"I owe my soul to the company store..."
Such practices, unfortunately, were not uncommon many years ago, particularly in rural regions where competition was sparse and one company could pretty much run a whole town. When I was a kid in my home town in southern Minnesota, you pretty much worked at the vegetable packing plant in the summer unless you could score a job at one of the stores, or ended up working on your farm. This has changed, with several small high-tech industries now located there, and the packing plant closed and probably hauled off to foreign parts. Speaking as a former silage pusher, I think this is a great improvement in the town.