i wonder at the state of the ins and outs of small local retailers these days, like, how do they pay their workers

it's not that travel has got cheap, it's just that it's got less expensive as fast as other stuff

i see this trend here especially in madeira where transport is naturally more expensive... the cost of fuel and the wear on brakes and cylinders is way above your typical flatland anywhere else on the planet

you can't even get groceries delivered here because of how high the transport cost is, and somehow everyone is driving cars around... and a great proportion of them are fuming up the air with leaky rings from compression braking on the way down the hills, and i've confirmed with a few people that they have to take their car to the shop more often to replace the brake pads and discs

and it's not hard to notice the number of now defunct retail venues around the place, i'd guess that for every operational retailer on this island, there is 2 or maybe 3 closed places nearby, everywhere

i think that the price of doing business has simply shut down these more marginal operations, and this has led to people using cars to go further... and the government funded building all these tunnels that bypass everything, and ... idk, i think there is some kind of car-centric mentality being deliberately propagated (i have thought this for a long time) in order to reap a tax gain at the federal level, and it's is almost consistently a federal operation, the licensure and forced insurance scams of road transport

it's also killed rail in many countries, bulgaria hasn't quit rail but serbia pretty much de facto has, and built all these ugly shitty highways instead, and you ask the local people they all miss the trains