When Donald Trump went to Hershey, Pennsylvania, last week to thank its voters for helping to elect him US president, it carried a special weight. “Chocolate Town”, which industrialist Milton Hershey built in the early 1900s near his birthplace, represents what many feel they have lost.
“For years, the jobs and wealth have been ripped out of your state and ripped out of our country like we’re a bunch of babies,” Mr Trump told the crowd at a stadium where the Hershey Bears ice hockey team plays. “People talk about how we’re living in a globalised world but the relationships people value most are local — family, city, state and country. Local, folks, local.”
Local is the last thing many businesses have aspired to be in the past three decades, as trade barriers have fallen and globalisation has created huge economies of scale, including the freedom to outsource production to low-wage countries such as China or to use immigrant workers for unskilled jobs.