Repurposing empty buildings as business storage or a warehouse is a common small business practice in small towns. Putting up a sign is a good idea for at least two reasons. Retail businesses may be storing extra merchandise. Manufacturers might have extra materials or finished product ready to ship. Service and repair companies have to…
Electric vehicle chargers are a perfect place for tourism wayfinding signs. EV charging stations are popping up in lots of rural places, especially along interstate highways and along the coasts in the US. They’ve become relatively common at some motels as well. Chargers are also popping up globally in rural places. Deb Brown reported seeing…
Living in a small town, we are often inclined to see change in our community as a threat to ourselves and our way of life. When we feel threatened by change, uncertainty rears its ugly head and our negativity often takes over. We say things like “What’s wrong with the way we’ve always done it?”…
Remote work will dominate the future small town workforce Your current residents Your current small town residents will increasingly work from home or remotely. Gallup looked at jobs that could be done remotely and the locations where workers actually did them. Four times as many workers will work remotely going forward, compared to the number…
The most common thing rural people ask us about remote workers is how to attract them. To find out what will make your town attractive, let’s look at what attracts people to your town right now. Every town has some people moving in every year, and we don’t notice them. We are far more aware…
Are you a proficient online gamer or metaworld master based in a rural community? You could make a small business out of being a virtual world tour guide. Years ago, a now-defunct business ideas site profiled Synthtravels, a business that offered guided tours of online virtual worlds. If you’ve heard of the metaverse or…
Pew Research released a major rural vs urban study, and the headlines missed the best bits. Pew Research’s new social trends study has shown up in a lot of news stories with widely varying headlines. Pew themselves titled it “Americans Are Less Likely Than Before COVID-19 To Want To Live in Cities, More Likely To…
Who knows what trends will affect small and rural communities in 2022 and beyond? Not many trends pieces cover rural places. These trends are specifically about rural and small towns. I’ve been following rural trends and writing about them since 2009. My trends reports have been commissioned or quoted by Main Street America, Emergent Research, the…
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