Where even Walmart won't go: how Dollar General took over rural America
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Re: Where even Walmart won't go: how Dollar General took over rural America
#2This is why you need to get the government out of business. They shouldn't be choosing what stores are built where nor should they be giving certain businesses tax breaks over others.
Re: Where even Walmart won't go: how Dollar General took over rural America
#3Previous discussion 10 months ago, 227 points, 317 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15500510
Popular topic recently: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=dollar%20general&sort=byPopula...
Re: Where even Walmart won't go: how Dollar General took over rural America
#4These places are just awful. I went in one last summer and the girls working there were drenched in sweat. The management refused to set the thermostat below 80 degrees! And the cashiers had to stock shelves when there are no customers at the cash register so of course they were sweating. Usually when you go in one, the only employees will be somewhere deep in the store and you have to wait a long time until they check the register for a line.
The idea is to have no stock room so they don’t have to hire stocking staff, and make the cashiers do it when they aren’t actively checking people out. The trucks unload everything right in the store so aisles are always blocked with giant piles of boxes. It’s gotta be a nightmare for someone in a wheelchair.
But the worst part is of course the way they treat employees.
Re: Where even Walmart won't go: how Dollar General took over rural America
#5This is why you need to get the government out of business. They shouldn't be choosing what stores are built where nor should they be giving certain businesses tax breaks over others.
What does "get the government out of business" even mean in this context? What do you think should have happened instead?
Dollar General asks for a tax break and says they won't build a store if they don't get one, and the government can either accept or refuse. It's not clear to me how you can prevent this situation, short of passing a law at the state or federal level that forbids municipalities from offering tax breaks. (Which I actually think the government should do, to prevent races to the bottom, but that would by definition mean more state/federal control over local tax policy, and is not likely to be popular.)
Please think for a minute before you post comments like "This is why you need to get the government out of business." They're so easy to make that often people post them before realizing they don't make any sense.
Re: Where even Walmart won't go: how Dollar General took over rural America
#6These places are just awful. I went in one last summer and the girls working there were drenched in sweat. The management refused to set the thermostat below 80 degrees! And the cashiers had to stock shelves when there are no customers at the cash register so of course they were sweating. Usually when you go in one, the only employees will be somewhere deep in the store and you have to wait a long time until they che…
Meh. Those conditions are par for the course in jobs like that. IMO it beats working fast food any day of the week.
Working at a franchised establishment (like Dollar General or Walmart or Wendy's) is usually pretty middle of the road because they use their scale figure out how to optimize for every last but of productivity and that usually means working employees as hard as they can reasonably work. However, at the same time the franchise usually decrees something like "thou shalt not drag the brand name through the mud by running your location like a sweatshop." Small businesses have much more deviation in quality. If you think getting minimum wage for doing retail work in an 80deg store is a particularly bad deal then you're probably living in a little bit of a bubble.
Re: Where even Walmart won't go: how Dollar General took over rural America
#7This is why you need to get the government out of business. They shouldn't be choosing what stores are built where nor should they be giving certain businesses tax breaks over others.
What does "get the government out of business" even mean in this context? What do you think should have happened instead? Dollar General asks for a tax break and says they won't build a store if they don't get one, and the government can either accept or refuse. It's not clear to me how you can prevent this situation, short of passing a law at the state or federal level that forbids municipalities from offering tax b…
Not to mention, let's assume that government "got out of business". Had no say in business at all. No zoning laws, no permission needed to open a shop wherever you wanted, etc.
Then while Dollar General wouldn't get any sort of tax break for building in a town, nothing could stop them either. Buhler wouldn't have been able to reject the store.
Re: Where even Walmart won't go: how Dollar General took over rural America
#8These places are just awful. I went in one last summer and the girls working there were drenched in sweat. The management refused to set the thermostat below 80 degrees! And the cashiers had to stock shelves when there are no customers at the cash register so of course they were sweating. Usually when you go in one, the only employees will be somewhere deep in the store and you have to wait a long time until they che…
Sweating is common for manual labor positions.
Re: Where even Walmart won't go: how Dollar General took over rural America
#9This is why you need to get the government out of business. They shouldn't be choosing what stores are built where nor should they be giving certain businesses tax breaks over others.
From the article it looks like the local government was what kept Dollar General out of a town after seeing what happened to a neighboring town that gave Dollar General some breaks to come in. So local government, while it did make a bad decision in the first town, made the opposite decision in the second town.
A question the article doesn't explore is what effect government policies and actions at higher levels (county, state, federal) have on the ability of a large chain like Dollar General to drive out local competitors. It might well be that getting government out of business, in the sense of stopping it from playing favorites, at those higher levels would be a net benefit.
Re: Where even Walmart won't go: how Dollar General took over rural America
#10This is why you need to get the government out of business. They shouldn't be choosing what stores are built where nor should they be giving certain businesses tax breaks over others.
Get government out of business?? I think it should be the other way round. Get business out of government.
Government has a place in prescribing how business is conducted. Without local government zoning for businesses your cities would be pretty shitty places to live. Light or heavy touch is the contentious point.
The bigger problem is that businesses by and large control America. Sort that problem out, complaining about government pushing business around is laughable.