I still notice it in small Wisconsin towns and elsewhere especially during tourist season. It comes down to competition. The ma’s and pa’s had been price gouging for decades then along came competition. May the best man win...that’s the american way.
#17 My mom would complain whenever we traveled up north in Minnesota (180 miles from Minneapolis) to the grandparents cabin and went into a grocery store there how expensive it was to what she was used to.
We also use to shop at the what we called the little store (7/11 size) near home for grocery’s until Byerly’s showed up a few blocks closer around 1970 or so.
It caused the owner to shutdown his store as he did not have the amount of goods or lower prices that the larger store had and could offer. Byerly’s is still there nearly 50 years later competing against Rainbow and Cub and others.