Small Town America vs. Big Box Stores

> We don't want a corporate, faceless box store coming in with no stake in our community.

Who is “we?”

If the community wants Washington General, then they’ll shop there. If they want the lowest possible prices, they’ll shop at Dollar General.

What it sounds like is that Washington General wants effectively a tariff on Dollar General so people won’t shop there. Because if it’s strictly “what’s best for the community,” then the community will decide what they value.

It sounds like Washington General doesn’t want the community to be able to make that choice. If nobody shops at Dollar General, then they’ll close it down. Not that it matters, but I despise Dollar General-type stores: generally cheap junk, so I personally chose the more expensive specialty store: but I can easily afford to do that. The Dollar General ICP is a person that doesn’t have a lot of disposable income. So it’s a bit arrogant to suggest that people without a lot of money should be subsidizing someone’s business just because it makes people feel better. That’s a luxury many people don’t have.

I _love_ Strong Towns but I want to push back against this article.

Strong Towns is a leading voice on YIMBY, but this is reminiscent of the common arguments I hear from NIMBY folks..."they shouldn't be allowed to build here because ____" is definitionally NIMBY.

While I don't love Dollar General or shop there very often, I have a hard time understanding why it's a "swindle." The reason people shop there is because the store provides what they need at a lower price. If I can buy the same milk for $3 from DG or $4.50 from Grandma's Really Adorable Milk Store, I'm going to Dollar General. No swindle here...that's just a better deal.

> “We feed off of what they don’t do, they can’t do,” the owner of Mike’s Hardware & Supply explained.

Great! Do that. Outcompete them on what makes you distinctly valuable, and if you're right, people will pick you. I go to my hardware store instead of Lowes because I know there's a 70-year-old guy who knows more about my project than I do, and I'm happy to pay an extra couple dollars to ask him questions while I buy a socket wrench.

Now, I get that government subsidies tilt the scales...but rather than yell that it's unfair, let's elect politicians who are ready to build incentive programs to provide similar (or better) subsidies for small businesses who provide fresh food and other goods which are crucial for local communities. Small businesses may need to gather together in some cooperative or union-type organization in order to present a more unified bloc to the political class but that's just the nature of living in a big country.

Big business is here to stay, whether we like it or not. And people are _choosing_ those businesses because they think they provide good value for money.

The tension this article writes about can be expressed to a tech audience as a compression problem.

Dollar General wins out on low prices - essentially compressing their value prop onto a single dimension, prices. They won't do the Strong Towns things like sponsor a park or thoughtfully curate what they sell to fit community needs. There's no button to press in a DG that says "sell more eggplants please".

The value of a small scale community business is many things on different axes, of which delivering goods for money is one. Much like when you compress a jpeg for size at the expense of image quality, you can optimize for one thing to the total exclusion of others.

For a customer at the till it's totally reasonable to think on that one axis, but it's important that there be voices tasked with appreciating the whole. It's a need of society to think of what's a better lossless algorithm so that we can efficiently enjoy the benefits of all dimensions.

I have mixed feelings about local small businesses. Like you, if I have the time, I go to a small hardware store about 40 minutes away instead of the Home Depot, which is within 10 minutes. I usually use Amazon as a catalog and then try to find a different on line outlet that sells that item. Usually, shopping at local stores involves an afternoon of driving around from store to store looking for what I want. Then I discover nobody sells what I want or they sell the same Chinese crap you would find on Amazon at twice the price.