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All Gone

L

LAA

Well-known Member
An Aunt that moved away from here 40 years ago made a visit this week and she started reminiscing about the various factories and businesses that used to be around here, as recently as 20 years ago we had all of the following:

Dawkins manufacturing house trailers

Rustler blue jean plant

Fruit of the loom

Garans childrens clothing plant

Three Cotton Gins

Fertilizer plant

rock crusher/asphalt plant

pulpwood yard

two large volume sawmills -- cross ties and hardwood lumber

Ford place

Chevrolet place

Three grocery stores

Big box store discount retailer

two feed and seed stores

Feed mill

Ice plant

Three hotel/motels

four restaurants

two hospitals

everything listed above is now gone or out of business except for one grocery store, one state subsidized first aid station/hospital and a couple of dollar stores and burger joints. I don"t see how areas like mine can ever rebound, when welfare and disability go broke it will be time to plant it all back to pine trees.
 
IP address traces back to outside of Witchita.

Sad story.

My home town on LI had factories too when I was a kid. By the time I got to college they too were all gone.

Pete
 
That is not surprising. I retired from the trucking industry 3 years ago and when we go and visit our daughter we go through the area that I ran and can't believe how many of the places that I delivered and picked up from that are gone and the places are standing empty.
 
Same thing in the Detroit area. Every place I worked at is gone:

6 small tool and die shops.
5 GM plants.
2 Chrysler plants.

All gone. Never coming back.
 
My hometown had the following, I know some are being missed but the following are gone:

Glass factory.

Shoe factory.

Seat factory for the automotive industry.

Battery factory for the automotive industry.

Wiring harness factory.

Overhead bridge company went bankrupt (only three left in the entire country) one of their customers bought them. Wages/benefits have apparently been cut.

All the 'mom and pop' grocery stores are gone.

'Mom and Pop' pharmacies are going fast.

IH dealer is gone.

Population is declining, my high school only graduated about half the students as 30 years ago.

Am sure I missed a bunch, but this will support what everybody else is saying.
 
We are mostly to blame for that in our demand for cheaper products. We did not have to buy imported products 40 years ago. Now it is about all there is to buy because we bought cheap imported products.
 
Check - Greenville, and all of Montcalm County. They can"t tear down the factories down and convert them back to sod fast enough. What"s really sad is the govenrnment backed, subsidized industries that came in to resurect the economy are belly up as well... UniSolar comes to mind. Hitachi too.
 
Companies that ship jobs overseas dont seem to know that the peasants need jobs to buy products.Country stores and restaurants are closing all around me.A city hardware just quit.Good store.Hardware and grocery closed in a town south of me.
 
Fifty years ago when I graduated you could have all the jobs you wanted, immediately. Now my grandkid that's a straight "A" student can't even get a job like the cartoon depicts. Colleges may need to teach kids how to live off the land.
a117407.jpg
 
In the manufacturing biz, I can tell you that technology has played a huge role in jobs going away. Yeah, a lot of jobs went to china, but a lot have simply disappeared. I can remember looking out over a design room at GM - acres of guys with drafting boards, thousands of folks invovled. Now the same work is done by a few folks with computers. Same thing on the factory floor. In the 80's we had 200 guys driving forklifts in the plant. By 2000, it was down to maybe 10.

We really haven't, as a country, prepared folks for this future.
 
I guess if your town doesn't have a University or casino you are SOOL. That's all that keeps ours going. Places to make money are all gone , places to spend money have quadrupled. College kids come to town every week armed with a new pot of cash to get rid of and so do the casino goers. Neither cares what they get FOR their money so quallity of food/services goes down and gas and taxes go up. University and Indi....I mean native Americans don't pay taxes. Gone are sugar factory, Ferro auto part stamping factory, Borden Creamery, Total Oil Refinery, Dowell Oil Well Services, Schlumberger Oil Well Services, State Home for Developmental Dissabilities (huge employer), four new tractor and equipment dealers/srvice , two grain elevators , . Now hamburger joints, car dealers, box stores and mini-malls and banks.
 
In the last ten years I worked for the same family at 2 different sites powder coating car parts.I helped to convert both plants to warehousing after the owners closed the businesses and sold the buildings for warehousing.One had 150 people working there (I was a leadhand on the night shift and remember saying to my wife "this might be the best job I ever have".When I got out of school there was still smallish dairy farms up and down the back roads.What barns are still standing are empty.In high school I owned a boar that travelled between 5 small pig farms (all had dairy as well) Not a hog around anywhere now.There used to be stores and restaurants and bars aplenty.We had a locomotive plant and a Ford assembly plant and a truck plant and all the feeder industries.

Ten years ago there were 7 strip clubs in London and it looks like that will be down to one real soon.Nobody has a spare nickel to spend on anything.
 
Used to have Ford, Chevrolet,Dodge/Plymouth dealers with gasoline service, hardware and grocery store in the small town central Illinois town I "grew" up in.

Least the bank and bar is still open.
 
Almost all of the textile mills are gone from our area... There were dozens, some had thousands of employees... We do have BMW, and all their suppliers now.

One booming business here is check-cashing/payday advance.. Legal form of loan-sharks.
 
Unions are not the only culprit, but they are the main reason we've lost so much industry in this once great nation.
 
Roswell, NM, was one of the largest alfalfa areas in the US..no more. Cotton gins..gone, big Levi factory..gone, Walker AFB..gone. wool production down. Now it's pecan orchards, mega-dairies with mega flies, and of course the alien stuff. Good change is more green chile grown. After moving away in 1977, it's hard to go back to the farm neighborhood and see 3000+ head dairies and yuppy horse lovers living on previous alfalfa fields.
Oh, well, I'm sure every generation feels the same looking back.
 
Lance, if that were true, states that have had Right to Work laws for the past thirty years would all be full of manufacturing plants. How many textile plants or clothing factories are left in North Carolina or Texas?

At this point, the cause is mostly irrelevant anyway. We're in a global economy now, and production will go to the country that can produce the product cheapest. You could abolish every union in the country and those jobs still won't be coming back.
 
I read an article that says that technology will eliminate whole sets of jobs.
Such as----

Bank tellers, (reduced because of online banking)

Automated trucks that drive themselves.
(this will reduce the OTR truckers by 50+%)

Designers, not as many needed due to computers.

There were many more middle class jobs that were listed that are threatened. I read it months ago and do not remember it all.

One trade that will be in high demand and is virtually impossible to automate and replace is HVAC service technicians. And everyone has heat and almost everyone has AC.
 
if you think it's poor now wait until the other countries get tooled up . the U.S. government wanted a service economy back in the 70's and look what they have created . now we will be servants to the world . thanks Barack and all that preceded him for the last 50 years .
 
I traveled across Texas for 35 years. As a service tech.Saw many small towns lose every thing. To the big box stores and people wanting cheaper products.

Onan generators. Used to be high quality product.That would last over five thousand hours. Until Cummins bought them out. Now you get a cheap quality product. That may last five hundred hours.If that long. I had one that lasted 49 hours,before the air filter assembly fell apart.
 
Small rural town 3 miles from our house had 2 banks ,2 doctors,2 barbers, 2 beer joints, Post Office,grocery store,and feed store plus elevator.Now there is one elevator and three houses.
 
Yep,RayP gave you the lowdown on Montcalm County. The "worlds largest refrigerator factory" is gone. The milk plant here in town is falling in on itself. They keep talking about tearing it down but haven't yet. The grain elevator that was behind it is gone.
 
When I graduated HS 40 years ago there was more jobs available in my county than there was working age people. Now most of the factories are gone, there are only 2 tractor dealers, 1 car dealer 1 grocery store(except for WM). Walmart is the biggest employer except for the government. It's become too easy to get on welfare and food stamps and you make more sitting on your azz.
 
So you are saying USA workers priced themselves out of the global labor market.

And unions had nothing to do with that?

Think about it.......

Paul
 
Are you suggesting that we should try to compete with Bangladeshi workers earning a dollar a day? Unions or not, we won't win THAT race to the bottom.
 
I live in SE Indiana but Google insists I'm between Columbus and Youngstown, Ohio so I get "directed" ads for businesses in towns I've never been to.

Last time I looked, Google maps also said that I-465 (Indianapolis) ran through Dearborn County (next door to Cincinnati). Lots of errors, but Google tracks everything?
 
Easy to get on food stamps?
Must be why so many in the service get food stamps for their families?

Some are poor because they are lazy. some are poor because they are not able to do better due to luck or other conditions outside their control.
 
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