Dollar stores make up nearly half of all new store openings in the U.S.
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Re: Dollar stores make up nearly half of all new store openings in the U.S.
#2Retail makes so little sense now for anything that isn’t very cheap.
Otherwise you can just ship it from Amazon, Instacart, or a speciality store.
Re: Dollar stores make up nearly half of all new store openings in the U.S.
#3Retail makes so little sense now for anything that isn’t very cheap. Otherwise you can just ship it from Amazon, Instacart, or a speciality store.
Good point; it's not (or, may not be) that more dollar stores are opening, it's that fewer other stores are opening.
Re: Dollar stores make up nearly half of all new store openings in the U.S.
#4Good article and discussion about the economics of these "Leeches of the poor":
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27650477
TLDR: The products in Dollar Stores aren't 'cheap' in the sense that they cost less than other stores per unit - its just that they're (mostly) packaged into smaller units that people living paycheck to paycheck can afford.
Re: Dollar stores make up nearly half of all new store openings in the U.S.
#5I'm lucky enough not to see a lot of those.
But everything else in retail around me is Chipotle, Noodle's & Company, Nails place, some other equally ubiquitous brand ... and yet there's lots of retail space available near me that is nice, but empty. Seems wasteful.
Re: Dollar stores make up nearly half of all new store openings in the U.S.
#6Retail makes so little sense now for anything that isn’t very cheap. Otherwise you can just ship it from Amazon, Instacart, or a speciality store.
Instacart ships from retail though.
Re: Dollar stores make up nearly half of all new store openings in the U.S.
#7The gut-reaction is that this is some horrible thing rather than a scalable business model that provides low-cost goods to customers in rural areas that were previously underserved. My family in rural Oklahoma and Texas have to drive over an hour to Wal Mart, the dollar stores have a similar but curated subset of goods at a cheap price, and the distance is much closer.
HN monoculture loves to crap all over things like this. I see it as deeply beneficial to society. Not everyone lives in SF or NYC and can use their iPhone to order delivery 24/7.
Re: Dollar stores make up nearly half of all new store openings in the U.S.
#8Re: Dollar stores make up nearly half of all new store openings in the U.S.
#9Retail makes so little sense now for anything that isn’t very cheap. Otherwise you can just ship it from Amazon, Instacart, or a speciality store.
That is an incredibly privileged response to something like this. No one who is living in poverty or near the edge of poverty can even consider the additional cost associated with shipping or delivery, let alone on a weekly basis for core staples.
Reasonably priced fresh food access within walking distance should be a basic right. However, the people who need this most are those who are underserved.
Re: Dollar stores make up nearly half of all new store openings in the U.S.
#10It looks like a couple of things going on:
1. We have more people without much disposable income (which is composed of two populations: poor immigrants with few marketable skills, and two, poor Americans left behind due to shipping MFG overseas --going on for a while, jump-started by MFN status in the 90s).
2. People want cheap stuff. It's unfortunate. It means more disposable crap going into the landfill. Save up and buy something that will last. (unfortunately ads don't contribute to model behavior here)
3. Overseas there have always been these cheap goods stores (100-goods stores in East Asia (百貨公司)), we're just late to the party --however in Asia these popped up because people didn't initially have disposable income as their economies evolved after ours. They are on the upswing, we're on the down.