Everyone talks about company towns and company stores as if they are these evil capitalist hellscapes. They make baseless claims like "the prices at the company store where 10x as high but the workers were force to by there anyway". No evidence is ever provided. No one ever questions it. Why?

Fist off let's all take a second to realize that these towns are a step in the direction of communism and not capitalism. If you have a communist town that is bigger than a hundred people, and you don't want everyone to just ransack the store and hoard everything because the shelves are always stripped by the first person to get there; then you need to issue money as a metering system for the disbursement of goods.

But why would you issue dollars? Doing that would force you to acquire dollars, pay taxes, pay processing fees and bank fee, and be subject to the tyranny of bankers. Instead you would use issue your own currency, that you control, that has no extra cost to you. That is only logical.

You would also run your own stores so your community gets the benefit of collective bargaining for goods to get better prices, just as any big box store does. You would get cheaper products.

There is no other way to run a commune that is bigger than a few hundred people.

Secondly, this system allows for companies to be formed with less capital. You don't need millions of dollars to pay your workers before you start actually making money by selling your products. You pay them in your currency and only need enough money to satisfy their immediate needs. They still can collect a fair wage and save it for later when the company is profitable. This literally subverts the biggest problem of capitalism, which is the claim that the poor do not have the capital to participate.