This story is representative of how our free-market economy used to work. In our new reality, it is somewhat different.

The hotel owner would be a national chain and the other entities in the story would all be housed under one corporate retail entity. Only about a third of the initial transaction would be available as wages, with another third distributed between China and the bank accounts of the shareholders of the mega-corporation that ran the mom-and-pop stores out of business decades ago. The remaining third would go to domestic suppliers of mostly food products that don't travel well, but there are people working on that as we speak.

The obvious difference between these stories is how much money gets sent somewhere else other than the local economy and how many changes in ownership the initial $100 experiences.