“To get there, you only need to hop on the highway, drive for some amount of time, and take the exit. It’ll be on your right.”
For those dependent upon rural America’s highway economies, these instructions suffice most of the time. Economic life is centered around highway exits, a motley collection of gas chains, bank branches, churches, and national fast-food chains with a few local options.
Our proposed panel, “Highway Economies: Tracing the Dirty Roads from Farms to Shelves,” explores the complicated relationship rural Americans have with the businesses that operate in their backyards and integrate them into the national economy. The first paper, Olivia Paschal’s “Why did the Chicken Waste Cross the Highway?,” explores how Tyson Foods advertised itself as the savior of rural farmers while it destroyed rural ecologies with its efforts to curtail environmental regulations and dumping of chicken “sludge.” Her work highlights the hidden costs of America’s favorite protein. Meanwhile, Frankie Barrett’s “Dollar Stores that Serve,” investigates how an industry crafted on the rural periphery of the American economy, the dollar store, worked its way into low-income, urban, and suburban neighborhoods on the apocryphal promise of improving livelihoods through lower-cost goods and convenient access. Finally, Nathanael Mickelson’s “Salt of the Earth,” tells the story of a fixture within the LTL trucking industry, Arkansas Best Freight, to highlight how rural companies struggled to balance the need for competitive advantages in the marketplace through inventive financing, technology, and management strategies, while preserving their rural identity.
This panel centers the experiences of people, places, and enterprises often understood as “marginal” to America’s economy. Together, our papers highlight how rural America ventured into industries that would define 20th and 21st-century capitalism by creating firms pivotal to the low-cost economy and central to life on the roads of America’s highways.