Thats even if the grocery store still exists. Ours Walmart came in and opened one store in the county and under cut local stores prices until they all closed then raised their prices. So now instead of going to the small grocery store everyone has to drive an hour to pay higher prices at Walmart.
My mother likes our Amazon wish list for the kids because they have so little of a selection of decent stuff there.

I agree that the small towns I'm talking about are very hard to find, but they do still exist. It takes searching through a lot of census data and also getting in the car and driving a lot of backroads.

In my own searching, I started at the county level. There are only about 3,000 counties in the USA so that is a manageable place to start. You can find this information at http://2010.census.gov/2010census/data/ and then information on each county on wikipedia or just google searching.

I started by searching for counties that had less than 15,000 people which knocked out about 70% of the counties. Then I narrowed further by looking for a whole host of other attributes I wanted like water, soil types, remoteness from interstates, property tax levels, number of churches, etc. and ended up with about 50 counties spread out all over the US. You can certainly use the EBT card user population as one of your criteria to ferret out the freeloaders. Information on poverty is available on Wikipedia for every county in the US.

Of the 50 counties I liked, I then visited probably 20 of them in person to look at small towns in those counties. This took several years of part time researching to finish. That's the level of research you have to be willing to do to find the right area for you. It's not going to just fall in your lap unless you are incredibly lucky.

I say this facetiously but buy and watch The Waltons on DVD, seasons 1-9, throwing in a couple of the Thanksgiving specials for good measure.

I say facetious because if you have to watch The Waltons to get your sense of family values it may be too late. You see a family getting by in an idealized manner but basically through hard work by all members for a long long time - including child laborers working the orchards and any kind of job whenever they can. Money can be tight and mortgages and the taxman are a constant, so endless toil is the name of the game. Keeping your expensive data plan and the iPhone is unlikely, and we may find a new love for old school news papers and post offices as crucial social landmarks. College for everyone is also unlikely unless the family is extremely lucky and dedicated and the student exceptionally worthy of a scholarship. There are a thousand indignities and adjustments in a severe recession or depression, my family lived through the one in the 70s and 80s and we had our share together. But we all made it out alive, and intact, although scarred in that funky Reagan-era manner of permanent scarring. Big warning though, many families spun apart too.

The good news is that endless toil is approximately how we work our way out of the current financial mess, so your contributions will be welcomed by society. Which points to the second layer beyond strong family ties and commitments - church, schools, and whatever community you live in. You remember, places where you should already be investing your lives and evenings and your souls now. Because if you aren't, you're missing out. Whether that means attending PTA meetings and lending a hand in your kids' activities, volunteering places such as working the homelessness committee in your church, or sitting and witnessing and commenting and debating while your city council fritters away your tax dollars. Filling your time with work and effort instead of hours counting rounds in your ammo bunker or watching TV. Yes, these activities will also be the bedrock of our communities when times get tough, and they will see us through hard times. One observation I have of the current Occupy [Where ever] movement is that taken individually and as a collective, they don't appear to have invested very much in their communities, but surely have expectations for radical changes to them. So good luck with that - alot of the folks they purport to speak for may disagree with their motives, methods, and expected outcomes. Folks vested in their communities will tend to frown on outliers who come in with new ideas to replace their hard work and dedication wholesale.

The ties that bind - I contend they are stronger and more numerous than anything that we can imagine. Make those ties for yourself if you haven't already. Prepare: prepare your local community to better clothe, feed and shelter those who cannot now, because tomorrow you could be your own best customer. And get in the habit of treating folks with the same sense of compassion and dignity you want to be treated with, since someday it will be you needing assistance. We can't even imagine how many ties we already have in our lives until we really need them. Times get hard, and we see failure and assume we need a new diktat, a new bogeyman. But like every generation before us, we have seen the enemy and it is us. The ties that bind outnumber the bogeymen - we have nothing to fear but fear itself. We won't face roving bands of vagabonds off the set of Thunderdome, we'll have the same boring council meetings and the efforts of friends, family and neighbors all trying to piece together their communities in times of little or no money. We will see soup kitchens long before we see starvation in our splendid suburban isolations. And lots of sweat equity, because that's what sees us through hard times.

Small towns are wonderful. But many people require specialized medical care for survival and quality of life. Eventaully you'll need a dentist, opthamologist, gastroenterologist, etc, with modern facilities. Not to mention medications.

Larger cities (50,000+) will likely have those resources, even during a financial collapse type scenario. Larger cities also tend to have robust trade/barter systems. Again, small towns are great, but our dependence on cities for acccess to goods and services is here to stay.

us hicks currently travel to the big city for specialized medical care, and would continue to do so unless the cities we needed to get to became too dangerous to visit.

if you're suggesting that travel may become extremely tough during hard times, then i have doubts the systems and people required to support those "specialized medical care" facilities would be able to continue to offer such services.

ie: if such travel becomes that impossible, how will folks in places of a population of 50K+ get food and fuel which allow them to even live/work there?

and should it get to the barter stage, what sort of valuable goods would apartment-dwelling city folks have to trade for the necessaries like food/fuel/water?

i would think any large-town/city that big would be in worse shape than a smaller community surrounded by farms and cattle ranches, creeks and ponds, timber of firewood, with areas within walking distance for hunting/fishing/foraging, even if we had to depend on self-medicating, vet-style with vet supplies, as we've done for years.

just saying...

Different members of my family have camped out in hospital parking lots miles away from home because a loved one was in for major medical care, it becomes a coordinated effort, someone takes them there, someone else stays a certain amount of time, rotate out ones that are able to stay, etc.
You get used to being without, my parents for example live up to a week at a time without electricity in the winters, they have a generator and wood stove and eventually the electric company makes it out to their end and fixes the lines. You get used to not having a reliable telephone and keep your emergency cell phone charged and ready with a few pre-paid minutes.
We had to leave the house at 5am to make it in time for surgery for my father a few years ago. It started snowing around 5pm the sunday evening before and dumped a record 14 inches of snow on us, my 2wd which was fine in the big city just barely made it there.
The local town is dependent on the local military to plow them out, can't afford snow plows.
Its interesting though, our county all the old family farms are being sold to people who moved from the cities, they retire and can afford to buy a farm and live off their 401k and other investments.

Many of the small towns have lost their own identity and are simply bedroom communities for the reasonably-nearest city. That is what my town is.

The local clinic belongs to a hospital chain, all the medical people are employees, so they have no real investment. I was talking to the local gas station owner, and he said he doesn't really know a safe way to pump gas out of the underground tanks using makeshift methods. And would they be refilled? The water association is local, most of the tanks are on hills, but if they lose power for very long, I don't think they could refill the tanks.

It's really hard to make plans because we don't know exactly how it's going to play out. Will the basic infrastructure remain? Will the people who keep the power running volunteer their time if the company goes broke? Fuel?

I suspect that we will be very, very sorry that most of our manufacturing is outsourced. Even if we did want to start it up, we don't have the machinery or the trained personnel or, in most cases, even the knowledge of what needs to be done. Exactly how long would it take to set up a shovel and spading fork factory operation?

The Waltons had it 'easy', because they owned their own place, had the tools they needed, had the knowledge to get multiple jobs done, and their family and social structures were already in place. The people of the town were already used to helping each other.

If the banking situation really crashes, and they forgave the home loans, that would give most people breathing space. But that's just one problem.

I am looking around my area at the multiple small acreages that are just growing grass. But our soil is quite poor due to the leaching of nutrients from the heavy rainfall. Agronomists say that 25" of rain per year, properly spaced, is relatively ideal. Enough, but not too much; we get twice that amount. The land is there, but where would the nutrients come from? Even the livestock here would starve if they didn't get supplement feed.

If there is a survival situation to make most people sweat, this is it.

Sue