A Dollar Store Backlash Has Begun

Small amounts of expensive food is still cheap.

We Iowans usually drive on country roads pretty fast -- also, we're used to 15-30 minute commutes for basic things.

While these communities are snubbing Dollar General and Family Dollar -- most of rural America welcomes them with open arms, because they stock roughly the same sorts of things as a CVS or Walgreens, but actually build out in a county of a few thousand, and the one next over.

A few decades prior, Walmart built up a retail empire through its willingness to build on the outskirts of rural, far-from-everything-else towns that only had gas stations, ailing downtowns, and maybe a small grocery store, but definitely not a supermarket. But even Walmart's best-in-class coverage leaves large tracts out, and these gaps are filled in by the sorts of Dollar General, for when you don't need to go to the Walmart another twenty, or forty minutes away.

In more populated, more urban areas, grocery stores have shed locations in neighborhoods that were faltering, further contributing to these locales' decline. These are interrelated. It's easy to claim that variety stores don't do enough about food deserts or that they even contribute to the problem (by not stocking enough fresh, perishable foods), but at least they're trying, while other national chain stores have pursued a pragmatic strategy that has largely removed them from this issue.

I once expressed, in a comment on a Strong Towns post [1], that when you consider settlement patterns, urban form, structural poverty, and food insecurity, perhaps you'll find that it's more sensible to subsidize fresh food delivery to people who could least afford it, but such a solution might find itself at odds with the solutions that (new) urbanists would prefer. It might not alter the structural status quo, but it could improve real outcomes in real people's lives.

And as for nonperishables and non-food, bulk packaging is a discount accessible to those with access (e.g. warehouse club), transportation, storage, and able to cover a higher upfront cost for a lower per-unit cost. These are all harder on low or unpredictable incomes, which is one of the many ways poverty is quite expensive. But is this the fault of variety stores? Of course not. The real fix is much harder.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17525029#17531109

> I assume the folks who are struggling are not stupid .. and have looked at every conceivable way of stretching their dollar

One might assume. Possibly the biggest trouble of dollar stores is that a lot of the "deals" are the result of simply selling things in smaller quantities. The next time you visit a Dollar Tree, compare the actual amount that you get for something like flour, oatmeal, detergent... really anything, to the sizes sold at normal stores. Things are often cheaper at Dollar Tree and Family Dollar because the containers are smaller, often 2/3 size, and sometimes the price for goods at dollar is more than elsewhere when adjusted for quantity. There are some deals to be found at Dollar Stores, but it's not as if similar deals can't be found at normal stores. Dollar Stores compete because of perception.

I occasionally stroll into a 99 Cents Only store and there was a time when they had big juicy mangoes for 1/3 of the price of the mangos at the local Ralphs or Vons. I bought some on the spot and they were delicious. But that's one of the ways that dollar stores get new believers; they will have a few really good deals on things that aren't really essential, like mangos, to get people to think "wow!" and assume that all the other low prices around them are just as good of a deal.

I agree. To me, this seems like a software patch I put in place to resolve some symptoms, but I did not go back and figure out my design was the real problem, and now the patch has created other issues I have to address. And pretty soon I have reached the "hard to remember the original chore was draining the swap" situation...