Rural New Mexico Blues

A reader's thoughts on consumer issues, grocery shopping, and more at the metro area frontier

Earlier this month, I received possibly the best comment ever on a piece at this newsletter. A recent subscriber living in the rural-ish small city of Socorro, New Mexico wrote a long, insightful email—she was responding to my piece about the saga of replacing my old washing machine, and she also mentioned an earlier piece about generational attitudes towards homeownership, saving, and spending. There’s so much in here that’s interesting, and this perspective, from this part of the country, is really important. This puts some detail and texture on things that are abstractions for a lot of people.

I’ve asked her if I could publish her email as a standalone post here, because it’s so interesting, and she agreed. The rest of this post is her email, lightly edited and with a few personal details removed.

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I wanted to write to you today because I had a similar situation happen to me with a washer/dryer [difficulty having an old unit worked on/finding a replacement], and to let you know how your writing on the urban/rural divide and consumer advocacy has had an important impact on my thinking. I wanted to share some of my own experiences with some of the topics you’ve talked about, and perhaps start some other conversations. Your writing feels like chatting with a good friend, so I’ve responded in a similar vein. I hope that’s alright. [Yes!]

To preface my story with some context: I live in a relatively rural part of New Mexico, about 75 miles south of Albuquerque. The town I live in, Socorro, is home to New Mexico Tech. Socorro has about 8,000 people. It’s 30 miles from the Trinity Nuclear Test site, has a 17th century Catholic church, and has featured in many a 1960s western. The town’s residents are a mix of professors and students, government contractors, professional astrophysicists (the National Radio Astronomy Observatory is here in town) and many diverse ordinary residents, many of whom experience pretty significant poverty ( the median income for individuals was about $18,000 in 2018). While I won’t touch on the cost of housing in this email, it’s vastly inaccessible given the median income and size of the town.

You may be interested to know that there’s a former Pizza Hut turned Chinese restaurant turned State Farm insurance office. [Yes!] We have a former Denny’s that is now a local restaurant called Yo Mama’s Grill. We have no national chain sit-down restaurants these days but plenty of chain fast food restaurants. We also have a Walmart and a local grocery called John Brooks, the latter of which stocks a small selection of vegan or specialty foods that Walmart doesn’t.

Because my husband and I don’t like to eat fast food, we cook at home all the time. Given how limited the ingredient selections are in town for how we like to cook, we drive up to Albuquerque on a weekly basis to go to Costco as well as to get things like miso paste, Spanish chorizo, and mascarpone cheese, which are impossible to find in Socorro.

When I read your excellent piece a few weeks ago about whether avocado toast was really the problem with Millennials, it resonated deeply with me. As you intimated it had for you, it brought up a lot of tensions that I have with regards to expectations for my life given how I grew up and how my parents lived when they were my age in the 1980s. My husband and I are making the choice to drive 150 miles round trip each week to buy organic pork at Whole Foods and rice noodles at the international grocery store, which sounds pretty excessive to my parents. However, we don’t even have any options for organic meat or pho in our town.

While I grew up in a somewhat limited area of Texas, at least back then, my parents now live near San Diego, and their “just deal with the inconveniences of Socorro” attitude has grated on both my husband and me to a significant extent given that they have access to so many amenities we don’t. We’re Millennials who went to college at large flagship state schools, so “going back” to eating frozen pizza or basic spaghetti for dinner (nothing wrong with them, just that we like a little more variety in our cuisine) feels like a step down from what our life was like in college and graduate school, where we could go out for Indian food as a treat in addition to making pasta.

As you said in your piece, it’s hard to do without certain things when there doesn’t seem like a particularly good reason to do so. While I thought that living in a small town with fewer choices would make for a simpler and cheaper life as we saved up for a house, it actually has made things harder. We’d like to have options for things like food, healthcare providers, and eventually, things like childcare but unfortunately, Socorro is not growing enough to provide those choices in the near future. 

That was a long preamble to say that in addition to the lack of mascarpone cheese in Socorro, there are also ZERO appliance repair people. 

This wasn’t always the case, as I understand it, but we too were basically forced into buying new appliances last year because it was impossible to get someone to repair the sensor on our old Amana washer. We bought the washer and dryer secondhand for the house we rent, and within a year of using it had some issues with the sensor. The washer would fill and agitate for 30 seconds, then stop, and when the timer ran out it would proceed to drain and spin as though it had run through the whole wash cycle.

I called Whirlpool [Whirlpool is Amana’s parent company], and they said they could send out a technician, but then they called back saying that no one would service Socorro. Nor would they replace it since it was out of warranty and I wasn’t the original purchaser. I tried to find repair manuals online to figure out the parts and fix it myself, but no dice.

Even calling around to repair shops in Albuquerque yielded nothing except one guy who said he’d drive down—but we had to pay him his hourly rate for the hour-long drive and then the time needed to inspect the washer, and then pay him once again to drive down a second time if he had to order parts to fix it. In other words, we could pay $200 to find out if he could repair it, or just buy a new washer. 

As you say in your piece [about replacing my washer/dryer], the push to replace rather than repair feels anti-consumer. What felt disheartening for me was the sense that if we’d lived in Albuquerque, we could at least potentially have gotten the washer repaired, which I wanted, rather than being told that what everyone does in Socorro is just buy new appliances when they break. The only place that delivers to Socorro is Home Depot.

But your piece drives home the fact that our appliance situation wasn’t just a product of the rural/urban divide, but a national issue. Even if we’d lived in Albuquerque we might have had to buy a new one. But at least there we could’ve bought another used set.

Again, I guess it comes down to choice. Feeling like you have options feels better than feeling like you don’t have options, regardless of what the number of options actually is. My worry is that this “replacing is cheaper than repairing” attitude is going to become the norm with everything all too soon, even cars, which is distressing since cars are far, far more expensive to replace.

In some ways, while there may have been less choice for foods at the grocery store in the 1980s, there were more choices about what you could keep, fix, or repurpose. I guess a lot of our current situation is that there’s an abundance of choice that feels essential but probably isn’t (like having a variety of international restaurants to eat at), and then a lack of choice with regard to things that are essential for protecting the environment, like appliance or furniture repair.

One final thought which may be a tangent, but which feels related to this lack of choice in urban/rural spaces, is the question of trash disposal and infrastructure to deal with it. The other day I saw this photo of Audrey Hepburn crouching and looking into her oven, and noticed that her trash can was lined with newspaper rather than a plastic bag. When did that shift happen? What sort of rubbish did she have where newspaper would suffice to keep the can clean?

I bring this up because I asked my mom the other day how people disposed of trash in the 1950s and 1960s in Spain (where she is from). She replied that even there, people would burn everything that they could in their furnaces or stoves and then throw out or repurpose the non-burnables like tins. This greatly reduced the amount of trash that even a large city produced. People repurposed and recycled nearly everything they could—I still have my Spanish grandmother’s sewing box, which was previously a cardboard chocolate box.

That seemed to be the norm post-Spanish Civil War. Up until about the year 2000, though, people in Spain also threw their old washing machines and mattresses out on the side of the road, which was its own serious problem. Now there are lots of places to dispose of large items, and recycling is ubiquitous even in small cities, but aside from really rural areas, people don’t burn their trash anymore.

Is that because so much packaging is plastic? Because many urban houses don’t have fireplaces? I wouldn’t burn plastic in my house, but what about potato peels and paper? We don’t have recycling in Socorro so we use our weekly trips up to Costco to drop it off in Albuquerque, but perhaps some of the environmental impact of our driving and recycling could be mitigated by using paper as fuel in our (nonexistent) fireplace?

I feel like this question about trash is related to the repair question, in that what was once normal practice has been abandoned in favor of practices which are better in some ways, but which have their downsides as well.

Social card image credit vhines200/Flickr, CC BY-ND 2.0

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Related Reading:

Station Wagons and Affluence

About That Avocado Toast

Where Do They Shop?

The Rest of the Country

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