Do dollar stores has aggressive pricing? I've found they are a bad deal for many common day goods. Usually the $/qty is pretty bad. One example that sticks to my mind is aluminum foil. Those rolls are pretty small for the price.<p>The main thing I find them good for is things like cleaning supplies, brooms, greeting cards, gift wraps which tend to be marked up elsewhere.
> <i>For all that, while Alfers feels sympathy for Nech, he said the Dollar General is the future. “The Model-T put horses out of business. It’s hard to protect existing businesses,” he said. “I would still vote for Dollar General. If one state didn’t accept the Model-T it wouldn’t have changed the outcome. I think Buhler voted their sentiment. The question is, in five years will they have a Dollar General or something similar?”</i><p>How sad. One of these is a technology change. The other is local policy. We make choices about the communities we want to live in. This one was under his control, and his justification for a choice I think he regrets sounds like cognitive dissonance to me.
These 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 <i>at the cash register</i> 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.<p>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.<p>But the worst part is of course the way they treat employees.
I wonder if this is somehow a very USA-specific issue, and I wonder why that would be. I recently moved to the countryside in Finland, to a place that isn't even a town, just a road with houses and farms. There are a couple of rather crummy grocery stores within a few minutes driving distance, but mostly people shop at the stores in the nearest city, maybe half an hour away.<p>Where I live is kind of an extreme. There are a lot of places that do qualify as towns, and urbanization is definitely taking its toll on them. Local stores close down, and people have to shop further away. Still, this idea of a store that doesn't sell fresh produce seems completely alien - I haven't seen that pop up anywhere. Why does that work in the USA?
Why do they frame it as only “poor middle America”. I use to live in apartments that were going for
$1700/month for a three bedroom (now $2100 a month less than
3 years later) and there is a Dollar Store in the same complex as a Publix across the street. The city had a median household income of $100,000.<p>Suburbia welcomes dollar stores just as much as rural America.
This 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.