HudsonHawk
I'll Lock Up
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Small towns used to be, (pre-freeway), much more self-sufficient. They would have amenities which we now only associate with cities. Hotel, fine-dining restaurant, department store, theatre w/stage, clothing stores for men and women, hospital, etc. There might only be one each of these establishments, but the town would have them. An example of this can be seen in the Coen Bros. movie, The Man Who Wasn't There, 2001. Set in 1949 Santa Rosa, California, (nowadays one hour north of San Francisco), the town's department store, hotel, and one white-tablecloth restaurant all figure prominently.
There is probably a formula for calculating whether a town retains some vestige of this self-sufficiency. It likely requires the town to be small enough to not have attracted the national big-box stores and to be remote enough in time-distance from larger communities.
It depended on the size and location of the town. Some small towns had all of those things, but ones I remembered did not. What they did have was a catalogue store, where you could go and order just about anything. It'd arrive in a couple of days or weeks, depending. I saw these all the up until the 1990s. In fact, many small towns embraced the Walmarts and big box stores for that very reason. Finally, one could simply go to the store and buy a pair of shoes. You could even wear them that very day. This was a revolutionary change.