28 People Share Small-Town Stories That Are Equal Parts Hilarious And Surprisingly Wholesome
Living in a city, I can go years without knowing my neighbors’ names. Sometimes we get in the elevator together and act like we’ve never met before. Small towns operate a bit differently. Everyone knows who you are, who your parents are, and which house you live in, even if they still call it by the last owner’s name.
People on Reddit shared the most “small town” thing they’ve ever witnessed, and these stories make it pretty clear that privacy isn’t always part of the deal.
1. “I grew up in a small Missouri river town. There was a combination hair salon/live bait shop called ‘Perms & Worms.'”
2. “I’m from a town of less than 2,000 people. I no longer live there, but I recently got a call from my daughter. She had been stopped for speeding and handed over her license and insurance. The officer goes, ‘Hey, you’re Donnie’s granddaughter! I ain’t gonna write you a ticket, but I’m telling Donnie when I see him tomorrow ’cause we’re going fishing.’ She replied, ‘I think I’d rather have the ticket.'”
3. “A woman walked into the DMV on a Friday, saw that there were three people ahead of her, and left to come back another time when they ‘weren’t so busy.'”
4. “A friend of mine posted a picture on Facebook a few months ago, tagging another friend: ‘Hey, Bubba, your pig got loose and is running around the Dollar General parking lot. Come get him!’ People were more surprised that they’d gotten themselves a Dollar General store than they were about Bubba’s pig.”
5. “I worked with a guy who was in his 70s, and a relative of the business owner. I asked the owner if my coworker was a local, and he said, ‘No. His parents moved here when he was 2.'”
6. “My hometown got a McDonald’s in 1976. The town had a parade for it.”
7. “My company sent a mechanic to a small town for several weeks to assemble a manufacturing machine. On his first day there, he went to the local cafe to get coffee and breakfast. There were several people in there drinking coffee, reading the newspaper, chatting, etc. He went in and sat at the counter. No one was there to wait on him. Finally, one of the guys said, ‘If you want coffee, you’ll have to get it yourself. They ain’t open yet.'”
8. “We have a village Facebook page. Every time the ice cream man drives into the village, the entire page goes ballistic. People send live updates of where the van is and which direction it’s heading. The ice cream man has started accepting DMs, so he knows which streets to go down.”
9. “When a local bank was robbed, one of the tellers told the police to bring her a yearbook from about 10 years earlier, and that she would be able to point the robber out. He had been in the grade before hers in school.”
10. “The town I’m from has a single stoplight, and it’s only operational on Thursdays. Why? The driving exams are held on Thursdays, and they are legally required to include at least one stoplight on the exam route. So that stoplight was literally installed so people can take their driving exams in our town.”
11. “I left the grocery store and forgot a bag. Another customer brought it to my house.”
12. “A known criminal with numerous arrests and convictions over his lifetime ran for sheriff. His campaign slogan was, ‘I know the jail inside and out!’ From what I recall, he was arrested at the polling station on Election Day for being drunk in public. Bert was a weird dude.”
13. “My town had a squirrel festival where we unveiled a new squirrel bridge.”
14. “I lost my wallet, and went to the DMV to replace my license. The guy there asked me if I had any other ID, but I didn’t. He said, ‘You know, you look just like your daddy,” and issued me a new license anyway.”
15. “The traffic on the ‘main street’ of my town is so sparse that two drivers going opposite directions can stop and talk to each other for a few minutes without causing any problem.”
16. “In my former small town, there was an older guy who’d lost his license after getting a few DUIs. Every day, he would ride his John Deere lawnmower to the corner bar around 3 p.m. and sit around watching TV and sipping his beer well into the night. Then he’d head the couple of miles back home on his mower. He even had a little canvas shell he put on when it rained or got too cold.”
“I used to work at a small town Dairy Queen, and we had a customer who would frequently just ride his lawn mower down the street to DQ after he finished mowing his lawn. We also had a piece of paper in the kitchen labeled ‘the Rick burger,’ so any new cooks knew what he got on his burger.”
17. “My baby lost a shoe at the grocery store. Several hours later, I went to work, and the shoe was there waiting there for me.”
18. “In 1995, our county got its first ATM. It made the front page of the paper. 😂 “
19. “I lived in a small town. When I moved there, people would ask, ‘Whose house did you buy?'”
“My wife and I bought ‘the Baker place’ 20 years ago. It’s still the Baker place, lol.”
— u/ipsok