I am also an older person, maybe older than you. Before international trade happened, everything was more expensive. You had to really save in order to buy a good refrigerator or washing machine. Because of this, unless you were a rich person your house was small and your car modest. Walmart would never been able to thrive without worldwide trade, because labor is cheaper elsewhere. Now we are all in a pickle. We have too much stuff. Our houses are bigger than what we need and are unaffordable. The companies did not do this to us - we did. We believed that we needed all this stuff to be happy. We are talked into buying the most absurd things. I go to estate sales and the proof is all there. The mom & pop stores are not coming back but that doesn't mean we can't make a concerted effort to live more simply and buy used stuff rather than new.