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Small town living is great. It can be hard to break into a social scene. You'll likely be a "new" family for years, but with some effort it can very easily be done.
If you're moving to a small town, I'd like to make the following suggestions:
1. Your service level will be lower because nobody is specialized in that service. Utility trumps style in many cases.
2. Like most places, rural or urban, nobody likes the dude that shows up and immediately starts explaining why their way is better before they even understand what it is they're looking at. The dismissal may not seem logical, but it's some of form of....go pound sand smartypants.
3. The community is very important in small towns. Make the effort to find a way to contribute. Don't expect a star to be pinned on you.
4. Bring your own money, but don't show it off. Rural areas are often low cost of living areas. Economic prospects are often limited. There ARE rich people in rural areas, but they generally will do the opposite of the cities. Conspicuous consumption that breeds jealousy is generally unwelcome. My wife wanted to show off at a family reunion with some of her items and I told her no. First, it's not how things are done. Second, look around the room. Those guys may be all wearing flannel and old jeans, but they've all got a lot more money than we do. We're gonna lose.
5. Try new things. You have to make your own entertainment in small towns. It can be hokey at times, but at some point it will click that you're just trying to have fun with one another. Join a band. Be in a play. Write for the local paper (but stay away from opinion pieces).
6. Be inclusive and respect diversity. While it's true that some areas harbor long-standing ignorance about other races and citifolk in general realize 75% of that basically stems from very little interaction or integration. At the same time, being inclusive of everyone you can possibly stand in a small town is important. Where I grew up, if you didn't play with the stinky kid too, you didn't have enough people for your baseball team. Find ways of working with people...cuz you're going to see them again.
7. Get prepared for more do it yourself than you've ever had to, cuz some services you just can't buy in small towns.
One of the biggest complaints for me, coming from Indianapolis to a smaller town (50,000) in east TN, is the lack of grocery selection. We have one significant grocery chain in this area, along with Walmart and a Sam's Club, which isn't in my town. There are a couple of stores from a chain based out of NC, and a few dumpy Krogers.
Prices are through the roof and selection is low. Even at the local farmer's markets, you can rarely get things like blackberries or raspberries. Fresh local meat is expensive and often unavailable. Basic staples like milk and bread are double what they were in Indiana. Many prepackaged, nationally available items, like some frozen Tyson chicken tenders I like, are 25%-50% more expensive here. Premade foods that were take out and cook (one of the grocery stores in Indy had a meat loaf made on site, uncooked, that all you had to was bake it) don't exist here. A lot of things I took for granted with shopping in general are unavailable altogether, require a trip to the nearest larger metro (things like Costco, organic groceries, etc.) a hundred miles away, or I have to get off Amazon.
I'm 31 and moved back to my hometown last year after spending most of the past five years in faster growing areas of the Midwest. There is practically no dating scene here for younger professionals. The women my age who are single are often single for a reason. Many of my grade school and college friends have a couple of kids themselves, and are too busy to meet often, or have themselves left the area.
Another wrinkle that you wouldn't think of is the lack of gyms. When I lived in Indy, I was a member of a fitness center run by the local government for about two years. When I first got there, I was a YMCA member. There were six Y's in the area. Before I left, I joined a higher end fitness club. If you didn't like one fitness club, there were probably a dozen within driving distance. In this town, the city and several of the major employers subsidized the construction of a new YMCA several years back, driving almost all the other local gyms out of business. That YMCA is the most crowded gym I've ever seen anywhere I've ever been.
I lived in a small town for a while to see how I would like it if I planned to retire to one.
1) Very car dependent with no public transit if I could not drive.
2) Very limited medical care. If I needed a specialist it was two hours away
3) Too boring, once those walks around the lake and through the woods got stale there was little to do during the long brutal winters
4) No work if i wanted to work a little, and any work available paid too little to be worth my time.
5) I'm a college educated intellectual and I found I had little in common with the local residents, many of which were chronically unemployed, had little education, and often had drug addictions.
I find it much more convenient to live in the city and take my vacations to the country when I want to do a little outdoors stuff. I just found out that living it daily was just not going to work out.
One of the biggest complaints for me, coming from Indianapolis to a smaller town (50,000) in east TN, is the lack of grocery selection. We have one significant grocery chain in this area, along with Walmart and a Sam's Club, which isn't in my town. There are a couple of stores from a chain based out of NC, and a few dumpy Krogers.
Prices are through the roof and selection is low. Even at the local farmer's markets, you can rarely get things like blackberries or raspberries. Fresh local meat is expensive and often unavailable. Basic staples like milk and bread are double what they were in Indiana. Many prepackaged, nationally available items, like some frozen Tyson chicken tenders I like, are 25%-50% more expensive here. Premade foods that were take out and cook (one of the grocery stores in Indy had a meat loaf made on site, uncooked, that all you had to was bake it) don't exist here. A lot of things I took for granted with shopping in general are unavailable altogether, require a trip to the nearest larger metro (things like Costco, organic groceries, etc.) a hundred miles away, or I have to get off Amazon.
I'm 31 and moved back to my hometown last year after spending most of the past five years in faster growing areas of the Midwest. There is practically no dating scene here for younger professionals. The women my age who are single are often single for a reason. Many of my grade school and college friends have a couple of kids themselves, and are too busy to meet often, or have themselves left the area.
Another wrinkle that you wouldn't think of is the lack of gyms. When I lived in Indy, I was a member of a fitness center run by the local government for about two years. When I first got there, I was a YMCA member. There were six Y's in the area. Before I left, I joined a higher end fitness club. If you didn't like one fitness club, there were probably a dozen within driving distance. In this town, the city and several of the major employers subsidized the construction of a new YMCA several years back, driving almost all the other local gyms out of business. That YMCA is the most crowded gym I've ever seen anywhere I've ever been.
Overall, I don't like it back here much.
About the raspberry complaint. Farmer's Markets, if officially sanctioned by the State's Department of Agriculture, can usually only sell locally grown, almost always required to be grown by the seller, produce. When raspberry season is over it's over. They can't import from Peru or wherever like corporate groceries do.
Same way with local meats, they're grown by likely small operators who don't benefit from the industrial model of commercial feed lots like the corporates do.
Here’s a potentially provocative assertion: it’s just more pleasurable and rewarding to live in a wealthier community, whether that community is a small village or a massive city or a suburb, coastal or heartland, northern or southern, landlocked or on a riverbank. Whether the prevailing sentiment is inclined towards punctilious religious worship or secularism, whether the preference is for American-made cars or imports, whether soft-drinks are called “soda” or “pop”, whether Main Street has 3 shops or 3 thousand.
Perhaps my perspective is skewed, but by “small town” I mean an incorporated town of say 10,000 to 20,000 people, surrounded by say 50 or 100 square miles of farms, woods, estates, industrial parks. The “urban” core of the town is perhaps a half-dozen blocks running north-south and east-west, petering out into expanses of drive-through fast food, law/dental/medical offices, then used-car dealers, and then a strip-mall with Walmart, Kroger, Tractor Supply, Rite-Aid, and perhaps a Chinese buffet, Mexican restaurant, nail salon and a couple of sports-bars. The high school has perhaps 1000 students, and its football team may be competitive at the state level. The tallest building downtown may actually rise to 5 or 6 stories, and have its own parking garage.
The adjacent small-town is about 10 or 15 miles up the highway. Some people live in one town, and commute for work to the other. Many live on a 5 or 10 or 20 acre plot between the two towns. This progression of towns pervades up and down the highway, until finally, after 100 miles or, one reaches “the city”, which boasts maybe 150,000 inhabitants.
This is the small-town America that I see. It’s not quant leafy hamlets of art-studios, boutique shops, manicured parks and well-stocked public libraries. It’s not boat-launches or riverside brick-oven pizza parlors. It’s large asphalt parking lots, with weeds growing between the asphalt cracks, strewn with beer-cans. It’s boarded-up factories surrounded by rusting fences. It’s people who are simultaneously corpulent and gaunt, with blank, other-worldly expressions on their faces and a dangling cigarette protruding in pose too stiff to be jaunty, too careless to be formal, sitting in their lopingly-idling 1998 Buick, cursing at the slow red light, perhaps with a screaming child or two in the back seat. It’s abandoned shopping carts leaning against no-parking signs, once-classic storefronts with a seemingly permanent “for sale” sign in a picture-window that once sported a hand-made Christmas display. And it’s a strange allocation of populace at 6 or 7 pm, with the drive-through at Taco Bell and Long John Silver’s packed, but nobody on the sidewalk.
The rather negative description in the above paragraph stems not from demeaning a community of small size. Some things don’t scale, and it would be silly to expect a grand opera house or a major research-university in a town of 3000 people. But wealth and poverty still matter. And for whatever reason, the modern reality is that smaller communities in modern America, or at least in my part of modern America, tend to be poorer communities.
Going to the grocery store is a very social event. Impossible not to run into a few people you know. This is good and bad. Good because you feel like a part of the community. Bad when you want to be descrete buying a weird combination of stuff like a 12 pack of Busch lite, some Saran Wrap, a coat hanger, a box of condoms, some frozen taquitos, a roll of duct tape, some zip ties, a tub of Vaseline and a carton of Marlboros. Then ask for $37 cash back. That combo usually will get you remembered by the cashiers.
Going to the grocery store is a very social event. Impossible not to run into a few people you know. This is good and bad. Good because you feel like a part of the community. Bad when you want to be descrete buying a weird combination of stuff like a 12 pack of Busch lite, some Saran Wrap, a coat hanger, a box of condoms, some frozen taquitos, a roll of duct tape, some zip ties, a tub of Vaseline and a carton of Marlboros. Then ask for $37 cash back. That combo usually will get you remembered by the cashiers.
Saran Wrap is to save the frozen taquitos as leftovers after you heat them up .
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