No Parking Signs Overshadow Boarded Up Convenience Store

Even with high gas prices, the Great Recession claims another rural business, a convenience store at a high-traffic intersection in a small Western town in the middle of nowhere. There could be many reasons for this, but this scene is replicated everywhere you go in the rural West and the Great Plains. Their economy has been dramatically hollowed out by a free market—with its imperative to seek the most profit no matter the cost—that simply does not care about the communities they leave behind.