All of those big-name stores, whose goods came from China, rubbed salt in the wound of an already flailing economy. We had traded the high-paying full-time jobs of the mill for the low-paying part-time positions of retail stores and restaurants. We had shipped our livelihoods off to China, and now we couldn’t afford more than the cheap Chinese crap sold to us at Walmart. Some of the people in the community recognized the troubling symbolism of a shopping complex built on steel mill soil, but their tiny cries of dissent didn’t echo very far.
