James Howard Kunstler Quotes

You go to Main Street, and Wal-Mart is coming to town and kicking out all the mom and pop stores. All the people that were in the mom and pop stores are now working for Wal-Mart.

The local grocery store was a gathering, a community place. You knew the owner, if you didn't have any money they'd let you go for a couple days. You talked. It was a friendly place. Supermarkets are totally impersonal. I mean, you may say hello to the checkout girl or something, but the personal connections are all gone.

I want to have a storefront here in Los Angeles. I want people to be able to come here and connect - not just with me, but with each other.

I don't think my wheelhouse is comfortable in Wall Street. My wheelhouse is small-town America.

President Obama has piled on more taxes, more regulations, more debt for future generations and higher health care costs - hurting our Main Street economy.

As a Main Street entrepreneur, I believe in free trade.

I try to support local traders. The service makes up for any extra cost.

I wanted to start something in New York that focused on making products locally and, because I'd just had my second child, didn't want to be traveling halfway across the world anymore. Originally, I wanted to open up a gallery space and sell things like cushions or blankets that didn't have a season, and have friends or artists contribute.

As a consumer and a mom, I've always been interested in local products.

I've always loved small business.

I've always wanted to buy a bookstore. You know, sell some of those muffins and a little coffee. I don't care if we make any money. I don't want to lose a lot of money, but we could visit with people and get books.

What I'd like to do is continue a private sector, free market Main Street types of policies. And those include less regulation. They include a fairer, flatter tax system.

I have worked for Tesco and am grateful to them but in principle I believe in individual shops.

At Shopify, we are trying to make things as simple as possible, but for the business owner, it's not unlike starting your own little shop along Main Street somewhere.

We will not allow Justin Trudeau to keep spending billions wrecking our economy and then forcing local businesses - the very people who create jobs and opportunities in their communities - to pay the bill.

Supermarkets must not eliminate the individual retailers and market roads like the Northcote.

I live at the bottom of a valley. I have a small bookshop in a small town, and I seldom venture far afield.

When I was a kid in the '60s, I went shopping in downtown Silver Spring. Hecht's, JCPenney, the little retailers - they sponsored all my sports teams.

By fostering the economic health and vitality of local communities throughout the country, community banks play a central role in our national economy. One important aspect of that role is to serve as a primary source of credit for the small businesses that are responsible for creating a substantial proportion of all new jobs.

It was my dream to have a beauty parlour in our village and to live near my family in Sinjar.

We built Bonobos, with more than a few dozen customers and counting, and the industry we were disrupting didn't seem to care. Then we 'sold out' to Walmart. Abracadabra. The red carpet rolled open.

As Western nations became more prosperous, leisure, which had been put off for several centuries in favor of the pursuit of property, the means to leisure, finally began to be of primary concern. But, in the meantime, any notion of the serious life of leisure, as well as men's taste and capacity to live it, had disappeared.

Ninety-eight percent of all American companies have fewer than 100 employees. Over half of all Americans work for a small business. Small businesses are the backbone of our nation’s economy and we must protect this great resource.....Helping American small business is part of our movement for change and the end of politics as usual.

The industrial age is over. What follows will be life lived on a much smaller and finer scale.

Recognizing the structure of your psychology doesn't mean that you can easily rebuild it.