Rural shops see revival, courtesy of gas prices
In small towns, locals now snub far-flung malls
THOMASVILLE, Ala. - Residents in once-sleepy Thomasville have started complaining about traffic jams on Route 43, which runs through town.
Much of the traffic is coming from shoppers, squeezed by $4-per-gallon gas, who are staying closer to home instead of driving 100 miles each way to the malls in Mobile or Montgomery.
"I just don't drive as much," said Herman Heaton, a 72-year-old retired lumber mill worker, leaning against a Chevy Silverado pickup that now costs $80 to fill up. "We don't go to Mobile as much as we used to for shopping." Heaton now spends about $600 a month on gas, double what he spent last year.
So now he's shopping locally.
Many stores in rural towns - from small shops to local chains - are starting to enjoy a little life after years of seeing customers bypass them. While it may not reverse the decades-long decline of small-town shopping, it could lead mall developers and merchants to rethink where to build and challenge a basic tenet of retailing: Build, and shoppers will come from miles away.
"The whole retail logic has been to build big mass stores that drew from a huge distance," said Robert Robicheaux, an economic development specialist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
Some small shops in Thomasville, population 5,500, report more customers as shoppers check out local options.
Thomasville is seeing a 5 percent increase in sales tax revenue so far for the fiscal year that ends Sept. 30.
In Brewton, Ala., a town about 80 miles southeast of Thomasville, city clerk John Angel said sales tax revenue is up 6 percent in recent months. Officials in Mobile and Montgomery, meanwhile, say they're dealing with shortfalls.
Tax experts say it's difficult to apply sales tax data nationwide since different states define sales tax in different ways. But Family Dollar Inc., which operates 30 percent of its stores in rural areas, says that its rural locations are outperforming the chain as a whole.
"Rural retail centers are likely to see a lot more traffic as consumers are not willing to make the long commute to the big city," said Michael Hicks, associate professor of economics at Ball State University in Muncie, Ind.
Hicks has studied the so-called pull factor - a measure of regional retail sales that takes into account local income levels as well as sales per capita - in Muncie and found it was seeing a smaller drop in sales than more urban areas like Indianapolis.
That means consumer spending in rural retail hubs is holding up better.
The decline of rural towns has been fueled by the closing of manufacturing plants and the flight of young adults in search of better job prospects.
But gas prices could be playing a bigger role in changing people's habits.
