I think to a degree there's some equalization happening that small towns can't handle. I can't buy a gallon of milk for under 4$ anywhere in the urban area I live. Even if I drive up to walmart on the edge of the city. When I travel to smaller towns (which is a lot - I'm gone almost every weekend camping, exploring, biking, what have you) I'm often shocked at how places so far from transportation hubs can have goods so cheap.
I don't believe it's sustainable, and the more the economy becomes de-localized, the less it can be realistically sustained. I think small towns like this are in for further decline the more centralized commerce becomes. It saddens me to say this, but many of these small towns don't provide much for the current big company driven economy, so why should the big companies care?
I don't think I'd really know until I broke down costs for overhead like rent, utilities, labor, etc. Most of those would be much higher in a urban setting than a rural. Then there's theft, spoilage, etc. Transportation is only one of those items. I think we would be shocked at how much the cost of an off the shelf physical item, isn't the item.
A lot of that, in the specific case of milk, is that farther out from cities you can sell it fast enough to make sense. Milk is, legally speaking, "good" for about 2 weeks from the time it comes out of the cow. If you're in a city where everyone eats out at all meals, you might not sell enough out of one store to avoid spoilage. This means that costs to the store go up since they either have to pass on high trucking fees per gallon for buying few gallons, or they amortize those costs and end up charging more per gallon because they throw a lot of it out. Conversely, out in farming country where I grew up, the closest restaurant was 20 minutes drive away, so we didn't eat out much and bought a lot more groceries than the people I lived with in NYC. This means that the Meijer in town rarely has to throw out milk for being passed the sell by date, and is large enough, with people coming in from a 50 mile radius, to move the volume to get volume discounts. Doesn't hurt that a reasonable quantity of their milk is bottled in town and comes from cows about a mile from my house... "Far from transportation hubs" is relative to what you're transporting...
I'm sorry but that sounds ridiculous, do you have actual experience with this sort of thing? I don't, but I'd be pretty blown away if a supply chain logistics expert came in here and said that groceries cost less in rural locations because people don't eat out as much. Why would they be unable to account for that? Do you really think urban consumers have random and unknowable patterns of grocery consumption that would lead to more spoilage?
I'm gonna need to see some sources to back up this claim.
I don't believe it's sustainable, and the more the economy becomes de-localized, the less it can be realistically sustained. I think small towns like this are in for further decline the more centralized commerce becomes. It saddens me to say this, but many of these small towns don't provide much for the current big company driven economy, so why should the big companies care?