Rant

Some of you know that I knit and crochet. I've been crocheting for about 10 years on and off and I'm slowly learning to knit after starting in January of this year. I keep thinking that I'm going to make myself a sweater but all the patterns I see are either extremely ugly or not in my size.
Anyway, back to my rant.... Since finding crafty forums on the net a few years ago I read about a neat pattern in a magazine and will go out to look for it. I rarely find the magazine that I'm looking for however. This last time I saw a picture of a sweater that I wanted a better look at and I wanted to see the pattern. I have looked all over the county for this magazine now and it's nowhere to be found. I found exactly 2 crochet magazines this weekend in the entire county and I subscribe to one of them. I didn't see any knitting magazines at all in my quest this past weekend. At one store I think I saw every quilting magazine ever published though. And if I wanted to take up scrapbooking there were enough magazines to give me ideas to last for the rest of my lifetime.
I'm wondering if there's a countywide ban on yarn manipulation that I'm not aware of. Is someone somewhere worried that if we have access to magazines we will want a yarn store too? What would happen if we got access to good yarn in the county? (RedHeart is nice for some things, but not for wearables) Would all those people fondling the yarn (yes, I like to feel yarn before I buy it) lead to porn shops too? Or is it simpler than that? Could it be that despite the suggestions of 3 chambers of commerce, we are supposed to drive 20 or so miles into the big city of Salem and spend our money there? Salem has yarn shops, book stores with racks of magazines, craft stores that don't just carry scrapbooking supplies, and ..... quite a few sex shops. Coincidence? Salem also has horrible traffic that just keeps getting worse every year. Probably because everyone from the surrounding towns is just expected to go to Salem to buy anything other than the absolute necessities. That kind of thinking is exactly why businesses don't last long in my town. We need a craft store, what we are getting is a another pharmacy that will drive one of the existing ones out of business and really hurt the other one. Maybe they will have a good magazine rack.