Well since I helped hopelessly derail this thread, maybe I can help get it back on track. Grew up in the rural midwest. Basically 3 little towns, clustered together with an even smaller town in between. At the end of 4th grade, Dad retired and we moved to a farmhouse a retiring farmer sold, smack dab between the towns. Each was about 10 miles away--with the little town only 5 miles away. All this was in NW Wisconsin, about 90 miles NE of the Twin Cities, so in the summer the tourists from Minneapolis would come on the weekends.
Anyway, in those days I would refer to the largest of the 3 towns when saying where I came from. It had a little less than 2,000 people but it did have a Dairy Queen that was open in the summer time. At some point, someone wanted to put a McDonald's there, but the town Movers and Shakers decided that would take away business from the mom & pop restaurants so they killed it. So one of the other 2 towns got it and because by the 1980s, humans had developed an invention called "cars," people just drove to the next town to get McDonalds (which beat driving 30 miles to the marginally bigger town that had a McDonald's) and the mom & pop restaurants lost business but the city didn't even get any of the tax money from having a McDonald's. Now it's a town around 2,000 that has 1 shitty hardware store, 1 shitty grocery store, a couple restaurants, some gas stations and a few car dealerships, a few banks, and at least 6 bars that I can think of, off the top of my head.
All these little towns are hollowed out. The town I was in until 5th grade, when I was little it had 2 grocery stores, a meat locker, a hardware store, and a few other things. Now I don't know what it has. A few churches, a post office, 3-4 bars and maybe a gas station. The shitty little town, when I was little it had a church, a car dealership/farm implement dealership/gas station, a cheese factory, and a bar. Only thing that's left is the cheese factory. The only one that is (relatively) booming is the one where I went to high school. When I was a kid they got a Dairy Queen that was open year-round. They added a McDonald's, expanded one grocery store into what you could almost call a supermarket, and--most importantly--got an Indian casino.