I would recommend reading Daniel Boorstin's book, The Americans: The Democratic Experience.

https://www.amazon.com/Americans-Democratic-Experience-Danie...

There are fascinating chapters about how the combination of railroads, mail-order catalogs, rural-free delivery of USPS, and chain stores like A&P successively wiped out local merchants in small town America in favor of distant economic centers.

The debates they had about those technologies and economic models are almost identical to the debates that have raged about Wal-Mart and later Amazon in my lifetime.