Main Street

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Main Street

1. The generic street name (and often the official name) of the primary retail street of a village, town, or small city in the United States, Canada, Ireland, some parts of Scotland and also in some countries in central Europe.
2. (idiomatic, Canada, US, collective) Everyday working-class people and small business owners, especially with regard to their concerns, social views, etc.
   • 2011 January–February, Chrystia Freeland, “The rise of the new global elite”, in The Atlantic‎, archived from the original on 20 December 2015:

     Thanks to a $700 billion TARP bailout and hundreds of billions of dollars in nearly free of charge loans by the Federal Reserve (a policy Soros himself told me was a "hidden gift" to the banks), Wall Street has surged back to pre-crisis levels of compensation even as Main Street continues to struggle.

• For more quotations using this term, see Citations:Main Street.

• (antonym(s) of “big business interests”): (US) Wall Street, (Canada) Bay Street

• antimeters, intermates, martensite, misentreat, terminates, tetramines