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Florence Mayor Steve Holt is getting more used to announcing closures than new businesses it seems.  Fred's stores will be closing the two locations in Florence (Downtown Florence and Florence Blvd toward Killen) as well as their Tuscumbia and Russellville locations.  The only two Alabama locations that seem to have escaped the nationwide closure list are the ones at Red Bay and Rogersville, AL.  The Cloverdale store has been closed for quite a while.  

Fred's was already showing signs of trouble when they closed their Prescription department at the Florence Blvd store as of last September/October.  I usually would shop Freds due to their close location to where I live however no doubt Freds was feeling the pinch between WalMart stores on one end and Dollar General on the other with Dollar General being far more like Freds.  

It seems though that the huge elephant in the room that is most responsible for the closure of many of the brick and mortar stores is Amazon.com and their online monopoly.  Some are wondering why Monopolies like AT&T were so bad that they had to be broken up and yet Monopolies like Amazon.com which could be argued to be doing far more harm to the nation's economy or shopping environment get off skate free with no threat to them.  

I can remember when WalMart was the big bug a boo and one catching all the complaints for running stores out of business and with respect to Foodland's Cox Creek location and the Big Star store on Cloverdale road that argument is most likely a valid one.  Mom and Pop stores are hard pressed to compete with WalMart who for a long time played havoc with the smaller stores by offering to match sale prices of everyone.  Now that they have cleared many of those smaller competitors, along with most K-Marts and Sears they have revised their policy and will no longer match prices and now there smaller stores who, many, offered those competing sales are gone and unable to offer them anymore.  Now WalMart gets what they set their prices at so although Amazon.com is having a similar affect on WalMart as WalMart has had on their competitors so with respect to Amazon.com WalMart isn't getting much sympathy from folks who are seeing them suffering from a bigger fish doing to them what they did to so many others.

Time will tell what will happen to Amazon or with Amazon but for the time being it doesn't appear that politicians are willing to take on addressing online monopolies at this time.  Before long Parker Brother's will have to reinvent or reintroduce their Monopoly Game with just 4 to 8 different squares as the old game is getting more and more obsolete.

Be as the Bereans ( Acts 17:11 )

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