointed that it wasn’t offered in my local town. The Daily’s Cocktails became available after a lot of social media traffic to my local Walmart.
I literally drive through my town and see more empty buildings than I do full ones. I know that my small town is NOT alone. There are plenty of other small towns throughout SC and even other states who have this same issue. Many of the mom and pop stores that I grew up visiting and shopping from are no longer in business.
I have found that many of the reasons for this down turn of our small town economy is a lack of customer service needs being met. The quality of products that are given to us is very low. I have noticed that many companies don’t even know how to earn the sales they need to stay alive in our economy.
I honestly believe the main reason our stores keep running out of inventory is because they fear keeping to much of it on stock because when they have had it they didn’t sell them. I can remember when I was a manager that I had a heck of a time getting the right number of products in stock because
Another MAJOR issue I’ve seen is the people who actually value their jobs and WANT to earn a living don’t even bother looking for work in a small town. That makes it hard for a company to give quality service when the employees that they are practically forced to hire don’t care about their jobs and they honestly feel they have job security because they know they are needed more by the company than the other way around.
Now the big question I have is how do we keep the small towns alive?
