...and in rural areas, most recently in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Also when I was a kid, at about the time you were growing up in a small town in Minnesota.
The thing about small towns is that you shouldn't assume that they're backward, and that merchants are unaware of the modern things that people are taught to crave by ubiquitous media. The Summit Store up in the Mountains, for example, couldn't carry the wide variety of a Safeway, but then, who really needs to--competition in commodities is all about redundancy and artificial brand differentiation. A mom-and-pop store can carry everything a person might need for everyday living, albeit one or two examples per category instead of a dozen. You really don't suffer in a small town these days as much as you might've when you were a kid.
That's commodities--then, when it comes to luxuries or specialty items ("You want small, interesting stores full of expensive stuff, drive to Carmel"), you have the Internet and universal UPS/FedEx delivery. Bet they didn't have that in Minnesota when you were a kid, eh Tom?
Prices at the little mom-and-pop places are a bit higher than bigbox retailers, of course, because they lack quantity purchasing power. But you have to factor in transportation costs, too. You talk about people driving 30 miles to a bigbox store, but that costs money. If people properly accounted for gasoline and time, especially with gas prices where they are and where they're going, they might find that driving a long distance to save a few bucks is foolish. Stores in small towns do benefit from one efficiency: The cost of transporting items in bulk on a truck into town is much less than the cost of transporting them back to town in ones and twos by automobile.
The Achilles Heel of bigbox retaining in rural areas is that it requires drawing people from across a wide geographical area to make it profitable. They have to kill off local retailers to ensure that people have no choice but to pay the extra transportation costs and invest the extra time. Otherwise, at some point gas prices would make WalMart too expensive and people would revert to their local merchants. WalMart's longterm survival depends on eliminating that competition as early as possible.
Wal-Mart wouldn't build a store somewhere if people there didn't prefer to shop there for more selections and lower prices. What would be the point? It's silly to say Wal-Mart builds stores that nobody at all in the town wants.
If people always wanted WalMarts in their towns, we wouldn't be having this discussion, would we? Remember the 11,000,000 hits I got for "WalMart traffic". "WalMart problems" gets you 15,500,000, "WalMart resistance" gets you 2,080,000...the Oracle at Google reveals quite clearly how many people really, really, really don't want WalMarts in their towns.