> "we're not against change, we're not against business, if you want to open a nice little coffee shop and bookstore, but Dollar General just isn't quite a good fit."<p>this line stood out to me because it mirrored a lot of debate in my small rural community when a dollar general proposed moving in (spoiler alert: DG won).<p>the debates around DG had a way of exposing some previously-unseen class and economic divisions in the the community. it wasn't a NIMBY vs YIMBY thing -- both wanted development -- but they just had very different needs and expectations.<p>you have one group that wants the cute little bookstores/coffeeshops to preserve "local character". they may not be rich, but they aren't struggling day to day so they say "I don't mind paying a little extra to support local business".<p>then there's the other group which says "i don't have any extra money to support local business". they'd love to be in a position to worry about local character, but today they just need to be able to afford another single roll of TP and have some snacks for their kid after school.<p>in my community, these two groups existed in their own little bubbles never really interacted until the DG debate came up, so in a way it was good for dissolving some of those boundaries.
The tension this article writes about can be expressed to a tech audience as a compression problem.<p>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".<p>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.<p>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.
My family lived in a smallish town for a while, and I've gotta say that chain stores were a godsend. We did business with local shops whenever we could, but the stock variety was inherently much smaller than we found at Target (or even Dollar General). Much as we would have preferred to be able to pay our neighbor $1.50 for an item, it was awfully nice to find nicer items for $1 at the chain place.<p>Don't get me started at the local groceries which were associated with the large employer in town, a giant grocery wholesaler. I definitely want to support my neighbors, but I don't <i>want</i> to buy Local Brand Ketchup. I want Heinz, darnit.
I've spent the majority of my adult life in small towns, some co-opted by chain stores and some resisting. Have to agree that the terrible space usage and car-centric design of these buildings has a huge impact. I don't totally get the "keep your money local" angle - nobody is going to locally produce toilet paper or toothpaste or affordable home goods that you need today and don't exist in thrift stores, but yes the chain stores don't source local goods even when locals are desperate enough to sell for competitive prices, and that's not good for your local economy.<p>But another aspect I didn't see mentioned is the disruption of skill and network development. The jobs these places bring are largely entry-level menial jobs. Anyone who takes that job is not learning business skills or apprenticing in something their town needs. Not only that, but the new chain store is not going to build relationships with small businesses in the region, leaving your town more exposed to national/global economic disruptions.<p>I've also heard gossip about some dollar generals in small towns being fronts for drug activity, but I don't know.
I _love_ Strong Towns but I want to push back against this article.<p>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.<p>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.<p>> “We feed off of what they don’t do, they can’t do,” the owner of Mike’s Hardware & Supply explained.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
Is there anything in DG that's healthy? The garbage these stores are feeding people is an externality that is contributing to negative health outcomes. To allow it is to condemn the rural underclass to eating toxic waste, it's equivalent to allowing them to live in lean to slums and shouldn't be allowed.
This is what the neo-liberal economic program has been doing all my life. "Free-trade" and globalization just mean that companies deploy lobbyists to DC and state houses to write legislation that picks winners and losers, erect barriers for some and tear them down for others, and concentrate wealth in the hands of a tiny few while spreading enough of it around to the professional managerial class and petit-bourgeoisie to keep the whole machine running. Blue-collar workers were put in direct competition with low wage workers overseas while white-collar workers were protected from foreign competition, unionization declined under constant attack, and middle-class wages stagnated while coastal and urban elites pulled away. Middle-class people were mollified, however, by rising living standards courtesy of cheap goods delivered by long supply chains connecting far-flung places with big box stores that landed right on the outskirts of their little towns, by the good graces of their hardworking counterparts toiling away in those far-flung places, and by large trade surpluses and easy money. And, it did have social consequences: the withering of small town life, the atomization of community, and the working-class revolts of the last 20 years as the machine started to sputter.<p>It's important to note that it doesn't have to be this way. This isn't the natural order of things. There IS no "natural order of things." This is a choice. You're free to like that choice if it suits you, but nobody is obliged to like it, and if you don't there is a tried-and-true program for forcing other choices: organize, unionize, and galvanize.
> We don't want a corporate, faceless box store coming in with no stake in our community.<p>Who is “we?”<p>If the community wants Washington General, then they’ll shop there. If they want the lowest possible prices, they’ll shop at Dollar General.<p>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.<p>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 feel like this article failed to effectively discuss the very important point that is how these big box stores tend to be a drain on the city's economy. It's sorta there but generally these stores tend to make communities poorer in the long run.