There’s a really cool produce market near me. This place has a truck they take to a city hours away and load it with produce once a week. On Saturday and Sunday they have a reverse auction where the prices keep going down until it’s all gone. Restaurants and people looking for cheap food get great deals and no food goes to waste.
They’re also really good at only stocking produce when it’s a good time of year for it. Walmart will have peaches year round, but they’re not good for like half the year. They also end up with some stuff that’s just not ever available around here, like lychee and diakon radishes, when they can get it. Plus they carry stuff from local farms when it’s available.
I feel like this is a business that could be replicated in a lot of rural areas. It’s basically just a barn on the side of the road with very little overhead, but it’s always busy.
Everyone should talk to their relatives, especially elderly relatives about scams. The most important points are:
That they should never trust that the person calling is who they say they are, they can always hang up, look up the number and call the company/police/whoever directly. Also talk about how scammers create a false sense of urgency. Lastly, talk about the ways scammers collect their money, by having you send venmo/Apple pay/Zelle, gift cards or crypto atms, nobody legitimate requires that kind of payment.
It’s a hard thing to talk about without making them feel like you’re calling them dumb or gullible. The way I broached it with my mom was to tell her about someone smart I knew that got tricked by one of those tech support scams.
Nothing guarantees you won’t get tricked into a scam, but you can make it harder