Read This: How dollar stores scammed America to become worth more than Coca-Cola
Surprise—the too-good-to-be-true store is exactly that
Aux Features Walmart
If you have driven more than approximately 2 miles anywhere in America, chances are you’ve come across a Dollar General, Dollar Store, or Family Dollar. If you happen to drive 3 or more miles, then you’ll most likely see all 3.
It doesn’t take a trained economist to understand how these so-called “bargain” outlets have spread across the U.S. landscape—it’s psychologically comforting to know the apparently cheap price of everything in a given store without needing to give it much thought. Throw in a crumbling American Dream, and you got yourself a recipe for business success.
It’s also a recipe comprised largely of opportunistic scamming, as a recent infographic by Zachary Crockett over at The Hustle makes very plain. After all, you don’t reach 34,000 stores across the country (with a new location opening roughly every 6 or so hours) by operating at a net loss. You do so by tricking your customers into believing they’re getting great, cheap deals on name-brand items, when in fact they’re simply paying more for less product.
“For every $1 in sales, Dollar General and Dollar Tree earn an average gross profit of ~$0.30,” reads Crockett’s report. “That’s more than rivals like Target ($0.28) and Walmart ($0.24).” These stores also buy bulk surplus and discontinued items, further increasing their overall profit margins. “That $1 Old Spice deodorant might seem like a good deal. But at 0.8 oz., it’s less than one-third the size of the standard 3 oz. stick—and on a per-unit basis, it’s significantly more expensive than the larger-sized offerings at other retailers.”
Okay, so you’re technically paying more for the convenience, right? That’s not terrible, given that these outlets are essentially, well, “convenience stores.” But here’s where it gets particularly gross: dollar stores are targeting demographics who either aren’t educated enough to spot the scam or who don’t make enough to have much choice in where and when they buy their household necessities.
“The core demographic of dollar stores—lower-income families who earn less than $40K per year—are often living paycheck to paycheck and can’t afford to buy in larger quantities, even if it means getting a better deal,” Crockett explains.
Desperation breeds profit for these dollar stores, and it’s a business model that has, perhaps unsurprisingly, proven extremely successful—there are more of these stores than all the Walmarts, CVS, Walgreens, and Targets combined. So yeah, you might wanna consider buying your pool floaties and Chef Boyardee Spaghettios somewhere more ethical like… well… um… damn.
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501 Comments
I mean, this is just another chain that is directing their sales towards another level of people being screwed over by low wages.If you have $12 at the end of the month to buy things like deodorant and shampoo, of course you’re going to go where you can buy $1.00 worth of shampoo at a time.
Yeah, so be prepared to buy shampoo like 18 – 24 times a fucking month!
I’m of that very poor demographic who cannot afford to shop in bulk, but I still won’t go to these places. I get ripped off enough as it is, even if I used to be surrounded by them. Thankfully where I live now I have better options.
So the scam is that they’re generating a positive gross margin? And I think everybody, even less educated folks, knows that you generally get a better deal if you buy a bigger-volume product. If lower-income people are unable to afford larger-volume products, that’s not really these stores’ faults, more the nature of capitalism/broader economic policies/globalization/pick your culprit.
i’m really unconvinced that a 3-ounce stick of deoderant counts as shopping in bulk.
The offering is price rather that cost/ounce. And if you ever go to any of these stores they more typically offer standard size packaging, as the mini sizes are bulk close-out purchases, not steady stock.
Composit compared to .8 oz? Really? Maths not your thing huh?
‘Their demographic tends to be the underserved’ is kind of an odd criticism. I mean, snap your fingers and have them disappear…are the people who previously bought stuff from these stores now better off?Having lived in/around areas that fit the description, these stores can attract business by being closer than other stores and/or having smaller iterations of stuff that therefore costs less (though not on a per-unit basis). And since they’re chains, they typically have a wider selection and better prices than people are going to find locally – convenience stores, which use the same business model but smaller and independent. (though obviously in that case there’s the argument that non-chain stores are at least distributing their profits over a wider group of owner-operators, rather than concentrating them up to CEOs).
I went on at length responding to the OP, but “I mean, snap your fingers and have them disappear…are the people who previously bought stuff from these stores now better off?” is looking at the problem backwards. These communities might have had better options, grocery stores with better overall prices and higher quality food, but then the Dollar stores swoop in and often lead to the real grocers closing. So if you just closed all the Dollar stores down you would be creating more need and food deserts, but the Dollar stores are the ones who exacerbated those problems in the first place (and as a result many communities/local governments are actually trying to keep Dollar stores OUT of their areas so they don’t end up in this situation, but in other places Dollar stores are still getting government subsidies/tax relief/etc to open more stores).
There’ve been a couple of interesing articles posted in the comments for this article, particularly long-form one from ProPublica, that made me look at the situation in a different way. Certain issues raised, like the minimal staffing and active discouragement of security in their stores, for instance, are big issues in some areas that the stores are located. The tendency for some of them to become nexuses of violent crime makes it easy to see why people would want to keep them out of their neighborhoods.
I’m less concerned about them drawing business away from supermarkets – after all, as a lot of people have pointed out, dollar stores aren’t really substitutes for large stores with a large variety of food. The ProPublica article pointed out that they tend to crop up in areas that are in economic decline, and if the presence of a dollar store reasonably close to a supermarket leads to it costing too much to operate, that supermarket wasn’t going to stay open much longer in the first place. Smaller stores would be more likely to get hit harder, though I wouldn’t say they have better prices – their merchandise still costs significantly more than what’s on supermarket shelves, if for no other reason than just the economy of scale (or lack thereof). Adding to the high prices is what they might have, which is fresh produce and meat – perishables will always have more thrown away, and thus the prices in the stores as a whole will have to cover that in order to keep it available (though fresh stuff is overrated – canned, and especially frozen, meats and vegetables are as nutritionally viable as their fresh counterparts with far greater shelf life).And of course, not all of (perhaps not even most) dollar stores end up with the model of setting up in an area where they hasten the demise of a supermarket or outright kill a mom-and-pop grocery. In my own experience, much of the time they go into an area that won’t support a supermarket – the choice for consumers goes from ‘travel to the supermarket if you want anything that the gas station doesn’t have’ to ‘there’s a dollar store close enough to walk to if you don’t feel like heading to the big town or the neighborhood with the supermarket’.
Exactly. My step-daughter just moved to a town about 25 miles from where I live that has a population of under 1,500 (pending updates from the census). The *ONLY* store in town is a Dollar General. It’s about 15 miles to the nearest town with anything bigger. Even if they drove to the nearest Walmart, any per-unit savings they gain would be eaten away in additional travel costs. My step-daughter works near where I live, so she does most of her shopping around here on her way home and just shops the Dollar General when she needs something “right now”. But this is the type of place that Dollar General has targeted. Not because they are purposefully trying to bilk a bunch of “rural hicks” but because Walmart thumbs their nose at towns that small because they want to build larger stores. Dollar General builds stores less than a quarter of the size of a Walmart and looks to be closer to their customer. Does that come with an increased cost? Sure…..even if just transportation costs. But there’s a reason those stores are doing well financially.
The best thing about the lower price grocery stores is that you can go in, and quietly jerk off and blow your load in some of the bulk food bins. People never notice and still buy the stuff. Ha! Ha! Ha!
Correct. And in their absence, there were (and still are) small, neighborhood stores which usually had significant markups on the necessities they sold. It’s not like the mom and pop stores were selling to their neighbors at Walmart prices.
Sorry, but I live in a neighborhood that is mostly low income and there is a dollar store on nearly every corner, but you have to walk at least 45 minutes to get to a real grocery store or pharmacy. That’s the problem. People are paying more money for less product, don’t know it, and have less access to stores where they can buy the full size product for the normal amount. My husband and I bought a house here after living downtown for 10 years and the way that these people don’t know that they’re being fleeced and denied access is a crime- anywhere else I’ve lived in this city, I could walk 5 minutes and be at a grocery store or pharmacy. Not to mention less access to public transit and otherwise just shit infrastructure. There’s no upward mobility for any families renting in this neighborhood.
I’ve lived around, and worked in, neighborhoods like that.Supermarkets and pharmacies wouldn’t flood in if the dollar stores left.
That’s not the point- it’s that a predatory business is thriving because people here do not have access to anything better. Even if grocery stores wouldn’t replace the dollar stores, there could be better public transit and other infrastructure so that low income people aren’t forced by lack of choice to shop at these stores. It’s like letting 10 check cashing stores in a neighborhood with no banks- it’s ensuring the neighborhood and its residents struggle economically while these predatory businesses suck all the money out of it. These are people who may require public assistance, so we are essentially giving tax dollars towards the dollar store’s coffers as a reward for their predatory business model. It shouldn’t be allowed to happen by legislators.
I mean, yes? Ideally this is completely true and if I could flip a switch to make it happen I would. But equating Dollar General to a check cashing store in terms of being predatory is pretty ridiculous. In the small town I live in, DG came in and made pretty much everything cheaper on a per unit basis than anywhere else within 30 minutes. Clearly it’s not universal, but hearing people talk about life in underserved areas as some kind of abstract experiment sucks, like people shopping at DG vs making the longer trip to a different store are somehow ignorant of the factors at play or per unit price.
But equating Dollar General to a check cashing store in terms of being predatory is pretty ridiculous.But it’s not. What you pay in fees for a checking account is small compared to what you pay in fees at a check cashing store. That’s the same as the Dollar General charging way more for less in terms of markup/profit margin. It’s preying on those who can’t pay the $4.29 for the full size product that is actually less $/weight just the way a check cashing store preys on those who can’t afford checking account maintenance fees.like people shopping at DG vs making the longer trip to a different store are somehow ignorant of the factors at play or per unit price.1. Not knowing the gross markup/profit margin of dollar stores is something I would bet most people don’t know. I grew up firmly middle class in the suburbs and had no idea. 2. Even is they DO know, just knowing that the further away stores have better value prices doesn’t help if they have limited time, infrastructure and resources to actually make that trek or the more value-driven but wait-and-save dependent product.In the small town I live in, DG came in and made pretty much everything cheaper on a per unit basis than anywhere else within 30 minutes.but that’s per unit and NOT per weight/volume. Meaning it’s NOT cheaper- they just charge more for less at a high markup. Like if Walmart sells a 20z water for $1.25 and I sell a 8oz water for $1.00, I’m not making things cheaper. Especially if Walmart’s profit on that bottle is $0.50 and mine is $0.50 for a bottle less than half the size. And deciding it’s okay because some people are super thirsty, can’t get to Walmart and only have $1 sounds very predatory.
They have generic stuff usually the same type of item you’d find in a WalMart… I go there sometimes because it is on the way despite living in a city. There are some goods I’ve become used to like generic Cheetos, and some decent cookies. My favorite is drink packets I haven’t been able to find cheaper than the Wylers lemonade packets at 10 for a dollar., or the Wafter cookies that are individually wrapped.
I mean, I can see the reasoning for the Dollar General since you know it’s going to be $1+ but for sure if you are going to the Dollar Tree, it is definitely the more for the convenience aspect, especially now during Covid, I’ve seen a lot more elderly people at my local ones, which is ok because it’s probably safer (germs wise) than the giant chains or supermarkets because, at least around here, the local ones are pretty constantly cleaned during COVID in ways that they can’t do in the bigger stores
Dollar stores are targeting demographics who […..] don’t make enough to have much choice in where and when they buy their household necessities.This sounds so sinister. Selling people necessities at prices that fit into their budget sounds fine to me. Some people cannot afford the $200 it takes to get a few things from Costco, not to mention the annual membership.
Exactly. The Dollar hook is that their budget is calculated on a shorter time span than economy serves. Would you rather pay $1 monthly, or $2 every three months? That’s the lesson of Sam Vimes’ Boots.
Exactly. The reason I don’t shop at CostCo is that I live alone, and most of what I’d have to buy in bulk would go bad.
I don’t buy cereal at Dollar Tree because, as the article states, the portions are too small to be cost effective. But much of what’s there really is cheaper.
After Kroger or Giant Eagle groceries, my SO stops at a Dollar Tree to buy inexpensive items that we use on the daily. That would include plastic-ware, sandwichsnack bags, and yes they’re cheaper than Wally World or Target by a long run on these certain items (for us).
its not the model for everyone, but its really expensive to be poor
The problem is that if a Dollar General or Family Dollar/Dollar Tree is not too far from a supermarket, the people will skip the supermarket and thus be ripped off. You aren’t getting much for what you pay at those stores.
And most people don’t have a vehicle large enough to shove a Costco pack of 128 rolls of toilet paper into.
The point is about UNIT cost. Despite being able to afford the product at a lower price, the unit cost is more. Therefore, customer are actually buying at a net loss compared to other reretailers.If you need a math example, let me know.
This sounds so sinister. Selling people necessities at prices that fit into their budget sounds fine to me.
This was my thought, too. How dare you open up a store in a low-income neighbourhood and sell things for cheaper than other places that’s also close to their home.
[Edited to quote, sorry]
How dare you open up a store in a low-income neighbourhood and sell things for cheaper than other places that’s also close to their home. They don’t do that is the point. They sell smaller items that cost less but they make more profit in aggregate.If they sold those things using the same profit margin as the larger quantity items found at WalMart or elsewhere, we’d have less of a problem. Shoppers would still pay a bit more, because of production costs for non-bulk items is legitimately a bit higher, but that’s not the complaint here. The complaint is they a dollar store goes way past that math to squeeze more profit from seemingly low-cost items.They also run other retail and grocery stores out of business, contributing to the vicious cycle.It’s not even that shoppers vote with their wallets, it’s that a dollar store is so profitable that they can afford to compete with anyone they don’t even have to take away too many customers before the lower-margin grocery stores start suffering and have to close, even when they attract more customers than the 5 new dollar stores in the area.
more expensive per unit for the same items, and while being the only store in the area it means they are happily gouging the customers.
thats what people here are complaining about.
Fair point, and I get how my comment might have been flippant. I’m from Ontario as well, and it’s nice to know that those concerns are at least being acknowledged by those with any control over it.
This is entirely separate, but another fun fact about Ontario: You know those cardboard beer boxes with punched-out handles? They’re likely from Quebec, where it’s required. That’s not entirely a chummy beer-swilling Canadian anecdote; it’s a legitimate pain in the ass if you’ve ever worked in a bar.
for the first time in a while bought some cans of pop and I do not know whos bright idea it was to make flimsy cardboard handles for liquid containers. oh mai gawd. and like the cardboard gets thinner every few years too XD
It’s one thing to sell people cheaper items they can afford, it’s another thing to sell it and make substantial profits on it because they have no other options because they can only afford what you’re selling. You kind of missed the point of the article when it clearly states that lower quantity items are sold for much higher profit despite them being cheaper. It’d be like me going to Costco and buying 2 dozen eggs for $7 and then setting up outside the Dollar store and selling those eggs at $1 a piece because that’s all those people can afford $7, meanwhile I make $24 off them. So in other words, they could be significantly cheaper than they already are, people are simply forced to buy it because they have no other option.
“Selling people necessities at prices that fit into their budget sounds fine to me.”The problem this causes is that the exact people who already can’t afford basic necessities end up having to pay a lot more for these necessities than everybody else.I’m not sure if we need to single out dollar stores, since this is a general problem caused by capitalism. If you have money, it’s much easier to avoid spending it than if you don’t have money. If you have money, it’s also a lot easier to make more money than if you don’t have money. This means that an inherent feature of our society is that it tends to make rich people richer, and poor people poorer. This is an unstable system, and it’s one of the root causes of high crime rates, and civil unrest.
Dollar stores are a nice illustration of this problem, but they’re obviously not its only manifestation.
But they’re marking it up MORE than other stores selling the same things. The extra markup is optional, and the only reason it works is because they’re exploiting the false perception that they mark things up less. If you can’t see how charging an extra tax on poor people is unethical, something is fucking wrong with you.
They are not targeting a demographic as much as they are targeting rural, underserved markets. Columbus, IN has a Kroger store. The outlying communities have 20 DoGen’s to shop that are within 5 miles of their home. The next Kroger is in either Bloomington to the west or Madison to the south. The area is better served by Walmart Supercenters rather than the mega grocery chains. Yet DoGen’s and their ilk survive & thrive because they are inexpensive and convenient.
The shoppers get less of their necessities for the same price, requiring them to pay more in the long run. That is sinister.
Wow are you missing the point. Entitled much?
FFS this isn’t about Costco memberships and buying in bulk. my local grocery store sells items at twice to three times the price than the same items at the local dollar store but It was only after a few purchases I noticed that the sizes were different because they keep both the size of the packaging and the label the same between the two versions, aside from the little number in the bottom corner mentioning the weight. I have been more careful about it since and I understand that its up to the buyer to be wary but the answer to predatory behaviour is not to scream hey keep an eye out for wolves and then adding more wolves.
It’s more of a smaller Walmart that spread incredibly quickly and the same social factors are at work. If you depress the cost of goods, you’re depressing the cost of labor, and therefore also depressing the spending capabilities of the community. These things are designed to hurt mom and pop stores and other locally owned small businesses more than anything.
I get that argument, but it’s not the one Andrew made in his writeup (I did not click through to the underlying article so maybe it’s in there.)
It’s a short walk to that point. The smaller quantities mask the actual higher cost. Most people aren’t going to do the cost per ounce calculations and just see “well, they offer it cheaper here!” So they look cheaper, but they’re costing more to the customer in the long run, both in terms of price and cost to the community as a whole. Let’s not forget companies like Walmart are more than happy to point people to SNAP benefits and other government assistance because they know they aren’t paying their employees a livable wage.
Kinda? Walmart actually sells name brand stuff at cheaper than you can get it elsewhere, if you can stomach the ethical issues that come with it – at least in my experience. So Walmart might be a bad deal for society but it’s usually a pretty good deal for shoppers.Dollar stores offer the illusion of a good deal while actually being the worst value you can get for your dollar – again, in my experience.
The best thing about Walmart is the clothes that some of the shoppers wear…particularly late at night (the superstore near where I live was actually open 24 hours a day for its first few years…you saw some really great stuff at 3:30am). I actually saw a gaggle of whores trying on thong underwear right out in the aisle one night. They didn’t buy anything…just tried the shit on and then put it all back on the shelf.
“Dollar stores offer the illusion of a good deal while actually being the worst value you can get for your dollar – again, in my experience.”The way Dollar stores work isn’t much different from Walmart. On some items it’ll be a good deal, because of a sale or whatever. On other items it’s a bad price because the quantity is disproportionately low or the item is made poorly (for example: tools sold at dollar stores).You can never assume that if you walk into a store everything will be a good price for you. That’s not how retail works.
Nailed it👍🏽
They also employ less people than actual grocery stores, and they offer lower quality/more processed products and almost no fresh produce or goods, which leads to increased health risks (and affects children’s development and eventually people’s education levels, earning potential, and so on). And paying less employees and not buying/carrying fresh stuff means their operating costs are significantly lower than the grocery stores they are choking out, even before you get into the increased profits from their bullshit product sizes and buying discontinued/remaindered goods.
I think they hired the wrong person to write the article. 😀
Mom and pop stores here are ridiculously expensive and don’t always have what you need. I do not subscribe to that “buy local” hooey because the locals need to make money too at the expense of their neighbors.
Fuck mom and pop arguments. I was a chef for many years before owning my own restaurant. I worked for chain restaurants which had fresh food, clean environments, paid well and came with benefits. Then I worked for mom and pop restaurants which almost always paid like garbage, worked you for unpaid overtime, no health care, dirty ass kitchens, using old foods for too long, and were just awful places to work. People can shit on corporations all they want, but if I were 20 years old again today and wanted to work in the industry, I’m moving up the corporate ladder at my local Chili’s long before I’m even applying at some locally owned shithole. You know what Wal Mart does that my locally owned grocer doesn’t. It has a wider selection of the same exact products at half the cost, my produce isn’t rotten within 24 hours of buying it, the stuff on the shelves isn’t a month out of date, and it has a far more expanded and diverse inventory of things like Asian and Latin foods than my local’s soy sauce and tortilla bullshit. Fuck mom and pop. Corporations beat them because they’re superior at delivering the goods, not because some moustache twirling CEO conspired against them. They also pay more so you can toss the cheap labor arguments out. My local Wal-Mart is always advertising starting at 15 dollars per hour. No local grocer is paying anyone that outside of maybe 1 or 2 top management rolls. the local grocer advertised for a deli manager in the paper starting at 8 dollars an hour. FOR A MANAGER. ROFL! Get wrecked.
Yeah, I’m surprised this article (maybe also the original?) doesn’t mention the role completely screwing over employees plays in their profit margin. I must have read half a dozen exposés on the topic (like the one: https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/dollar-general-thriving-workers-say-they-pay-price-n1137096) in the past few years.Basically: they know they’re probably going to get robbed, but they don’t really prepare or protect the workers.
Many people can’t afford to ship at Mom and Pop stores. I do, but I do see the price disparity. It’s terrible but some people just don’t have enough money to go Mom and Pop
“If you depress the cost of goods, you’re depressing the cost of labor,
and therefore also depressing the spending capabilities of the
community.”
well outsourcing the work all together does that too. the amount of products at dollar stores that are NOT from China or another foreign nation is miniscule.
“These things are designed to hurt mom and pop stores and other locally owned small businesses more than anything.”
designed to out compete and turn the largest profit they can. just like every other capitalist endeavour. don’t think they have a grudge against anyone though.
‘really its those people’s fault for having tasty blood, the disease laden mosquito cant help themselves’ is not an excuse for letting mosquito populations balloon out of control.
The scam is that they’re preying on lower-income families and individuals who don’t have the financial means to *get* better deals…a vicious cycle that these stores help REINFORCE. For the profit of the few CEOs and shareholders.It’s Robinhood in reverse.
the scam is they’re often the only store in some of these small towns.
Source: I drove Ventura to Detroit in March and was blown away how many Dollar Generals etc were in places where there were perhaps 3 businesses in their two block ‘downtown’.
That’s dishonest and you know it.
to you and Inspector hammer, this brief summary didn’t really get at a lot of the deeper issues. Basically, Dollar stores often push out grocery stores, frequently in areas where people are poor and don’t have a lot of options or transportation. Dollar stores have a smaller physical footprint, which means less rent, AND they employ far less people (I think the number I saw was something like a quarter of the employees a grocery store in the same area would employ). So they are more profitable than actual grocery stores and have a lower overhead, and if they can pull away some of the grocery store’s business it will often lead to those grocery stores closing. This is already bad for the local economy, because we have established the Dollar store will employ less people, but then it also has a negative effect on the customers, as the poorest people lose access to actual grocery stores and all of a sudden Dollar stores are the only thing within walking/bus distance. Then they get stuck in the cycle of overpaying for less (and sometimes worse) products, AND they lose access to fresh produce. Dollar stores almost never sell fresh fruit/veg/meat/eggs etc., that’s part of why their profits are so high and their overhead is so low. Lack of access to healthy, affordable food is shown to increase chances people will remain poor, increase health risks, and even affect the level of education they might complete. AND I don’t remember the details about this last part enough to get super specific, but it gets into community/government territory where Dollar stores are getting tax relief or other subsidies for building in “food deserts” or underserved areas because they will “create jobs” and provide food/goods for nearby poor neighborhoods, which if you combine it with all the previous stuff I mentioned it becomes a self-perpetuating cycle of them getting extra money for fucking the poor and actually weakening the local economy.
This is a much better argument than anything in the article or the “infographic ” it’s based on.There’s both a Family Dollar and Dollar General near where I live, directly across the street from each other. Aside from a hardware store, a carnicerita, and couple of Circle K’s, there’s else nothing within 20 minutes.I’m fortunate that I can forget those stores are even there. I went into one for the first time recently when the hardware store didn’t have what I needed. They smell like depression and despair.
The problem is particularly dire in rural areas. I have family in one rural area. The town they live in is the county seat, so, not a tiny town. They even had their own supermarket, which also sold gardening goods and gifts and had a great butcher. It wasn’t open on Sundays, but neither was much else, and everybody was okay with that — this is a conservative, rural area, after all. Mainly a farming community, although this town has a courthouse, a small hospital, clothing stores, multiple churches, and a state school (yes, the kind where “school” is a bit of a euphemism).Then a new gas station moved in. This was a big deal; they did have another gas station already, which was also a service station, but this one had a big convenience store, and sold things like pizza. Since the town was short on restaurants, that was pretty amazing; they hadn’t had a local option for pizza since the Pizza Hut closed a decade earlier. And it was an option for picking up a few groceries on a Sunday.Then, a few years later, Dollar General moved in across the street from the new gas station. The gas station is still there, and doing great business. But the Dollar General is doing even better.Three years ago, the grocery store abruptly closed.Now, they have a convenience store and the Dollar General for groceries, unless they want to drive for an hour to the next major city. And for the smaller communities around that town, it’s even further.I’ve been in that Dollar General. The choices are really not good. And yeah, that town is really hurting for jobs now. It was tough before. Now it’s worse, and they’re paying more for worse food. And people know it. There just isn’t much they can do about it.
It is honestly kind of astounding how much nearly ever comment on this article other than yours completely misses the point… although to be fair, the ARTICLE sort of missed the point as well. The role “dollar stores” play in the spread of food deserts in the United States and the perpetuation of generational poverty within them isn’t some sort of mysterious secret, and yet all these commenters seem to have gleaned from all of this is “let’s compare our anecdotes about unit pricing”. It’s really disappointing. Thanks for being a light in the dark!
If I remember the math correctly based on a report from 2014, the average Dollar General employs three employees per shift per location. Those being the primary retail clerk, stocker/secondary retail clerk, and the manager. Some less than scrupulous locations may combine those first and third positions. Meanwhile, they serve an average of a hundred and fifty people a shift, or fifty households.
So you’re looking at 50:1 customer to employee ratio for many locations, and as bad as a 75:1 ratio for some others. That’s pretty fucking bad when these aren’t creating employment opportunities, they’re erasing them. For every Dollar General that appears instead of a grocery store like an IGA, that’s three jobs that take the place of twelve or more. You’re erasing nine employment opportunities each time.
Thank you, you saved from having to write these exact same things.They push out access to food, actual cost efficient opportunities, small businesses, and countless other things which actually serve the neighborhoods while providing better and more economically viable alternatives. And the old “they’re simply not educated enough” is a whole bunch of classism and racism rolled into one. Considering the rich made Gwyneth Paltrow half a billion dollars for vagina scented candles, informed and educated purchases clearly aren’t a matter of class.
Do you have sources? I remain unconvinced that stores like DG are putting full line grocery stores out of business all by themselves.
This is a much more compelling argument and should have been what the article was centered around. I think it would have been much more convincing.
I go there for gift wrapping paper and related. Always check the feet per roll, but you can get some bargains.
Yes, envelopes–same size, brand and amount for $3.97 elsewhere are $1.00 at “The Tree” (as my elderly Aunt calls it). Gift wrap, paper products and cards are other good buys. As an ICU nurse I will buy different strength reading glasses for patients, hair ties/headbands, puzzle books, etc. One of my cousins shops there a lot and will buy a garden flag, little signs, outdoor hanging spinner, etc. decor to gift me—very low quality and doesn’t even last a season. I finally told her no thanks, I am trying to cut down on the clutter. What I wanted to say was the planet doesn’t need the clutter, and I prefer well made, long lasting more natural items. But I think it does serve a demographic with the sizes and prices.
The larger problem about these stores is that they often are in “food deserts”. So people are using them for everyday purchases due to national chains being too far for people. The tradeoff of knowing you are getting screwed is balanced by knowing you would spend more getting to a “classic grocery”. It has nothing to do with income level or education, mostly is has to do with localities not being able to bring in a Target et al. Cost effective geo-location is a big planner for some companies…supply chain issues rule the world.
What people often don’t realize is that even the grocery stores (locally owned or large chains) in poorer neighborhoods cost more. Part of it is due to higher shrinkage and part of it is they know their customers have no other option.
You often get better deals and better quality food at a grocery store in a rich neighborhood. In the poor neighborhood it can be the same cost per unit for the deodorant at the dollar store as it is at the neighborhood Walmart.
Poor people know how to stretch a dollar and get the most from their money.
Sure the grocery store might “have” 88¢ bread, but it is never in stock so the only other option is the $1.19 bread or spending $2-3 on the name brand or you can reliably get $1 bread at the dollar store. So you make one trip to the grocery to get what’s a good deal there and one trip to the dollar store and get what’s a good deal there. You may only go to one or the other once a month, but you get what’s good and make the money last as best you can.
A lot of dollar store shoppers are also making smart decisions and not buying the rip-off items unless they are in a pinch and it is cheaper than the gas station. They just buy what they must or what is the best deal. Plus many dollar stores take coupons so that rip-off item suddenly becomes a better a deal with right coupon (which you can get out of the Sunday paper they sell for a $1). Some canned goods (like coconut milk) and spices are way cheaper. Basic soap and shampoo can be cheaper per unit. Napkins and named brand tissues are less expensive (same size box of Kleenex is almost $2 at Target vs $1 at Dollar Tree). Birthday cards or blank cards are way cheaper. We get our Christmas cards from the dollar store where we can get 10-12 cards for a $1. Heck, you can get good deals on paper goods at Dollar General (which often has overpriced stuff) if you use coupons and shop on a Saturday where you can use a coupon to take $5 off a $25 purchase.
“And I think everybody, even less educated folks, knows that you generally get a better deal if you buy a bigger-volume product.”I would want to test that theory
I got a laugh out of that. I once went grocery shopping with my mom who consistently buys the smallest sizes and quantities of items because she only cares about the final price, not the actual price per unit. I tried to explain to her how bulk is cheaper and did some of the math for her, but all she said was “Yes- but this costs less”. I am certain she’s not alone.
the local grocery store has, and I am not making this up I swear, gone through waves of making sure the bulk packages cost more per unit than buying the smaller units and unfortunately taking all that extra packaging that comes with.
up here in Canada, or the province of Ontario at least, there are rules that the pricing label has to have a price per unit or small measurement. they implemented this when they realized people’s math skills were not up to snuff and they weren’t doing the quick math while shopping.
they print it on the pricing labels very tiny. Sometimes they forget to put the labels on so you don’t know till you hit the cash register how much (and they don’t know the unit price) and the one thing I really hate is when they put things on sale and for some reason that does NOT require them to have the per unit price. the more vile stores make sure if its on sale to take away the price sign representing what it was before the sale price, just for good measure. add all that to the growing trend of shrinking the weight of the items but keeping the pricing the same as a subtle way of leaving you thinking “prices aren’t going up” while you run out sooner. =(
I check price per unit on almost everything larger packages often don’t cost less per unit than the smaller ones especially at Walmart which is probably due to their small margins and that they likely push for a better deal on the smaller ones?
Right, it’s not ideal (is any big business ideal?), but dollar stores have saved my ass many a time when money was particularly tight.
The scam is that many of the products are packaged in a way that makes them confusingly similar to the more traditional product in a Walmart/Target/grocery store. The cheese will have 12 slices, instead of 16. Or it may not even be real cheese. That .8 oz deodorant is going to be almost the same amount of plastic it just won’t be full, like the 3.5 oz version. The bear shaped container will look like honey, but if you read the small print it’s artificial honey flavored syrup.
It seems like you’re getting a good deal unless you’re very diligent. They’re using your expectations against you just like a con artist.
“..and that’s why Dollar Store is the real monster! Now, if you could just click on a few great products from our stellar advertiser Amazon that we have helpfully littered across the page for you convenience, you’ll be helping make America a better place.”
-The AV Club
There have been a number of studies into it and all of them find that dollar stores create poverty and drive down the spending money available to the population living nearby.
A couple of examples:
https://ilsr.org/dollar-stores-target-cities-towns-one-fights-back/https://progressive.org/magazine/dollar-stores-prey-on-the-poor-sainato-191001/
Yep, they’re filling a demand. It’s not good or bad, but that specific demand is there.
There are also plenty of rural areas near where I live that feature Dollar General as the only place within 15+ miles to buy produce and other grocery items. Walmart basically killed a lot of local grocery stores in the 90s/00s, and then DG ended up going in and being more nimble than Walmart to target the surrounding towns where people would probably, say, don’t want to drive 30 minutes each way to get a few grocery items after work.Time has value too, as does gas.
I know farmer’s markets and produce stands can be rather bourgeois these days, but are there none of them around those areas?
I mean, some farmers markets, but they’re typically a few hours one or two days per week. Work weekends or nontraditional hours? Sorry!And your solution doesn’t offer plenty of things that a store like this offers for people. Like, fuck, maybe you just want a few bags of chips, you know? Some DG stores offer beer/wine too. CVS and Walgreens also have expanded offerings in some areas. Shit even in downtown Denver the Walgreen’s was basically a grocery store when I loved there.The main point is stores like these fill a market need and obviously they’re not charity. But fuck, I’m just a single guy, buying bulk doesn’t always work for me math wise either. Driving an hour to Costco or 30 minutes to a Kroger isn’t always an option. Locally there are still some towns with indie grocers, but those costs are just as gouging sometimes if not moreso. (For obvious reasons relative to a huge national chain, and I’m happy to shop there as much as possible vs a chain like DG.) But calling this a “scam” is such typical bullshit. It’s naive about capitalism or life in rural areas or life with low income, or maybe naive about all of the above.
Walmart has turned “larger quantity is cheaper” on its head as of late. Many items on their shop-and-pickup website are more expensive in larger amounts. Because most people are used to buying the giant economy size to save money, they get taken in by this trick.
The problem is that they muscle out other retail and (especially) grocery stores. They pop up multiple locations in food deserts and become (and aggressively stay) the only option for low-income people.
And it’s not just that cheaper things in lower quantities tend to be less efficient use of a dollar (to use a phrase). That’s true, but it’s more that the products they stock are designed in particular to be high-margin. They could sell them for cheaper and still make a profit, but they exploit the illusion and artificially engineer a market when they can’t be punished for it.
it used to, you should actually check the kg/price nowadays, as some store and brand use it as a way to charge more, on the belief that the family pack being bigger is the best deal.
I mean, this is Vimes’ Boots Theory incarnate.
Hey look, immediately someone is there to defend the predatory retailers preying on poor people! Probably even doing it for free!
No. The scam is because they’re getting people to pay more overall for the same amount of product by having a lower price for a product that doesn’t last as long, requiring more long term expenditure. Like Terry Pratchett discussed in one of his books:“The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
This was the Captain Samuel Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socioeconomic unfairness.”
Wow entitled much. The poor get a raw deal because they are poor. Surprised that’s so hard to understand. Have you ever wondered how the electric will get paid?
I shop at the Dollar General by my home. The cheese they sell is substandard and nasty. Milk, eggs, cheese? Not the cheese. I think the house brand is “Clover Valley.” It’s gross.
Wait so targeting a demographic is gross?The fuck?Nothing is wrong with targeting low-IQ or low-income individuals. It’s up to those individuals to make the smart decisions.What the fuck is it with this country and wanting to reward stupidity?
I agree with you in principal, and I do recall reading an article a while back about how the poor becomes poorer because of this lack of purchasing power.I can afford to go to Costco and get TP, PT, detergent, etc. at bulk prices. My per unit price is often 30% to 50% lower than buying at the dollar stores, and I save even more when these things are on sale and I stock up on these daily necessities that don’t go bad/expire, so over the course of a year I may be a few hundred dollars ahead of someone who can only afford to buy at dollar stores.Take that few hundred and multiply by millions of people who visit dollar stores, you see why they’re doing so well.
If capitalism worked as advertised, someone would open up an 80 cent store and put them all out of business.
The “scam” is that they’re claiming you’re saving money. You’re not. You’re paying *more* at a dollar store. That said, as long as someone somewhere is selling the stuff for as much as 1 cent more than the dollar store, they’re technically not lying.Just a small example, Dr. Teal’s Epsom Salts with Coconut Oil is $5 for 3 lbs at Dollar General. It’s $4.87 at Walmart. You aren’t saving money by shopping at the dollar store.Dollar stores try to emphasize the idea that you’re getting regular products cheaper than you can get them elsewhere, and it’s not true. If they’re the same size, they cost more at dollar stores. If they’re smaller, they cost less per package, but cost more per unit of measurement. And the dollar store is certainly not drawing attention to the fact that they’re smaller. Keep in mind that it’s not always travel size vs full size. Sometimes it’s full size looking packaging, but with a few ounces missing. And I don’t know about you, but I could not tell you how many ounces the bar of soap that I bought from Target is, and so if I were in a dollar store buying the same soap, I would not know if it was a little smaller than a normal bar.Plus, normal stores will pull product when it expires – especially if it’s a product that you ingest. Dollar stores will not, with the exception of OTC medication. And they only pull OTC medication because they got sued a few years ago. All that aside, no, I don’t think they’re *scamming* people any more than any other marketing communication is a scam. The entire advertising industry is set up to steer you toward making bad financial decisions. The dollar store isn’t any better or worse in that metric than any other outlet.
The scam is that you’re paying more for less. The packaging SIZES are the same, but the amount of product inside is not …
… So you agree? Capitalism is a scam?
It sounds like the “scam” is just being on the lowest end of the unit price spectrum. Most people are generally aware that you pay the highest unit price for the tiny amount, and the lowest unit price for the bulk amount.
It’s predatory, but only a scam if there is a fraud involved with that knowledge.
I guess how broadly one defines “scam”. I once had a customer accuse me of “bait & switch” simply because we ran out of the particular item that was on sale.
Yeah, I may be being a bit pedantic but scam is probably a narrow legal term. It’s most certainly preying on the poorest among us by maximizing profit margin vs. unit price.And it could go further. Some of their white label brands could be engineered to use deceptive packaging that “looks” bigger or more full of product with a teeny tiny net.wt. printed.
It’s not just white label brands that do that. There are actual on-label products made in a format that does that.
You fucking crook. You’re supposed to carry enough volume to satisfy all demand.
Well, “bait and switch” is the only vocabulary most people have for the scummy practice most stores employ of “advertising the hell out of a super low priced product and then only providing ten for a fifteen store district”.Add on top of that “negotiating a different model number for the same product with the manufacturer so we don’t have to honor our price matching policy” and you have something that’s not traditionally defined as a scam, but it’s certainly a scam.But we live in a world where getting over on someone using a technicality is the virtue most valued, so continue on.
And usually stores will tell you how many cents you’re paying per ounce, or whatever unit the thing comes in. The information is readily available. I don’t know that I’d even call it predatory. If you have $1 to spend instead of $3, having the $1 option, even if you’re paying a higher margin, is useful for the person who can’t afford the other $2 and would otherwise be able to afford nothing.
And usually stores will tell you how many cents you’re paying per ounce
This brings up a good point. Is the printing of unit prices on SKU tags a regulation, or a voluntary practice? If the latter, then not printing unit price could be one more tactic to create information asymmetry.
I believe the modern price per oz/unit stuff is a result of a 2006 Uniform Unit Pricing law, because a) that definitely wasn’t around when I was a kid, and b) they absolutely wouldn’t do it if they didn’t have to.Even there, though, I’ve noticed a trend that I think speaks to their desire to get past the people who just assume “bulk is better”—oftentimes the cheapest by n SKU at the grocery store is actually the second-largest or middle size. I especially notice it with the off/store-brand stuff, where I presume they assume people are just buying on the assumption it’s always cheaper and aren’t looking any more closely.
I brought those topics up in a another post. what I find interesting is that I went to google to find any studies or articles to back up that stance and all I found was a ton of articles with weasel words of ‘bouying in bulk “tends” to be cheaper per unit.. or the words “usualy” etc etc.
meanwhile I have been seeing these kind of shenanigans for ages. too bad no one is broadly reporting on it. I mean, not even the websites supposedly for saving money ffs
This is the key point. It’s all very well to identify people who have to do something because their situation is bad – but if you just prevent them from doing that thing, it doesn’t improve their situation. It’s bad when people only have bad options available to them – but taking away the best of those bad options just means that they have to pick an even worse option.
It’s absolutely predatory, and pretending it isn’t is deciding to be part of the problem, frankly.If it wasn’t predatory, you wouldn’t see the misleading packaging of products or oversized containers or the like.
Or maybe the person only needs $1 worth of the product.
If you really want to see bad prices try buying Tylenol at a gas station convenience store.
The lack of muzak at Dollar Tree always unnerves me, basically confirming we’re in the end times
Every time I have to go to one, they’re playing country. I’d much rather have blessed silence than that garbage.
I work at Target and they had the same Playlist playing for more then a year. I also miss when there was no music playing.
I used to work at Kmart, & they had the same one-hour loop of music videos playing in the clothing departments for months on end…& for some reason*, it always included two Selena Gomez songs, & they were always the worst two songs in the loop.*the reason is she had a clothing line there
Kmart plays music from the 70s and 80s :p
Dollar General is like kudzu. They’re all over the place. In Sumter County, Alabama there are 4 stores about 10 miles apart on the same highway. In Meridian, Mississippi, there are 6 stores circling the city, with two in the heart of downtown. And there are stores popping up in nearly every unincorporated community. Just like Walmart has all but eliminated the local mom-and-pop store, DG is replacing both the inner-city neighborhood corner store and the community general store. They just don’t have the gas pumps. Yet.And this is causing more trouble than expected. With DG, Dollar Tree and Family Dollar becoming the newest destination for the latest Hot Wheels models, the areas are now flooded with scalpers raiding the pegs and pallets, destroying the storerooms and harassing the employees looking for that ever-elusive “Treasure Hunt” model. Last month, one of the local DGs called the police to arrest a scalper who marched right into the storeroom and started rambling through the pallets, looking for a supposedly just arrived case of Hot Wheels, claiming it had a Treasure Hunt model in it. He refused to leave when asked, claiming he had every right to be in the back, despite the “Employees Only” sign. The police briefly scuffled with him until they handcuffed him, and he was still yelling about privilege.I know that guy. He was charged with trespassing and vandalism, and now has been banned from every DG in the East Mississippi/West Alabama district. Walmart placed a nationwide ban on him last year, including the Sam’s Club stores.
That doesn’t sound like a DG problem. Sounds like an asshole problem. And like dollar stores, they’re everywhere.
Dollar General is like kudzu; if you keep heaping in melted butter you can just about choke it down.
That’s what my girlfriend’s sister said about sucking my cock. Gets expensive…with all the melted butter… to get a blowjob from her.
Not sure what that has to do with dollar stores. That happens anywhere that sells action figures or collectibles.
Yeah, Target stopped selling Pokemon and sports cards for a month after a fight over them in the parking lot of their stores where someone showed a gun.
a side tangent would be that some of the posts earlier brought up the lax security and under staffing at these stores.
I never knew how terrible hot wheels collectors were until I took my kids to an event at a Kmart. I saw the ensuing chaos and was like nope.
Right now they’re hitting every store in the area searching for the latest How Wheels model, and it isn’t even a Treasure Hunt: the Tesla Cybertruck.I saw a few on Ebay a few weeks ago selling for $15-$25. A couple of clowns were bold enough to try and sell for $50. Everybody were claiming they were “very hard to find”.And these guys are dangerous. Yes they will hurt you and you kid if you get in their way.
The local mom and pops have been conning people for years with their high prices on food and commodities. I lived in a town that once the last gas station closed for the night, you were out of luck for buying anything. Then, Dollar General showed up. I don’t live in that town anymore but if any place needed a Dollar General, they did. Otherwise, they’d have to drive further to buy anything late at night.
Easy way to solve the problem. Let the guy into a DG store…follow him in as he hunts for the elusive Hot Wheels model…produce the model and then jam it squarely up his asshole. He’ll never come back!
Dollar Tree is a dollar store. Dollar General and Family Dollar, however, despite the names, are not. Stuff there isn’t that much cheaper (if at all) than any retail store. They’re just mini-grocery stores/maxi-convenience stores. At Dollar Tree, though, everything’s a fucking dollar. Sure, the name brand stuff is just packaged in smaller portions than what you would get at regular stores (like if you buy a box of Ziploc bags, for instance, there’s only 18 in the box rather than 45), but there’s plenty of good deals to be had on generic stuff if you’re not too picky. I don’t shop there that often, but the clientele can be (ahem) interesting, and it’s good if you just need to run in and get some paper plates or something without having to make a grocery store trip.
exactly. i needed a couple of plain, large wine glasses after my neighbor broke the one i lent her. i didn’t want a whole set, just 2. for $2, i got them. & if they break, no great loss.
I stocked up on my summer BBQ glasses and plates for under $20. Several weeks ago they were putting out their Halloween candy and I picked up my treats, straight to the freezer for the season.
It’s a great place for dishes and other kitchen items. I have really nice plates and bowls from Dollar Tree.
I’m fairly well educated and I know exactly what I get when I shop at Dollarama, the Canadian dollar store. Everything is either $1, 2, 3 or 4 now. They have name brand kitchenware like Betty Crocker and it may not be as high quality as the bigger stores but when you’re teaching cooking classes, they are good enough for students. They also sell my favourite chocolate bars for 78 cents each. They’ve been out of stock for months now on Zero bars. I used to pay almost $2 each for them at chocolate shops but when I see them at Dollarama, I buy in bulk.
I live 20 minutes from “town.” The Dollar General in my village has been a life saver.
In my small town with three entrances that come from county highways there’s one at every entrance, so we have 3 Dollar Generals, one Dollar Tree, and one Family Dollar, and each small town that’s only a few miles away also has their own stupid grey box Dollar General.
Why do all these types of articles equate low income as low intelligence. People are smart enough to know they’re getting smaller sizes and maying more per ounce, pound, inch, etc.I could buy 40 pound bags of cat food, but the smaller bags, even though cost more per pound, are more convenient. Plus I don’t need all my money tied up in cat food. Same with sandwich bags, foil, or snacks.
Not necessarily low intelligence, but there is definitely a correlation between low-education and low-income, as better educated people can get better jobs. Much of the predatory business ecosystem for the poor depends on their innumeracy. Besides Dollar stores, there are those awful “Checks Cashed”, “Payday Loans”, and “Rent-to-own” stores, all of which make no mathematical sense for the consumer.
“Not necessarily low intelligence, but there is definitely a correlation between low-education and low-income”
Yes, but the writer of the article IS equating low income with low intelligence.
PERIOD.
That’s not the only part of the equation though. Check cashing services in particular serve those who can’t get a bank account, likely because of immigration status or bad credit history or owing back taxes. Payday loans are sometimes used recklessly but they’re also the only option for the desperate who have no family connections and can’t get credit. I mean yeah this ties into low education and lack of employment options but there are perfectly intelligent people who have to use these options because they can’t do what you have to do to develop and maintain good credit.
You are describing outliers. Frank Walker Barr is describing the general trend/correlation.
I’m really not. Check Cashing joints in particular are really the only option for a lot of workers. Check out any working class neighborhood with a large concentration of immigrants (especially undocumented) on payday, I don’t think they’re in those long lines by choice but what can they do if they don’t have the papers you need to open a Bank of America account? Or, I’ve known plenty of people who have decent jobs and are otherwise financially solid but have a bankruptcy or medical debts hanging over them and can’t open a bank account either because it’ll get drained. In most cases they’re going to know the check cashing fees are sucking them dry but they’re stuck. Rent-To-Own, okay, that’s a terrible choice and hard to defend— anything they have you can probably get used or thrift or do without— but then, I’m not defending it. Taking out a payday loans is one of the worst things you can do to yourself financially but when it’s that or eviction… it happens, and that’s hardly an “outlier” event.He didn’t mention predatory used car loans but that’s another one where people who need a car because they live somewhere without public transportation get stuck. I mean these aren’t one-in-a-million scenarios here, it’s day to day life for a lot of people. I’m not saying Frank was wrong at all, he’s totally right, but it’s also easy to overlook how difficult it is for the truly poor to get out of the quicksand even when they know they’re getting completely ripped off at every turn.
But this is exactly why we should have Post Office savings accounts like we used to (which pre-dated the whole idea of social security numbers) before the banking lobby destroyed them. Although to be fair, more than a few credit unions are open to the undocumented, but they might not know about them.
Word. Lived in Phoenix for 14 years. This is a way of life for folks on the edge. They wish they had better options, but don’t. Fuck payday loan places.
I agree that Rent to Own is a scam. I fell for it once or twice but never again. I don’t even like the furniture I have from that.
I’m smart at most things but managing money is not one of them. I have only myself to blame, though I sometimes wonder if it’s the structure of our financial system that is more to blame.
There still needs to be usury laws so people don’t pay 10X the amount they borrow.That kind of shit drove Jesus to violence.
If you can’t demand usurious rates of interest, then you can’t offer large numbers of high-risk loans to people. And if you can’t do that, then the people who are high risk (because they have no collateral, and often volatile income as well) won’t be able to access credit. And if they can’t access credit, then people who are basically solvent (but with no contingency funds) end up thrown out of their homes, or even into jail, due to short-term cashflow problems. The government could instead regulate who can get these loans – but people have a problem with the idea of the government saying “I know you could get a loan to cover the payment, and could maybe pay it back, but we don’t trust you to act responsibly with you money because you’re poor/black, so instead we’ll block you from getting that credit, so say goodbye to your home”.Alternatively, the government could pour money into the payday loans people, taking on all the risk themselves, so that the lenders can offer low-interest loans to people who may not be able to pay them back. This does work… but, as we’ve seen, it encourages reckless lending, and leaves the government holding the ticking loans when a recession leads to a lot of them defaulting at once.
Getting credit to high-risk debtors isn’t something where there’s a magic-wand solution…
If you can’t demand usurious rates of interest, then you can’t offer large numbers of high-risk loans to people. They can still offer high risk loans, and still make lots of money. Just not as much.There’s got to be a limit on how much you can punish people for needing money.
We got rid of debtor prisons a long time ago.
and this is why people invented something called multitasking.
ban credit entirely
legislate an increase in wages
no cost healthcare
And not even just low education, but actual education! I didnt have a lot of money at my disposal as a college student, so Dollar Tree was a life saver.
But again, you don’t actually get good deals at Dollar Tree or whatever. You just think you did.There was a great article about someone who opened a “98 cents and up” across the street from a “99 cents and up” store; and they were killing it. Almost nothing in the shop cost 98 cents, but people still had the idea that it was cheap.
Check cashing services in particular serve those who can’t get a bank account
Cheque cashing services take advantage of those who can’t get a bank account.
Does bad credit really stop people from getting a bank account?
No, bad credit shouldn’t prevent opening an account if you’re a legal citizen, have a valid green card etc… It’s grey area or undocumented who have trouble. It’s more like people in financial crisis can’t have accounts because that money will probably be forfeited. Whenever I’ve known people who can’t (or won’t) the bank, which is surprisingly more than you’d expect, it’s because they owe a lot of money to the IRS (very common with independent contractors) or have a bankruptcy or big medical debt. Or they’re a deadbeat parent but that’s hard to be too sympathetic towards. And I mean it’s easy to say “well they owe the money so they should pay it” but if things went wrong and they owe $50,000 to a hospital and just make enough to cover their monthly expenses, well, that’s when they end up cashing the checks at one of those shady places every week.
“No, bad credit shouldn’t prevent opening an account if you’re a legal citizen, have a valid green card etc… It’s grey area or undocumented who have trouble.”Does this mean “grey area or undocumented” can’t open bank accounts with bad credit, but they can if they have good credit? I have opened bank accounts and they don’t even run your credit. How does bad credit keep anyone from opening a bank account?
“Bad credit history” like a bunch of unpaid utilities, or some bills in collections, will not preclude you from a bank account. Doing stuff like bouncing checks on purpose however, will.If you are a U.S citizen you have to have done some shady stuff to be excluded from being allowed to open a simple checking and savings account. (I’m not trying to argue against the harsh economic realities that poverty brings, because of course places that offer extremely predatorily high-intrest short-term loans to people are terrible.)
By “better education”, you mean college, right? Going to college doesn’t guarantee you’re going to be smart or have common sense, and not going to college doesn’t mean you’re going to be less smart than someone who has.
“Not necessarily low intelligence, but there is definitely a correlation between low-education and low-income”Then where were the dollar stores 40 years ago.People didn’t get dumber and education didn’t get notably worse over the last 40 years.Wages stagnated.
Not necessarily low intelligence, but there is definitely a correlation between low-education and low-income
Also, a lower-educated or indeed a person with lower intelligence has no less value as a person. A person victimized by their lack of knowledge deserves a social safety net which can correct for that. We can even do it without implying that they’re “less than” or that those of us who are better educated or better positioned are actually better people.
But, because we as a society are squeemish about recognizing social standing (we’re very anti-class in America), we refuse to talk about these issues as real problems, and instead say things like “people know what they’re getting into, it’s on them, and if you say otherwise, you’re insulting their intelligence.”
Not in the long run (make sense to the consumer). But if you need something now, that desperation often means finding the first thing you can afford today, not whether it will cost more down the road.I mean if I don’t have a bank account, and need to cash a paycheck; paying for it is pretty much the only option.Same thing, if you have bad or no credit but need money today, payday lending maybe your only option.
No, it depends on a lack of options.
The payday loans are predatory, and pretty much all low-income people know that. They know that it’s going to charge an obscene amount of interest and fees, but those places stay in business because there is no safety net for people living paycheck to paycheck with very little wiggle room for unexpected expenses. Someone middle class on up could dip into savings or ask a family member for a short term loan, but people who are generationally poor don’t have that. So when your car needs a $600 repair, but you absolutely need it to get to work or the lights won’t stay on, you go to your friendly local loanshark payday loan place and take the hit. There are literally no other options for a lot of people.
I love interjecting myself into conversations about stocks and bonds to tell people that all my money is tied up in pet food. I mean, I have four cats and two dogs all on prescription diets. It’s really not a joke.
You are a good person.
Seriously, I have two old cats who only eat the fancy shit, except when they decide “We had that fancy shit yesterday. We want other fancy shit.”
Hey, if your pet is too picky to eat the food you provide, they have the option of starving.
you stock up on the flavors/brands they like when they’re available & in stock…only for the fuckers to get up one morning & decide THEY DON’T REALLY LIKE SEAFOOD PLATTER ANY MORE!
Oh man, my cat has no teeth and can only eat a special fancy raw-meat food that we buy in frozen patties. Some weeks his grocery bill is higher than ours.
But the returns of cuddles must be huge!
I’m going to use “our money is all tied up in cat food” the next time we see my husband’s rich (extended) family. they’re about 20 years older than us and don’t understand that not everyone is loaded like they are.
Why do all these types of articles equate low income as low intelligence.
Because school funding is tied to property values. Duh. There’s a reason the best schools in the nation aren’t in the poorest towns.
With everything going work-from-home, I’ve strongly considered moving further away from the city center. I could get twice the house for half the price and my salary wouldn’t change a bit. There are additional costs (such as shopping at Dollar General because the nearest Walmart is 20 miles away) that offset some of those savings, but thanks to COVID, it’s a valid financial decision.
Counterpoint: Yale University
boola-boola!
I believe “Yale” is spelled with a 6.
I thought Yale was spelt with three 6s
Yale is not attended by the locals. I live in CT, you can’t pull that one on me.
Dude, you just failed Humor 101. Or maybe I did?
In that case, whoosh.
My town in Connecticut has a Dollar Tree and there’s a Dollar General just over the town line to the north.Our median family income here is $120,546. (The town to the north, their median income is $94,463). In our town 50% of residents over age 25 have a bachelor’s degree or higher.
people are surprised i feed 2 medium dogs for under $50/yr but thats how much 2 55lb bags of pedigree cost on coupon
I don’t equate it low income with low intelligence, but the fact is that most people of all walks of life are bad at budgeting, simple math, and price psychology. It just so happens that low income people who never figure it out end up suffering for it, and people more solidly middle class or above generally don’t have to deal with the ramifications of spending twice as much or more on groceries as they probably should.
The people Dollar stores pray on often don’t have the choice to make smart decisions. You can walk down the street to Dollar Store and buy some overpriced stuff or you can spend time and money (when you may have neither) to take a bus across town to the grocery store (and the Dollar stores opening in your poor neighborhood might have actually killed the legit grocery stores closer to you).Also, poor communities= poor schools and poorly paying jobs, and poor diets have been shown to affect your eventual education level and earning potential.
Learn how to spell fuckwad…it’s ‘prey’ not ‘pray’!
My town in Connecticut has a Dollar Tree and there’s a Dollar General just over the town line to the north.Our median family income here is $120,546. (The town to the north, their median income is $94,463). In our town 50% of residents over age 25 have a bachelor’s degree or higher.
The real problem isn’t that they’re selling it for way more per volume. The real problem, which the OP didn’t go into, is that people who can’t afford the larger volume have no realistic choice but to buy the worse, smaller, and more expensive stuff.It reminds me of the Sam Vimes “Boots” theory of socioeconomic unfairness:The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
This was the Captain Samuel Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socioeconomic unfairness.
I cannot get wealthy friends to check unit pricing or indeed try to wrap their heads around it.
They don’t fucking need to.
I imagine wealthy people don’t really care about checking unit pricing. For them, the small amount of money they would save isn’t worth the effort required to compare.
Well Marty, all I can say is if you are even considering buying 40 lbs. of cat food in one shot then you must have one huge fuckload of cats in your house…which means that it probably stinks like a drug-addled, homeless derelict’s (you know…a person who can fit all of their possessions in a small paper bag) dirty gonch. Won’t catch me going in the place.
And, buying in bulk like at cost clubs ALSO don’t mean you’re more intelligent. Time and again there have been exposés about how customers are ripped off with such pedestrian items like toilet paper.
Andrew wants to take them, and hold them to his bosom, to protect them.
No they’re not. In the community as a whole, I can guarantee you, they’re not. Americans as a general rule suck at math. Low income areas are no different, and the problem just perpetuates itself. The children can’t do better in school because they don’t have adequate nutrition, or aren’t adequately clothed, or don’t get enough sleep because of stressors at home from being poor. (Living with poor parents)
The concept of “if I buy more, I pay less over the long run” may seem intuitive and obvious to you, but that doesn’t mean that people who don’t know this are stupid.
Seems less like “low intelligence” and “low awareness” or, more likely, “seething, begrudging awareness (with pitifully low power to act on it)“
Not understanding math is actually endemic in the US, across all incomes.
The concept of “money tied up” is pretty spot on here. Keep the gas in your at half, you want food or gas this week. Buying in bulk is a luxury for those with space and money.
People are smart enough to know they’re getting smaller sizes and maying more per ounce, pound, inch, etc.I don’t know how much of the public at large you’ve interacted with in the last 18 months, but I’d have to disagree with this.
People are fucking DUMB. Like, basic math skills they should have learned in 7th grade DUMB.
Over the given time period, I have lost count of how many times I have downgraded my expectations for the basic thinking abilities of strangers. Every time I think I’ve gotten to a point where I can comfortably say, “I feel relatively confident people understand at least this much,” someone comes around with a tweet about how suspicious it is that only the unvaccinated seem to be dying of COVID now.That Carlin bit about how stupid the average person just hurts now.
When you’re poor, you definitely know the value of every dollar.
I would wager convenience plays a role here too. I know that i can get a better price at my local walmart or grocery chain BUT driving to any of them and going into them is sometimes daunting. It’s not worth it to save 30cents on a can of tuna i forgot to get or if i ran out of something and i need it quickly. Honestly i’ve seen people doing their grocery shopping at gas station convenience stores. by the way Low-income does not directly relate to low intelligence, Dollar tree stores are also located next to high income neighborhoods, either that’s the exception to the rule or the income correlation is incorrect.
It’s similar to how 20 Fl. Oz bottles of soda are more expensive than their 2 Liter counterparts. There’s a certain value in convenience. I, too, could buy the larger bags of cat food but the smaller bags are way easier to take home and store. Also, I don’t own a cat, so I don’t need as much.
Absolutely. Opportunity cost matters.
Getting a big bag cat food is a waste my cat who is picky likes me to change up the flavors. I find that stuff you find at a dollar store is poorly made. Plus since I don’t have a car it’s not worth it.
groceries are now selling bulk items at higher per unit prices for intelligent fellows like you anyway so no we aren’t calling low income people low intelligence we are calling all people low intelligence when it comes to going shopping
lol. Avclub lecturing anyone on ethics. If only everyone could make a living shilling for Hollywood like you guys.
Dollar stores also have a bit of a complex crime problem, if ProPublica’s reporting is anything to go by: https://www.propublica.org/article/how-dollar-stores-became-magnets-for-crime-and-killing
I live in a rural area in Tennessee, where Dollar General is based, and over the past 15 years or so they have aggressively pushed out into rural areas — little country crossroads that had only a gas station / convenience store now have a Dollar General. That sometimes causes a hardship for little locally-owned country stores.
And even the Wal-Marts! Wal-Marts do sometimes fail, and while it might be schadenfreude to laugh at that, if one Wal-mart is replaced by a half dozen dollar stores that are more profitable, that doesn’t necessarily mean the consumers win.
Yes they do…the half dozen dollar stores aren’t filled with fucking kooks, whores, druggies and people with an IQ no bigger than the average woman’s tit size.
No because they lose, and lose a ton. Walmart, even the smallest ones, offer a lot of options for fresh produce and meats. Very few Dollar Generals offer this and it makes their diet a lot worse. At best, you can get milk and eggs at dollar general, but most of it is processed garbage with no nutrients
Thanks. I shared this on another thread, but didn’t realize I’m grey on AVclub.
Yeah, the real shame is that they’re pushing the old general stores out of business.
Some of those country stores deserve it for marking everything up to where it drives people to a Wal-mart. In my state, that should be downright criminal.
They may not be marking things up as much as you assume. You assume that if the convenience store is selling an item for $5 which Walmart sells for $2, the convenience store is getting $3 more profit and is therefore being greedy. I worked for my local newspaper for 34 1/2 years, and for the first half of that we had an office supply store. One item that sold well was a leather-bound presentation Bible, the type of thing you might give a graduate in a church service. All of a sudden, people stopped buying them. We later found out why. Walmart had started selling the exact same Bible, and their *retail* price was less than we were paying our wholesale supplier. Even if we’d had no mark-up at all (and, of course, any business has to cover its own overhead), we would have been unable to match Walmart’s price. The owner of your local mom-and-pop store cannot negotiate the type of prices from suppliers that Walmart, or Dollar General, or Amazon can negotiate. The prices that the mom-and-pop store charge aren’t automatically the result of greed.
They may not be intentionally greedy but they still make it hard for people who don’t make six figures to survive in some of these rural hamlets. Only the ski assholes and 2nd home owners will willingly pay more because they assume it’s part of the “Vermont experience”. Fuck these people. They aren’t ever welcome.
So? What if I only had a dollar and I needed a box of detergent but the only available one is a larger three dollar one? Am I just fucked? Seems like that’s what good a dollar store would be.
You’re missing the point. Nothing mandates that Dollar chains make 30 cents on the 1 dollar detergent. They could make 24 cents on it instead and that still leaves the 1 dollar detergent available. The ability to make a 30% margin is like usuary, not a market force.
“The ability to make a 30% margin is like usuary”
Learn to spell the word, then learn the definition, then regret writing what you wrote.
I think the market force is the apparent lack of competition. Nothing stops a local grocery store from opening up across the street, offering lower prices (making 24 cents on the dollar), and pulling business from the Dollar chains. That they aren’t seems to be part of what allows the Dollar chains to make 30 cents.
That’s a vast over simplification of the situation though to claim that local stores should just stock the lower units of items to compete with a Dollar store, especially when people won’t simply recognize that the Dollar store doesn’t have the lower cost items.
Dollar General and Family Dollar have run rampant because they have put grocery stores out of business because of this model, which in turn creates food deserts in low income areas. Grocery stores run on razor thin margins and its extremely difficult to survive if you arent part of a huge chain. Then Dollar General goes in and opens even more stores in these areas, saying they have food for these customers, which they do, but they offer very little in anything remotely healthy, which makes the obesity epidemic that much worse
Learn how to spell fuckwad!
That’s only 2c higher than Target, as stated in the article, and that number is gross margin not net profit. No way in HELL any large retail store you’ve heard of has a 30% profit margin. That number is closer to 1%
How is a 30% profit margin usury? The profit margin on name-brand items routinely exceeds this.
So? What if I only had a dollar and I needed a box of detergent but the only available one is a larger three dollar one?
Exactly. You do what you have to do.
Aside from their business model, lots of articles have been written about how they don’t make any attempt to create a safer environment for their customers and employees and actually contribute to the local area’s economic distress. https://www.propublica.org/article/how-dollar-stores-became-magnets-for-crime-and-killing https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/as-dollar-stores-move-into-cities-residents-see-a-steep-downside/2019/02/15/b3676cbe-2f09-11e9-8ad3-9a5b113ecd3c_story.html
Interesting. Thank you for sharing.
One more:https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/07/06/the-true-cost-of-dollar-stores
That’s true. The DG in Toomsuba, Mississippi used to get robbed quite often until early last year. It turned out to be a guy from Tuscaloosa who was robbing DGs in that city.
I don’t know what to say, there’s so much wrong with the link.Just because a store has “dollar” in their name, Dollar Tree is the only one that has the “everything is a dollar” concept, while the other two are just stores with that word in the name. They don’t sell things for “a tad more”, milk is $2.80 to $3.65; store-brand Dayquil is $5; appliances cost more, etc. etc.. “Dollar” is just a word in their name.As for the size thing, sure. The bag of Beggin’ Strips is priced a third less than the ones at Target and Walmart, but it’s less than half the size. There are also special sizes of other things like Tide and bagged dog food, which forces those who have a choice to do the price per ounce. The same at least used to be true for some products at Walmart, but I try never to shop there anymore since they got rid of cashiers and forces everyone to do self-checkout, so I don’t know if they use so many discount store product sizes anymore.Still, Ajax dish liquid is in a common sized container and the linked article inexplicably includes Scott toilet tissue on their graphic, though the original Scott is always a thousand sheets per roll, so it’s as simple as doing per-roll math. Another thing the link notes is that they are rapidly expanding into communities of less than 20k people. Former President Jimmy Carter famously campaigned for a Dollar General to be built in his hometown of Plains, GA and for it to be located within walking distance of the town’s poorer neighborhood, not because he hated poor people, but because it is (still) ten miles to the nearest grocery store which is pretty much out of reach for anyone without a license or a reliable car.Sure, maybe it’s cool to shit on these stores for going into urban and suburban neighborhoods, where the Krogers, Publixes and Safeways won’t go or it’s too close to another of their existing stores. but why wouldn’t it be better to try to get those stores to build in the urban food deserts instead of advocating against those who do. Not to mention that most everywhere in rural America can’t support a big grocery store, so somehow it is cool for some people to think it would be better for rural residents to drive ten or fifty miles, or have a limited selection at an inflated price whenever they need a quick bar of soap.
In my small town of 16k they are converting the empty Family Video building into the third Dollar General in town. It will be about .5 miles from one and about a mile from the other.
Yeah, a lot of these are in rural areas where the closest big box store or grocery store is a 40 min drive. People will use it when the payoff is better for DG than driving to their other option. And in both that case and the urban cases the DG isn’t going in because the mom & pop shop that supposedly used to be there was servicing their community too well but not well enough. Most of the time it’s because this elusive “better” business was never there or hadn’t been there for many years.
I can’t speak for the US on mom n’ pop stores vs “Pound Stores” (yes they are called that) which operate on identical principles here, but in the Pound Stores absolutely do set up in areas which had good “corner stores” as we call them, which often had more genuine bargains/honest pricing, and sometimes do end up largely putting them out of business.
Most everywhere in rural America can support a grocery store, but people don’t want it. My village of less than five hundred people supported a nice little grocery store for three decades until a Walmart opened up thirty minutes away. The prices were only marginally better, but people were still willing to spend two hours or more, the cost of fuel, and wear and tear on their vehicles to save(accounting for all that) probably ten dollars.You could put a sustainable, affordable grocery store in every one of those communities currently supporting multiple dollar stores and people would still go to the dollar stores thinking they’re getting a better deal. People are too stupid to choose what’s good for them and that’s exactly why dollar stores are thriving and chain stores won’t go near those communities.
If dollar stores were smart they’d EXPAND their grocery/perishable aisles!!! Where I live near the Jersey Shore (in a 55+community), I see lines going out the door with elderly people shopping for their food. They have neither the money or the inclination to shop in bulk, and it’s a convenient way to get their groceries each month.
I don’t disagree with you about targeting lower income people but its not really a “scam”. People know that buying in bulk saves them money. The price for toilet paper at Target isn’t a scam because I can get double the amount at Costco for a cheaper per unit price. That’s just how that works.
They’re not talking about buying in bulk though. They’re talking about selling tiny quantities of something in a speciality pack made just for these stores rather than the standard size sold in Walmart, Target, grocery stores, and drug stores. There’s a difference in losing out on money because you’re not buying an 8-pack of deodorant and losing out on money because you’re buying a significantly smaller single stick because you see the $1 price on it and think you’re getting a deal. I can almost guarantee you that the average Dollar Tree shopper doesn’t think they’re losing out, not because they’re poor and stupid but because most people don’t take the time to do the math.
No, not really. It’s exactly the same. Just scaled down rather than scaled up.
I make a good amount of money, but I don’t shop at wholesale clubs because I can’t really afford to buy in bulk. I know it saves in the long run, but those $500 shopping trips all in one go are a bitch. That mentality is exactly the same for a Dollar Tree shopper. I guarantee that the majority of them know that the items are smaller and they are paying more in terms of unit price. They just can’t really do anything about it.
i dont see anything there as a bad “value” if you only need to use it once, and it works
I guarantee that the majority of them know that the items are smaller and they are paying more in terms of unit price.
I guarantee that as soon as you use the term “unit price” they would look at you like an alien. You really do not seem to understand just how miserably the education system is failing people in poor areas.
You’re a racist. You’ve declared that “poor people” ( and no doubt black) “don’t know what they’re doing, so they need us enlightened white people to help them”.
Not understanding economic terminology doesn’t mean that people can’t compare the sizes of objects. Poor people aren’t automatically idiots.
Cool strawman. I very clearly said that the education system is failing them, not that they are inherently or automatically idiots. Why even respond to a comment you didn’t read?And comparing the sizes isn’t the only thing you’d have to do if you didn’t understand unit price. You’d literally have to do math to figure out the relative values. Do you understand what unit price means?
No, they aren’t idiots. But the companies making these products aren’t being honest either. They use deceptive packaging to make it look like you’re getting a larger amount than you really are. It goes hand in hand with shrinkflation. But, the packaging size is just one factor. Often times the dollar stores are selling the exact same product as Walmart or Target, and just charging more for it. People don’t check, they assume everything in a dollar store is cheaper than it is anywhere else. And finally, they also sell lower quality items than you find even at Walmart. I feel confident that in most cases if you compared the generic brand product from a dollar store with the same product at Walmart, the Walmart product would be superior in quality.
How can they compare them when they can only see one of them? The whole point is that the regular grocery stores and even Walmart are too far away for the people to use them, so they go to the dollar store instead and think they are getting a deal when they are not.
It doesn’t really help if the unit price on an item is lower but the total cost of buying the item is more than you can afford or use because it’s a three-pack.
I don’t know that you can blame the area’s education system as much as the general state of education. Granted it’s been 15 years since I was in high school but we were never taught anything useful like this. Unit price, income tax, none of it. But if you want a book report on ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ or to know that mitochondria is the power house of the cell we can hook you right up.
True but at the same time I know about all that shit but I can’t remember any of that to pay it any mind unless I’m in a store comparing it to similar items around it.
I guess this is the only way to respond to grays now…I don’t know that you can blame the area’s education system as much as the general state of education. Granted it’s been 15 years since I was in high school but we were never taught anything useful like this. Unit price, income tax, none of it. But if you want a book report on ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ or to know that…
A little of both. Schools in general could be better, but there is a SEVERE divide between schools in rich areas and poor areas (in America).Really, people complain about schools not teaching practical life skills, but since when should that be their job? Are the parents responsible for nothing? Schools have enough on their plate. That’s exactly the kind of thing parents should be teaching.That said, the math skills necessary to work out the unit price of something are absolutely in school curricula. Whether those lessons are actually grasped, internalized and remembered by the students is another issue.
That said, the math skills necessary to work out the unit price of something are absolutely in school curricula. Freaking exactly. Unit price is covered before high school (maybe not with that exact name, but it’s still there): division & ratios. And doing your income taxes is just reading directions & decimal arithmetic, both of which are also addressed before high school.
All those word problems people complain about when they’re *in* school are the applications they also complain about not learning *after* school.
I guarantee that the majority of them know that the items are smaller and they are paying more in terms of unit price. It’s a weird thing to guarantee given that their business strategy is predicated on their knowledge that this isn’t true.
Their business strategy is predicated on people wanting their products. You don’t have to be unable to compare items to have a genuine desire for their products: you just need to be unable to afford to buy in bulk every time.
https://talkpoverty.org/2020/02/13/north-carolina-prenatal-substance-exposure-crime/Some fun quotes:The key to their success is a strategic focus on poverty: Deep discount retailers are uber-accessible to low-income consumers even when there’s a net negative economic benefit to shoppers and the community.“Our customer doesn’t buy until she absolutely has to — she’s that stretched,” noted one Dollar General executive, according to Dr. Shrestha’s research. …Brown is a 53-year-old .. “My attitude has changed over the years,” she continued. “I’m not embarrassed. I don’t care… I’m making a smarter financial decision when I shop at the dollar store for whatever I get there.” You could make the argument that it’s not out of a deception of value proposition but necessity that people shop there, although it sounds like Brown is a person who has the impression it’s a wise financial decision, whether she has an alternative or not. But either way, it’s still a deliberate exploitation of people experiencing poverty as a business strategy. That’s straight from the mouth of Dollar General senior management. That’s not just “people wanting products” – food and a great deal of other things they sell are not luxuries but things people have to get from *somewhere*.
You got the wrong link there, here you go:https://talkpoverty.org/2020/02/19/dollar-stores-sell-low-income-people-sense-belonging/
whoops how’d that happen, thanks
No. This suggests you’ve never even been in one of these stores. A significant fraction of the products are misleadingly packaged – i.e. packaged in ways that make them look like you’re getting more than you actually are. Pretending consumers are all paying close attention to the weight/amounts labels is pretty silly.
I don’t know about that. The items aren’t that far away from being regular size, like cereal boxes, pringles cans, bags of chips, etc, they’re not much smaller but, specifically at Dollar General, not everything is actually $1, that’s never always been Dollar General’s shtick. Dollar General has spent a lot of time an energy figuring out how exactly to extract that profit margin from poorer people who can’t afford to lose that extra profit margin.
I’ve never been able to justify holding a Costco membership. Every time I do, I never go and when I do go, I hardly buy anything.
So what do you do about the welfare mom who takes her six fucking kids to Seven-Eleven within 20 minute sof getting her welfare cheque, buying her weekly groceries at inflated prices and …on the way out of the store…loading all the little fuckers and herself up with 64-ounce Slurpees and about 8 dozen fucking Ding Dongs?
They can go to Target or Walmart.
While Dollar Trees are mostly in suburban shopping centers and are very popular with Girl Scout Leaders, most Dollar Generals and Family Dollars are more than ten miles, sometimes up to a hundred miles from the nearest Walmart, Target or chain grocery store.Bloggers like to write these stories because they see them in lower income parts of a city, but the vast majority of the stores are actually in rural areas, where there are few to no other places to shop around.
That makes them even worse. They drive local groceries out of business with their shit.
The ignorance here. There’s large swathes of major cities that don’t have easy access to those stores. And when you reply, “they could catch a bus” not everyone has the time or the money to travel far for shopping. It’s not necessarily a scam as much as it’s Terry Pratchett’s boots theory and economics in action, but it’s always going to strike me as unfair that the richer you are, the easier it is to avoid unnecessary expenses.
I’m in the UK but we have similar stores with similar strategies here.A very large proportion of the audience definitely does not understand that they’re losing out on “unit price”. This has in fact been an issue more widespread than just “Pound Stores” (as we really honestly call them here), to the point where supermarkets have to show the price per weight of a lot of goods (I presume this is either mandated by statute, or an attempt to avoid such a statute being emplaced), and that was in response to widespread reporting about people being mislead by how goods were presented. It’s still not completely effective, and some supermarkets do shitty stuff like switch between price per 100g and price per kilo even for the same kind of good (and all the weights involved are below a kilo), but it demonstrates the issue. As the British education system, flawed as it may be, seems to produce equally or more numerate consumers than the US one, I don’t believe the US is going to be better off here.Having shopped at pound stories, I’ve literally overheard people crowing about bargains which aren’t bargains at all.A lot of the goods in those stores have seriously misleading packaging too (and I know this is also true in the US, as I’ve been to them there), or oversized-for-the-contents containers, which clearly rely on deceiving people into misunderstanding the unit price issue. For example, you’ll have chocolate sweets (candy) in a large package, but both the actual weight of the contained product, and the price/weight of it, are worse than a smaller package at a conventional store. I’ve genuinely been pretty disgusted by this sort of thing and it caused me to stop shopping at those places.It’s particularly tricky because some of the stuff absolutely is a bargain, usually stuff that’s been discontinued or whatever, like that really is a full-size bottle of that shampoo you like, albeit of a formulation they no longer make, and that’ll be mixed in with stuff where 200ml of shampoo is in a 350ml bottle or the like. And sure, if you check carefully, you won’t be caught out, but a lot of the stuff just isn’t really cheap even compared to just buying in normal shops here (we don’t really have Sam’s Club or other bulk-buying equivalents – there is one, but the rules for joining it are draconian and largely exclude both the poor and the middle class, essentially it’s open only to wealthy professionals – lawyers, doctors, etc. and people who run their own businesses – mostly shop owners – so my friend who is a lawyer making £100k/PA can bulk buy but me or any normal worker cannot – that’s a separate issue though and just serves to illustrate how shitty Pound Stores are).
What Paul Kinsey doesn’t realize is that these stores do not commission size and packaging. They buy up custom size/packing overruns or out of stock for the original provider. The custom size/shape is a Walmart ploy so competitors cannot price match on an exact item.
I live alone, so I have no need for Costco-size items. I only wish I could purchase certain perishables like produce and bread in smaller quantities because that stuff sometimes goes bad in my household.
You don’t have to spend $500 to buy in bulk. lol I shop at Costco and I usually spend about $100-$150 at a time, and a lot of times less. You don’t have to buy everything they have just because you’re there.
The nearest grocery store takes as much as $1 in gas for me to drive there and back. I can walk to the Dollar General at the end of the block. It sometimes makes more sense in every respect to walk there and get something I need before the next trip to the grocery store.
You inadvertently bring up a separate issue with these stores. Some jurisdictions are actually banning them because they offer no nutrition, no produce, etc. Low income people are sustaining off of $1 junk food from these stores rather than going to the grocery store (which, admittedly, offers both nutrition and junk food).
Yeah, I’ve noticed in my city that a lot of the dollar stores (regardless of actual brand) are located next to bus stops. It makes convenient for people using mass transit to pop in, grab what they need for a couple of days, and catch their bus. A larger format grocery store or department store doesn’t fit in the same footprint.
And besides walking is good exercise. Another notion to think about, I am alone, need always to buy small amounts, a Dollar Tree for an elderly person, is like Costco for a large family. To buy large amounts and larger quantities in a regular grocery store, is a waste of money, why should I spend more for larger quanity and then throw it away. Now that is a total waste of money. Thank you Dollar Tree for the ability to buy smaller items at a dollar. Waste Not, Want Not.
like the “travel sizes”? id buy it… for travel. if you buy it for daily use, you arent thinking straight. but their 16 oz is a house brand and really watered down, maybe?
People keep assuming that those shopping at Dollar General are seeing $1 as a deal. Most of their customers shop at Dollar General because it’s the only store in town. Sure, in the larger cities, it’s people looking for a deal, but the majority of the growth of Dollar General has been in towns smaller than 10k. Towns small enough that no other store will build there. The people shopping there are shopping there because they don’t want to drive 20 miles to go to Walmart.
I’d like to jump in here and specify that the items I buy in a dollar store are things I can’t find elsewhere.
Sorry, Paul, but I’d like to thank all the commenters here for noting the original author has no clothes. I wouldn’t purchase a can of Beef-be-roni at a dollar store if I had a less expensive choice, but that purchase always incorporates available budget and travel cost or time, so yes, a dollar store is taking advantage of my poor state. My recent dollar store purchases have been things I once bought from local shops, especially smallish hardware stores; gone now in lieu of big box and long travel alternatives. Likewise, I never would have purchased a kitchen appliance from a small hardware as I thought they were nuts to stock something at twice the price of Best Buy; everything has a breaking point and I do feel sorry for people that absolutely must buy from a dollar store due to circumstance.
The money followed the big box but the dollar stores fill the gaps as an opportunity, a bigger gang than those who tried to fight the big box at their own game and failed; even the independent dollar stores seem to have vanished. I’m walking distance from a small independent grocery that just announced permanent closing; they tried a boutique inventory thing and leaned heavily on local seniors to compensate for bad prices, but the bottom line is that I’ll travel across the city to save money on a bag of potatoes if I can. There’s a nearby big box about a year from finishing construction, so the small place is likely acknowledging they wouldn’t survive that onslaught, no point in losing money up to that day it arrives.
This will be the first time in my life I’ve lived within walking distance of a large and price-sensitive grocery, but my pattern is that I’ll be evicted the day it opens.
You ever been poor, to where you have a very limited number of dollars to your name?Sometimes you need something and have $1 to buy it, quantity be damned.
I mean, they are talking about bulk. In the deodorant example, the 30z stick is 375% more than what they are buying. That’s bulk. Instead of the standard grocery 24 pack of tp, its equivalent to a 90 pack, as an example.
One of the ills of capitalism is trying to get you to buy more than you need to consume. If people find the quantity that they need at the size of their pocket, what’s the problem with that? Maybe the real issue is that the large stores are getting us to consume excessively.
And it is falacy to assume that only the poor use these stores. They are in rich neighborhoods too. I don’t need the higest quality knife when I can get one 10 times cheaper. My logic is I would have to break that knife 10 times before I would need one at Target.
People are visiting the dollar store more frequently because they are smart buyers who know that they can get certain types of goods at a neglibible price and at the quality that they require. For other things, they would go to the bigger stores. It is not a rich-poor arguement to me. It is more around basic economics and frugality.
But you got to pay $30+ a month for membership that ads up.
But you got to pay $30+ a month for membership that ads up.You’re full of shit. Costco memberships start at $60/year.
You can find many deals on things if you know your pricing.Dollar General is my go to store for some of the OTC remedies and some cleaning supplies that I use. Food prices vary. I don’t usually buy health and beauty stuff there.
This. My mother goes there for things that she knows are cheaper there. She also has the luxury of having other sources of groceries available to her (mostly me and my brother doing shopping for her but we don’t mind). The real problem is when they become the only source of staple goods for a community.
Personally, I don’t shop at the Dollar Store, but am super pissed that I’m forced to buy toilet paper at Sam’s Club at outrageous per unit costs as compared to buying it by the pallet or even in shipping container quantities. Why should I be penalized because I can’t afford to buy or store toilet paper in quantities of tens of thousands of rolls? Capitalism! So unfair!
Simple solution. Don’t use toilet paper. Use your shirttail, or…if you are a woman…use your fingers!
How can I get in on the pallet or container of TP action? After the great TP crisis of 2020, I’m feeling the need to stock up. I can just park in the driveway while the garage is holding pallets of TP.
“You do so by tricking your customers into believing they’re getting great, cheap deals on name-brand items, when in fact they’re simply paying more for less product.”
Well, at least we know how little respect YOU have for the poor.
What’s the scam?If Old Spice deodorant is $1 for .8 ounces at a dollar store ( 1.25 cents per ounce) and it’s $7.41 for a two-pack (4.5 total ounces) on Amazon is $1.65 an ounce, how is it a scam? I wouldn’t call that “significantly more expensive.” I’d consider it “less expensive.”(I’m assuming retail would be a bit more for Old Spice than Amazon, but not by much. Also it doesn’t include shipping if one is not a Prime member.)Even using the retail numbers in the chart provided in article (I didn’t verify them), it’s hardly “significantly more expensive” per unit at dollar store.Also, why is this article on a pop culture website?
Congratulations, you found a shitty price on Amazon. Walmart sells it for $.97/ounce. https://www.walmart.com/ip/Old-Spice-High-Endurance-Anti-perspirant-Deodorant-for-Men-48-Hour-Protection-Pure-Sport-Scent-Twin-Pack-3-0-Oz-Each/12442824
Yeah, toiletries and other stuff like that are rarely a good deal on Amazon as I’ve learned from trying to get everything delivered over the last year. You’ll almost always find a much better price at Target or Wal Mart or somewhere.
It’s more than just toiletries.
Yeah, it’s pretty much a myth that Amazon has the lowest prices in general. They certainly used to, back in the days when they weren’t making much or any profit (the late 1990s-early 2000s), but these days they rely on the fact that people automatically assume they have the best prices and don’t comparison shop.
Yeah, I was looking for Zest bar soap on Amazon, and Jeezus.I got it for many times cheaper at Target. I did have to have to buy $35 of stuff to avoid the delivery fee, but that wasn’t hard (if you were poor though…).
I think Walmart always charges for delivery, but now that I think about it, I might’ve had something perishable in that order, which would make it a same day thing.
I think it’s gotten worse recently. Maybe due to the pandemic and more people doing their regular shopping there. I noticed the same thing recently when trying to buy some mints. The unit price was way worse than what I could get at CVS despite being a larger pack.
Thanks for helping to make my point.
Well, you “assumed” that retail would be more expensive and it’s not, so I’m not seeing how he proved your point. Unless the point was that you’re fucking dense.
At no point did the article mention Amazon.
Your point was that it’s less expensive per ounce. He showed that it’s not.
You’re making his point, dude, try to do some maths.Normal stores sell it at a significantly better price per unit than Amazon. You mistakenly and fatuously assumed it would be cheaper on Amazon. That was wrong and a bit dumb, frankly.
Sadly the person you’re responding to is too profoundly thick to understand what you’re pointing out. Which really helps illustrate the issue.
Exactly. This is like saying you’ll save more if you shop Costco than you do by shopping at Walmart/Target. No shit. But this also probably falls under the category of it looks bad on us to have one in the neighborhood so we better say some shit to make these places look bad.For instance, I live in NYC and they still will not allow a Walmart to open up within the city limits. The claims were always the same, horrible working conditions, destroy mom and pop shops and so forth. All technically true. But this is also a city that until recently had two full size K Marts and can’t build new Targets fast enough. Why is Target allowed yet Walmart isn’t? Basically the same store that sell the same items. Both notorious anti-union and not so great on the employee work conditions. Oh that’s right, Target is considered higher class and you’re not poor if you shop there. You’re a price conscious consumer.
… And frequently these stores barely have staff to properly stock the product without there being a mess, as well as having to divert staff from stocking to come up front to be the cashier, instead of having a cashier available up front at all times. Hire more people. The executives have their money, handsomely. I predict that the “robot” self checkouts that Five and Below have now will start becoming more of a trend, unfortunately.
did they fire everyone at 5 below when they put in the self checkouts?
no.
how do i know this?
the 8 employees stocking shelves and saying hi to me every time i go to a five below.
shut the fuck up.
I prefer the self checkouts because I don’t have time to wait for the overworked cashier to get to the register. This is a DG/franchise issue that needs to be addressed. Most DGs only have 1-2 people on the clock for the whole store.
Since when do Dollar stores have name brand items? I grew up in these stores and it was always off off brand.
Discontinued items, repackaged lines that didn’t sell, sample sizes that aren’t usually labeled as such – brand names are all over the place in Dollar Trees these days.
99c only used to be like that years ago until it was bought out by a canadian pension fund. i made a killing off reselling the “little brown sack” lunchboxes they got from bloomingdales. buck a piece, resold for $25 with “free shipping”
Dollar Tree actually has name brand items, though they are in smaller quantities than their counterparts in grocery stores. Examples include Kraft and Bullseye BBQ sauces, Hunt’s ketchup and pasta sauces, etc. Many of the frozen food items are name brand (Michelina’s), as well as soaps and shampoos (Suave, Yardley).Dollar General employs a strategy similar to what Aldi does—putting the name brand next to their store brand so you can see the price difference.
A lot of it is just overstock, too; other stores know they won’t be able to move it before expiration, so they sell it to Dollar Tree at-cost or at-very-slim-profit to avoid the losses, & then Dollar Tree sells it for a dollar & makes some profit, while the customer genuinely does get a bargain. A lot of it is definitely not discontinued, because I’ve still been able to buy more of it in “normal” stores months or even years later.
I don’t go to dollar stores much, but there is a Dollar General Market (ie: their equivalent of a small grocery store) in my town and if you pay attention to their sales you can get a great deal. They stock a mix of national brands and off-brand stuff. For example, where I live, the sales on 12-pack sleeves of Coke products are usually 3 for $11 or $12. Dollar General: 3 for $9. This week the grocery store I usually shop at has Edy’s ice cream on sale for $4. Same size is also on sale at DG Market: $2.50.
Dollar General and Family Dollar have always sold name-brand and store-brand merchandise and at no point in their history have they sold “everything for a dollar”. That is Dollar Tree and if they still exist, the store actually named “Everything for a Dollar” and those are the ones with discontinued items.Sometimes I buy the store brand if it is just as good, but most of the stuff I buy from these stores are regular, national brands and I buy it there because it is cheaper or it is a quicker in and out than going to a full-fledged grocery store. Of course if I’m in a rural area like the Appalachian mountains, the stores are the only choice sometimes for a hundred miles.They are just smaller Walmart-like discount stores, usually in less-populated areas.
Former resident of very rural Appalachia here. Dollar General and Family Dollar were great to have nearby when I realized I forgot something on my bi-weekly shopping trip to “the city” (any town big enough to have a Walmart). And that is how the vast majority of people there treated these stores, the place to go when you needed just a couple items. You run out of dish detergent? It’s cheaper at Dollar General than the gas station. Dollar Tree still exists and is awesome for things like cheap greeting cards, basic toys (your kid wants a rubber snake? Go to Dollar Tree), etc.
“They are just smaller Walmart-like discount stores, usually in less-populated areas.”That’s exactly what DG Market is. And it seems to be working.
i buy the canned hunts pasta sauce at dollar tree. it’s the same size that’s sold in stop & shop for a little more money. yeah, i’m just saving a very small amount (.50?) but…it’s the thrill of the bargain!
“The thrill of the Hunts” was right there…
dang!
Depends on which dollar store you go to. Dollar Tree is the one that has everything for $1, so they have a lot of off-brand stuff. Dollar General and Family Dollar, despite the names, are more of a discount, smaller Walmart, so they’ll have more expensive name-brand stuff. Not just food, but stuff like Tide, Pampers, Tylenol, etc.
Think of General and Family like they’re Big Lots without the furniture.
Or old products that are not made anymore.
Dollar General and Family Dollar are NOT dollar stores, for one thing. Anyone who steps inside knows this. Dollar Tree is a dollar store. And just like every store – everywhere – some items are a deal, others are not. Yes, they have small sizes of products that aren’t a good value and yes, they have some items that are cheaper at Walmart. It’s up to the consumer to shop for bargains where they will find them. I can get the same toothpaste for .13 cheaper at Walmart but lord, sometimes I’m very happy to just get it at Dollar Tree and avoid Walmart – for obvious reasons, not to mention that driving to Walmart from the Dollar Tree will cost more than 13 cents in gas. The less travel and hassle, the better. Pretty much everything is a “scam” if you want to just be cynical – and I do love being cynical myself. This is pushing it, though. Most people know which stores to go to for the bargains they purchase frequently. There’s one supermarket here that prices everything 20 to 80 cents higher than another market. They put out an ad featuring some genuine deals each week, then draw in people who will buy higher priced items while they are there. Which happens everywhere. This is not a revelation. I can go in, buy the sale items I want, and leave without buying anything else. That type of markup is so egregious that driving elsewhere is worth it. Here and there, I’ll “let” myself get ripped off for a dime if it means I can avoid a second stop, but when it’s several dollars, no. Try to find laundry soap anywhere for a buck outside of a Dollar Tree. You can’t. And it works just fine. I see some fool buying Tide for 14 bucks and I cringe. Sorry, Tide people: you’re nuts.
“Sorry, Tide people: you’re nuts.”Have you ever been to Tuscaloosa? Because that exactly describes the citizens and the university’s fan base.And football season’s right around the corner. Tuscaloosa and Auburn are perhaps the only two places I know where funerals and weddings are never scheduled on gameday.
I can give or take Tide, but I sure as hell pay extra for Dawn. The dollar store dish soap does absolutely nothing to clean grease Also can attest to Alabama fans being the worst. Go Cocks
Roll Tide
But sometimes caused by.
Back in 2015 Dollar Tree bought Family Dollar and they’re in the process of rebranding the stores as Family Dollar & Dollar Tree. So everything that’s a dollar is marked with green Dollar Tree stickers and everything else is Family Dollar. I assume they did it that way so it doesn’t confuse customers.
One time I needed a phone charger and I figured going to Dollar General would be a good place to get one. Nope, they know that if you need a phone charger you are going to be willing to bend over like a moron at not bother going elsewhere, so they charged like $8.99 for a basic-ass USB-C phone charger. But I paid it like a chump because of course the person I was going home with only had Apple chargers, that’s how the universe works.
The worst part about these stores is when they become the defacto grocery store for a neighborhood (either by opening in ‘food deserts’ or forcing small grocers to close) all the food in their is processed, preservative filled garbage.
My neighborhood’s closest actual grocery store is too far away to walk, but there is a Family Dollar. I’ll go in there occasionally if I need toliet paper or a gatorade, but when you see people who are forced to shop there because it is the only thing they can walk to, the only food they can buy are ones that are slowly killing them.
I used to have only two grocery options: Dollar General and Whole Foods. (They were across the street from each other! haha) Definitely had to strategize which items I bought at each store. At least I was single. Families on limited income might’ve been forced to buy everything at Dollar General.
I have been in line behind people filling a shopping cart at Dollar General. I used to judge but it’s just easier to get what you need and if you want to save money, go to the supermarket instead.
See my comment above where I observed that dollar stores would be smart expanding their choic3s in groceries.
My spouse and I recently went into a Family Dollar near us because we had never been in one before. Our major problem: They don’t put a price sticker anywhere near many of the items. So you drag it all to the checker only to find that the real price is ridiculous. We walked out of there with two purchases since the price of toiletries was the same as our more expensive grocery charges. F these little rip-off islands of misery.
They still selling $1 “steak?”
Tube teak.
don’t know but Dollar Tree does have $1
Ocean Market Wild Salmon Fillets
Their real crime is the crime against architecture and small town feel by using these cinderblock and metal buildings everywhere. Most of these small rural communities don’t have the resources to require architectural review and block this kind of soul crushing garbage
theyre so generic they would probably be easy to repurpose. also newer, built to code
The one in my town is in a converted bowling alley. They’ve only done the bare minimum to make it feel like a DG.
Ah, so it’s predatory to fill a market void and put your stores close to your customers…
I know nothing about Dollar General or Family Dollar, but you don’t need to be low income to find Dollar Tree attractive. I have a list of 30-40 items that are a much better deal at DT than at the Safeway right next to it.If DT can do that and also achieve a higher profit margin, more power to them.
Yup. There’s a few items I go to Dollar Tree specifically for, but many other things I would never buy there. Particularly when you go to a regular store and see basically the same item at a lower price. I’ll use the example of 2-liter Shasta soda. 1$ at Dollar Tree, but at WinCo a couple blocks away it’s .79¢ for the same size and brand. (I don’t drink soda anymore anyway.)On the other hand, I regularly buy frozen potstickers from Dollar Tree, 7 for $1, while at WinCo it’s generally 12 for $6 or more. And I like the ones from Dollar Tree better.It’s just shopping skills.
While these stores indeed sell name brand products in smaller sizes, thus upping the per unit price, they also tend to be in areas that are under served by bigger grocery chains. There are many neighborhoods across the country where these stores are the only place to buy food without driving across town. Those without cars have to either take public transportation or go on foot.I’m certainly not extolling their virtues, but there they are filling a niche that is generally ignored by Target, Walmart, Kroger, Safeway, etc.
What bothers me is when they intentionally *create* the situation where they are the only option available without a car (in urban areas) or a very long drive (in rural areas) by saturating the market to the point where the mom and pop stores can’t compete and the supermarkets have no incentive to come in. Totally legal, but absolutely predatory.
I’ve been in many of these dollar stores and have suspected for a very long time that I could probably get more for my dollar elsewhere. I think the trick though is in finding an equivalent good for a dollar or less. Typically, yes your dollar goes farther at Walmart, Target, etc, but can you find it in a quantity that is a dollar or less?I was joking with a friend about doing a Youtube channel about Dollar Trees and if the price was a good deal or not. Clearly I should have!
Andrew, did you read any of the literature on these stores from the past few years. We can debate the difference between poverty and intelligence (yeesh, really?) but the fact of the matter is the Dollar General is a sign of real and systemic problems in the social and economic infrastructure in America, and it is explicitly using that dysfunction for economic gain. Here is your future reading:https://www.npr.org/2017/12/11/569815331/loving-and-hating-dollar-general-in-rural-americahttps://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/aug/13/dollar-general-walmart-buhler-haven-kansashttps://slate.com/business/2021/07/dollar-general-food-deserts-grocery-stores.htmlhttps://www.cbsnews.com/news/dollar-stores-and-food-deserts-the-latest-struggle-between-main-street-and-corporate-america/Please understand, if you’re going to be paid to write for the internet about matters of social import, you have a duty to your fellow citizen to at least Google that shiz.
thanks for the reading list (not sarcasm). I consider kinja articles more as suggestions of ideas than a deep dive though. at what they get paid I don’t expect them to work much
So the only stores that aren’t scamming people are bulk stores like Sam’s Club and Costco? Because who spends $3.29 on a bottle of mayo when you can spend twice as much for 3 times that amount of mayo, amirite?
The larger amount of something you buy, the better deal you get. That’s pretty much universal. Dollar stores just take that philosophy and work down, rather than work up. And it works out great for them and their investors.The reality here is that the only store with “Dollar” in its name that has everything priced at a dollar or less is Dollar Tree. Everything else is simply a de-glorified CVS or Rite Aid without the pharmacy. And as someone who is probably considered upper middle class, I shop at Dollar Tree for the things I know I’m getting a deal on. Certain snacks. Holiday decorations. Greeting cards. Pretty much those three things. Everything else is a bit of a scam. But if I only have a dollar to spend on deodorant, I don’t really have the luxury of spending 3x as much for 5x the amount.
Dollar Tree bought Family Dollar and they’re now combining the stores in one building with different color price tags.
Family Dollar Tree? :p
As someone who currently works for Dollar Tree, I just want to say fuck this company and its scumbag CEO.We’re burning up in the PNW heat wave and they won’t even turn on the AC in the stores to anything reasonable. Everyone who works there and comes in to shop is sweating from the heat and the company just doesn’t care.
It is quite possible that your store or district manager is lying to you about the CEO. The Dollar Trees around here (St. Louis) have had the AC running all summer, through our 100+ degree heat wave too.
i generally go to dollar tree or 99c only for small things i know they have. shoelaces, tape, dry erase markers, reading glasses. sunglasses. their “regular” offerings? usually sams or costco unless its something like disposable cups- where the costco size would sit unused for DECADES. i know all this stuff would still be less than walmart
I estimate 70% of sales are kids who get a few bucks then incessantly whine to their parents to go to the dollar store to get candy and tchotchkes.
Whole lotta people in these comments wondering why we should give a shit about poor people when there are still rich people we could be coddling.
There’s also the fact that dollar stores, being run on extremely low cost models with minimal staff and no security, both drive other potential competitors out of business and impoverish their areas, but also basically create crime because they’re highly tempting targets for robbery.
8 people running a store? thats about as many sams has to run a gas station
This has been well-documented for years. So my question is: why is AV Club covering the dollar stores? And why now?
Yes, like liquor stores and bail bondsmen; they target the working poor to get rich.
But what are we to do? Abolish poverty and enact MLK, Bayard Rustin, and A. Phillip Randolph’s vision for economic equality with the Freedom Budget paying every American a living wage? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Freedom_Budget_for_All_AmericansThat’s crazy talk. We need racial and fiscal segregation to keep the status quo happy. How else will a rich person flaunt their wealth if everyone around them is doing well?
I’m guessing these places are also places people do all their grocery shopping, and I’m also guessing these places only carry ultra processed food.
All these stores serve to do is make people think they’re getting a sweetheart deal. I do buy some things at them that I can’t find at the supermarket. They work in-between checks but yeah, definitely stick to a supermarket for food items.
A lot of people here just seem to be going by this brief summary, which misses a lot of the more predatory and harmful aspects of the Dollar chains.https://www.nprillinois.org/2019-08-23/dollar-store-dominance-comes-with-a-cost-for-low-income-americans“the big chains intentionally cluster multiple stores in low-income areas. That strategy discourages supermarkets from opening and it threatens existing mom-and-pop grocers,”“dollar stores don’t offer fresh produce. Dollar General and its dollar store rivals mostly sell snacks, drinks, canned foods and vegetables, household supplies and personal care products”“In rural communities, they often become the singular source for grocery needs and in poor and underserved minority communities, they proliferate until no other business wants to locate there.” I can’t find the other article I read about this recently, but another big issue is Dollar chains employ significantly less people than grocery stores in the same area (I think it was something like 1/4 of the total employees). This again lowers overhead and increases profits, helping them push out existing grocers, and it means less jobs/money for the community. And while local governments are now starting to push back, for a while and (probably currently in some places) Dollar chains were getting relief or subsidies for building in “underserved” communities even though ultimately they are not beneficial to the health of the local populace or the local economy. They charge poor people who often don’t have any other choice more money for smaller products, AND they don’t offer the healthy foods that those poor people need to help reduce health risks and develop healthy bodies and brains to complete higher levels of education and get better jobs in the future.
Another thing, which is actually better for these stores, is that they are going up in small rural communities. Drive through large states which have very small towns all the time (due to farming, oil, etc), towns that honestly a Walmart or Target, or even a large chain grocery store won’t go to because they wouldn’t even get enough employees to operate it. Open a Dollar store, have a manager and a couple employees, limited staples, and you have a perfect store. So, these companies are actually pretty smart, and a good deal.
Fuck you Kinja. So if someone replies to your post but they are in the greys, it seems like there is literally NO way to view or reply to that comment? I know the notification links have BEEN broken, but I get a notification that a greyed commenter replied to me, I can read half their comment in my notifications, but then I come back to this article and there is no way to see it. Hit show Pending comments, nothing. Even tried backing out of the whole article, came back clicking show Pending, then kept hitting the see more replies button, and STILL the two grey comments responding to me don’t show up. I even went to the other commenter’s profile, looked at their “Discussions” section and tried to click the time stamp link directly to their comment and it still won’t show up. Fucking piece of shit commenting system keeps getting worse. Can OTHER people see the grey comments responding to me? Could someone star Calli Arcale’s comment so I could actually read the whole damn thing?
Can’t see shit. I even tried opening up your comments in a separate tab and window, still nothing. Kinja is legit one of the worst commenting systems I’ve ever had to wrestle with.Same goes for me, by the way. Grey people, I promise I’m not intentionally ignoring you. I literally can’t read your comment.
Same. And, it has been like this for weeks if not months. Nobody seems to fucking care either. Well, nobody who can fix it anyway, I mean, like i care, you care etc.
The disappearing comment thing—thank you for mentioning it, I have missed some wonderful interactions because no matter which display I choose including Pending, it will not show me those grays!
I can see every gray reply except gray replies to my own comments. I can see gray replies to other people’s comments, but not my own! :p
I can see every gray reply except gray replies to my own comments. I can see gray replies to other people’s comments, but not my own! :pYou’re likely not seeing every grey reply to others’ comments. I could see your comment in the greys, but I can’t see the one mentioned by the OP. There seems to be neither rhythm nor rhyme to it.
I know. Stupid, right?
It’s so frustrating.Sometimes I can see just enough to make me really really want to see the rest of the comment.
Stuff like making Kinja your sites software is the kind of decision-making that absolutely blows my mind. It’s so obviously shitty and frustrating, how do people not realize that when it’s this difficult to engage in simple discussions people will do it less? When your overall goal is to get people to stay interested so they click around the pages, having a decent place to talk with other people about the articles does a lot to grow a dedicated reader base that is both active on the site and also more likely to share the articles elsewhere as well.It’s weird to picture somebody thinking Kinja isn’t horrible enough to replace or drastically overhaul, and that it wouldn’t be worth it to do so. It’s just so clunky and unintuitive and unreliable-seeming that it has probably cost them a bunch of people who would have otherwise been more dedicated and engaged readers.
Half the time they don’t even post what I wrote.Kinja is garbage
YES! Kinja sucks. Kinja sucks. Kinja sucks.I’m a developer and if I ever put this kind of crap out AND LEFT IT THIS BROKEN FOR THIS LONG, I would have been fired.
It’s not just you. If it’s in the greys, the comment essentially doesn’t exist, and it’s been that way for a couple of months. I can’t count the number of times I haven’t been able to respond to a genuinely interesting conversation someone’s trying to have with me because I can’t interact with the comment or read more than the first couple of lines. People have been complaining about this shit for weeks, and as far as I can see it hasn’t been so much as acknowledged, let alone dealt with, by staff.
Started out as a “Grey”, been one for years. No politics, no trolling, no arguing. There simply no way to not be a “Grey” unless you have an account created over 3 years ago. Kinja needs to have a separate system for us.
Copy and paste is fucked, too.
Also, I haven’t been able to embed a hyperlink in text for some time now. (I have to type my comment and then separately paste the hyperlink below it. That seems so 70s.)
Yep, the comments section has been pretty much broken for what, two months now? And it’s only gotten worse. I feel pretty foolish still using it to be honest.
It’s random too. Some comments I can find, but I have to really look for ‘em. If people are starring one of my comments? Who the well knows which one, no way of really knowing. What’s the point of it? Unfathomable.
It’s so annoying. I’m right there with you.
I believe from personal observation (not 100%) that a grey who responds to the original comment in a thread (such as yourself in this case) can be seen and responded to, BUT, if someone responds to the non original commenter (such as myself in this case) that grey cannot be responded to (or sometimes seen). It was my vague understanding that when Kinja did the last format update (which was actually quite some time ago) that this was a “feature” so that the original poster has “control” over that particular thread. Yes, it sucks, but, I believe it was intentional.
How about being in the grays after having to create a new account because…Kinja?
Can’t even find my original comment let alone the replies. And now I’ve registered my formal complaint for all it’s worth.Also: capitalism gonna capitalism
Yes! When I want to go to a specific reply to one of my comments it doesn’t take me directly there anymore and I have to sift through all the comments to find mine. I thought there was something wrong with my settings.
I couldn’t even see my own gray comment that someone replied to once. I could see it in my discussions, but not in the article. And I’m gray, so I don’t expect a response.
This is all part of the parent company’s long game to bankrupt G/O and sell the assets for scraps
Right? What’s the fucking point of this grey bullshit anyway?
Well it used to be a way of hiding trolls and only featuring more trusted commenters who had been starred by a writer at least once. But now there’s no way out of the greys so it’s just pushing away anyone new. Great business model!
And that’s bullshit too. Why does my comment need to be starred by the writer of the article to be seen? I’m not allowed to participate unless my comment is controversial or funny enough?
And it became pointless because trolls know just how to rile people up, so the comments that SHOULD stay greyed always get angry responses that ungrey them (and thanks to Kinja’s measurements of “engagement” a comment with almost no stars and a bunch of angry reply comments usually ends up at the top, so not only is the hateful shit ungreyed, its usually featured!).
Is that still the case even now that greys are basically impossible to access? I spend maybe 1/8th the time I used to around here because it’s just pointless when your comments go into the void. The commenting community was half of the draw around here in the first place. As shitty as kinja always was, it had a better community than Disqus or any other website/platform.
I swear, G/O is trying to tank this place. I at least understand that there’s theoretically quick profit to make with a million video ads, and driving away all their talent lowers personnel costs, but actively making Kinja worse to drive away readers? Venture capital is weird.
Kinja notifications have been broken for as long as I’ve been using them. When I click on a notification stating that someone replied to me, it takes me to that person’s reply 0% of the time. Not once has the system worked as intended.
Once I figured out you had to click on the time/date stamp instead of just the whole comment/notification it worked for me… until it didn’t. And based on all the other comments I have seen, it seems like that feature has been completely fucked for months now along with the issue with grey comments, and it doesn’t seem like Ernie from Kinja is around to help (man I hope that poor bastard didn’t kill themselves after that initial AV Club/Kinja transition Q and A).
Dude, ever since they did a mass-greying (because fuck us, right?) like a year ago, I’ve been stuck in the greys on Jalopnik, which was the whole reason I joined kinja. I was a well-known commenter there for years and at this point it’s clear there is just no way back in. It’s ridiculous. Somehow I’m still ungreyed on the other sites though.
Grey comment:And that’s bullshit too. Why does my comment need to be starred by the writer of the article to be seen? I’m not allowed to participate unless my comment is controversial or funny enough?
Well, they used to have big issues with committed trolls and even harassers posting porn and gore on Jezebel so they had to do something. The idea was just to basically vet comments, but it looks like either the writers also can’t access the greys like everyone else, or they just stopped caring.
I can’t see shit.
I almost feel bad for replying knowing that you’ll never find this comment.
I read “Fuck you Kinja” and starred this without even reading the rest first.
Hell, I find it hard as shit to reply to non-greys. I’m sure there are a bunch of people who think I’m ignoring them, but really I just don’t feel like spending half an hour trying to convince this idiotic message system that, yes, I really do want to see that comment.
Had this exact same issue over the last two days, It is fucking annoying.
i cant even go to comments i made to figure out which of my burners was the most recent one. and liked notifications, i have to dig through tons of comments to see what the hell is going on.
what the hell happened after april to kinja?
Lots of people are going full conspiracy theory and think the overlords intentionally broke Kinja to make commenting worse to speed up the death spiral of G/O sites. I just think they stopped caring and aren’t paying anyone to maintain it anymore so something happened a few months back that an update could easily fix, but the update ain’t coming.
Almost as if the greying of comments is a dumb idea.
I’ll keep it short since I’m not starred on avclub, but basically from what I’ve seen they fucked up the more replies unroll on show pending. Now it will either straight up not show the more replies unroll button, cutting the comments off at the 4th reply if viewing pending, or it will load non pending replies when you unroll. I assume someone went in the code and fucked something up back when spanfeller had his mental breakdown about deadspin. I remember it sucking for about as long.
I know the notification links have BEEN broken, but I get a
notification that a greyed commenter replied to me, I can read half
their comment in my notifications, but then I come back to this article
and there is no way to see it. .Agreed. Everything about these sites has become increasingly garbage. They should just go back to the old Gawker comment system and have it over with. You couldn’t dismiss trolls as easily, but at least it WORKED.
Actually, in the days of Ye Olde Gawker, the comment section also broke from time to time, but it would generally be fixed within 24 hours or so, and, if it needed longer attention, there would typically be a reply or post from the staff addressing the problem. Back then (Lord Denton’s anti-commenter comments notwithstanding), there appeared to be an understanding that more eyeballs are a good thing.P.S. How many of us remember Gawker’s private messaging function (and the trouble, good or bad, it could get us into)?
I’ve been having this problem for what seems like months now as well. It used to work perfectly fine which is the worst part of all this.
Kinja-G/O is the Dollar Store of blogs.
careful, i used to be approved until i started criticizing kinja
Oh I thought it was just me. I occasionally see a grey comment but never the ones that have replied to me. It’s annoying, but at the same time they’re usually grey for a reason so I guess better out of sight, out of mind. This is a recent development, no? I feel like I used to be able to see them, even after the kinja switch, but maybe I’m misremembering.
Radical!
Hey I know spending $5 on a box of egg rolls gets more food than the $1 egg roll at Dollar Tree/Family Dollar … but those egg rolls are the size of frozen burrtios (like 2 1/2 egg rolls in one)! And they got Lobster ones!
Alongside their marketing and demographics pan, they have done a great job of identifying “food deserts” (neighborhoods with little to no other grocery shopping options) and filling those voids. We live in a small community south of Tampa Bay and there are two of these stores within walking distance, while the nearest Wal-Mart super center and proper supermarket are all approximately 5 miles away. Our neighborhood is a mix of older couples and lower income and is currently being gentrified by middle-class and rising families (yes like us TYVM) so for us its no big deal to drive to the supermarket, but many of the lower income folks either don’t drive or only have a small scooter or golf cart so Dollar Gen where they go and that lot stays full all day.
Franco-American (uh-oh) Spaghettios.
you’ve clearly never been poor. If they had more money to price compare, they would
hi, i’ve been poor. i live paycheck to pay check. being poor isnt an excuse to see that everything at dollar general is cheaper at walmart and still shop at dollar general.
have you always been stupid?
I don’t know about the US, but Canada’s Dollarama has cheap stuff. I’m looking at this “Adhaero” brand 4x 1g super glue package that cost C$1.25. Buying name brand Krazy Glue on Amazon is 1.9mL for $3.47. And I much prefer the smaller multi-pack as I usually don’t use much at a time and it may end up hardening before I use it again.I’m not saying there aren’t things that per gram/mL/oz aren’t worse, but there is much that isn’t, and that’s on the consumer if they’re not calculating it out. Even in that case, that’s not a surprise, larger quantities is usually cheaper. (hello, Costco!)
So, what I’m hearing you say is that there is no ethical consumption under capitalism?
Doesn’t Dollar Tree have a lot of educated customers though? I heard there are quite a good amount of savvy shoppers there, and there are even Dollar Tree stores in high-income areas where median family income is $200k and up.That said, I agree with you for the most part, and I understand the negative impact these stores can have on communities.
Also, in most of the less-affluent areas where these dollar stores are most prevalent, there are better cheap stores, independent (non-chain) stores with a decent selection of gray-market/international items. These stores are often a better value than Dollar Tree, Family Dollar, and Dollar General.
So I’m getting ripped off when I buy Steelbook Blu-rays for $1 at my local Dollar Tree?
There is no scam when you know exactly what you are buying. I can price things to the unit or the ounce and compare them to the lowest price i can find that same item at. For example they USED to sell Cascade dishwasher detergent cubes 4 for a dollar: 25 cents each. That is the lowest price you could find even with most sales. Cheaper than Walmart. Now after like 3 years they have change them to one dollar for two. Thus, it’s not a good deal anymore because you can find them for around 35 cents each if you buy in packages. So now only a fool would buy them. But there are other things that are good deals like cleaning sprays, many dishes, some rubbermaid tubberware, some lotions, facial cleansers. There are other things. Depending on the candy it’s a good deal. But not always. And when you’re really getting a good deal when they find it they’ll change it. I got another one, kitchen trash bags. etc. I mean me paying $3 for 10 tall kitchen bags vs paying $1 is a no brainer. Me paying $3 for glass cleaner vs $1 for a no name brand that cleans my bathroom mirror exactly the same per ounce and has like 8 more ounces of fluid in it is a good deal. The same package of crunch and munch popcorn is like $1.35 at the grocery store. If you know what your buying it’s a good deal.
They also get rich by being one of the few food options in the food deserts that have laid waste to underserved and underprivileged populations throughout America.
It’s not much of a scam making consumer goods available to poor people who could not otherwise obtain them. Yes, it’s technically overpriced. But if bread is $3 at the grocery store and you only have $1 to your name, the dollar store is your savior. Been there, done that.
…can’t afford to buy in larger quantities, even if it means getting a better deal,”
This is truth.
I think this article oversimplifies a number of things in order to make some sort of complaint against dollar stores. Dollar stores are generally in more rural areas. And despite the low-key insulting swipe at the intelligence of customers in rural areas, the actual truth is that if a customer in a rural area can go to a dollar store 5 minutes from them, purchase a needed stick of deodorant for $3, be home in 5 minutes and on with their day that is great. That is far preferable to driving 45 minutes each way to a larger volume department store to pay 3% less. Both the value of time and cost of fuel will far exceed a few % savings. Of course the ideal scenario is to stock up at larger volume stores when in the area of them, which rural people do. But there are many times in-between where something small is needed, and dollar stores are an important savings of both time and money to rural people in those cases. It’s not at all being unwittingly scammed as this article paints things, dollar stores actually save time and money in many cases over a long drive. This is like a very late complaint about convenience stores, which are much more of a scam and have far larger margins.
Just wanna chime in here to say that if a dollar store is a store that exclusively sells things for a dollar or less, neither Family Dollar or Dollar General are dollar stores (tho Dollar Tree is).
I make over $40K/year & love Dollar Tree.
sure i can buy a can of spam like tins for a dollar. it may be 2/3rds the real spam, but the real spam cost almost 5 bucks at a grocery. add to the fact that the dollar store is 2 blocks away and walmart is 20 miles… besides, 2 1/2 qt bottles of diet shasta for a buck? beats out everyone. a lot of their stuff is great for ‘use it once and toss it’, like painters tape, paint rollers and liners. canned food can be a toss, the soup might be beat if the grocery store has a sale going. if you’re careful you can do well. as to quality, it all says ‘made in china’
by 2040 everyone will work for 1 of 6 conglomerates
Nonsense! Some of them will be owned by 1 of 6 conglomerates.
When I worked for WIS, an inventory company, we had to count for all the Dollar Generals and Family Dollars. And, they were almost always dirty and dusty as fuck. Every one of those stores reeked havoc on my sinuses. The worst one was this store in this small town near West Memphis that was dusty as fuck. It was like we had driven in Dust Bowl footage. The Dollar General was surrounded by a pack of stray, mangy dogs. And, I mean “mangy” literally. Every dog had mange. And, of course, the store was covered in dust. They didn’t have it set up for us to count (all the hanging items had to be turned around for us to scan their bar codes so that we can turn them back and know what had been counted). The back was overflowing with unstocked boxes, which we had to count 1-by-1 because each box had a bunch of different items mixed together. And, for some stupid reason, our boss had the new girl count the greeting cards even though she had no idea how to do that, and those also had to be counted 1-by-1; though a seasoned counted could have had them done by lunch. We were stuck there from 6 AM to 6 PM. And, it took 3 hours to get to the place. Needless to say, I started looking for a new job after that day.
You know, Andrew, you could open a series of small stores catered to the same demographic and charge a lot less and mint coin!Right?
I don’t think DG should be lumped in with with Dollar Tree, or even Family Dollar. They don’t really sell $1 items; they’re just kind of small discount stores that belong to a large chain. Their prices, particularly for store brands are pretty similar to Walmart and the like, but they’re popping up everywhere. I live in a pretty bougie area just outside of a mid-sized town, and the convenience of driving 2 minutes to the DG for something I forgot at Kroger is pretty fucking wonderful. They’ve also added fresh foods in some rural locations where there’s no grocery store, so that’s pretty handy.The one downside is that their logistics haven’t kept up with their store growth, so especially with whats going on now they have some bare shelves pretty often, or weird selections.
Read This: How Capitalism Works.
Check the prices at Safeway or whatever the big chain (besides Wal Mart) is in one of the rural/ low income areas you reference and then get back to me about who’s ripping us off.
I use the ice-cream scale. At my local discount grocery (WinCo) a half-gallon of name-brand ice cream can usually be bought for between 3$ (on sale) and 4$. Around the corner at Safeway or Fred Meyers (Krogers) that exact same half gallon will be between $7 (on sale) and 8$.
Yes – can confirm! What really gets me is just how much of the store that holds true for, not just name brand or big-ticket stuff. It’s been a while since I’ve shopped at WinCo but I know that a few years ago a can of store-brand tomato sauce cost 37 cents there and the equivalent was 89 at Safeway. There is a Winco about 45 miles away and a while back we actually did quite a bit of comparison to see if it would be worth going more often. It felt like Safeway cost about 80-100% more absent “club” or sale pricing, and about 40% more in practice because only a fool would buy anything at regular price there. At least we have a Wal Mart within 10 miles. I understand the hate that exists for them, but a lot of people don’t grasp how limited your choices get once you are not very far outside of an urban center (where you are much more likely to run into those low-income types the article is white-knighting for). Wal Mart and Dollar Tree keep their prices low and don’t forsake us out here in podunkville. The article somehow interprets that as a scam, which is really puzzling to me.
There’s a bunch of WinCos around here, one only two miles or so away. Only a couple hundred yards further away than the local Walmart. Fred Meyers is closer (I dunno, 500 yards as the crow flies?) and a Safeway kinda between the three but at right angles to them. Chucks Produce is only about 3 miles away and probably has the best selection and quality, but it’s also more expensive than any except Safeway.https://chucksproduce.com/
“But here’s where it gets particularly gross: dollar stores are targeting demographics who either aren’t educated enough to spot the scam or who don’t make enough to have much choice in where and when they buy their household necessities.”Yeah, that’s how they do it. When I was a broke college student, it WAS a bargain to buy a bunch of stuff for a $1 a piece, esp. since it was JUST me and I didn’t need family-sized anything.
Here’s the thing. I lost a business and spent about a 34year period dirt poor with about 30 dollars a week to spend for everything. So yes, buying bigger amounts would result in greater long term value, but I didn’t have that luxury, I had to get everything I needed for the week within a certain monetary limit. Dollar Stores allowed me to do that. Sure it would have been nicer to buy the bigger bulk items or larger sizes, but with 30 dollars you have to figure out how to eat 14-21 meals a week so having a giant deodorant doesn’t matter much if it means you don’t eat for 2 days because you bought it. Clearly the writer has never been living under those circumstance or they wouldn’t have written this idiotic article like they just solved a puzzle in a Dan Brown novel. We all get the point, moron. Nobody is saying they’re a great deal, but they’re a structure that allows a lot of people to survive for a while.
It costs a lot of money to be poor.
The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.This was the Captain Samuel Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socioeconomic unfairness.– Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms
Penny wise, pound foolish.
Sir Terry always gets a star.That said, I have said for many years that there is no boot made that I can’t wear out in a year. (I worked in industry.) I eventually altered that to no boot made that I can’t wear out in two years, when I found a boot that lasted that long. However that boot was also twice as expensive as the other boots I was wearing so it was kind of a wash.
But was that twice as expensive boot of high enough quality to be worth recrafting by a cobbler instead of buying a new pair of boots?
Nope. I don’t mean I’d worn the sole through, but that I’d broke all the stitching out, worn holes in the toe leather over the safety toe, and destroyed some of the eyelets. Working in metal fabrication is hard on boots.
this was totally true for the longest of time but the lemon market has crept into any and all markets. prestige brands and brands thought of as durable now sell the crappiest made items that fall apart so quick. they know they have you over a barrel. people still buy for the brand recognition and accept the fact nothing is built tough anymore. late stage capitalism is a monster
I’ve done plenty of comparison shopping between Dollar Tree and other retailers including Wal Mart. Sometimes DT is CONSIDERABLY cheaper than even Wal Mart for functionally identical products. DT was also one of the few places to offer TP during the Great Hoarding of last year. Not premium stuff but better than the empty shelves everyone else had. For the things Wal Mart has cheaper it tends not to be THAT much cheaper. Often the slightly higher price at DT is balanced by the convenience of multiple smaller packages rather than one big lump of something perishable or which is infrequently used.
But here’s where it gets particularly gross: dollar stores are targeting
demographics who either aren’t educated enough to spot the scam or who don’t make enough to have much choice in where and when they buy their household necessities.Wait… there seems to be a lot of reaching here. Dollar stores target those areas because low income areas are far more likely to be looking for a deal and fill their stores. You go where your market is. If you set one up in a wealthy area most people won’t go in. They don’t see a need. If you are going to sell at a low price point, you are going to do better where people are looking for that. It doesn’t have to be nefarious.
Isn’t the scam how every store sells “family size” packs at a higher price per pound than the smaller ones?
Not sure I’d call it a scam and I don’t really care if the patrons understand they’re basically getting screwed for the convenience of tiny, affordable portions. Many of the exact same $1 items actually cost less elsewhere. It’s predatory is what it is. Preying on the poor on a grand scale while they gleefully bend over and ask for more. Meanwhile, tiny, local stores get squeezed out. It’s the WalMart situation again. Why are people cheering for this shit?
“That $1 Old Spice deodorant might seem like a good deal. But at 0.8 oz., it’s less than one-third the size of the standard 3 oz. stick—and on a per-unit basis, it’s significantly more expensive than the larger-sized offerings at other retailers.”See that’s the trick though. I have been shit poor at least twice in my life, once in childhood and once early in adult life. It is expensive to be poor. When all you have is $68 in your checking account, buying a $4.99 stick of deodorant is a major purchase and so you pay a premium to buy less, just like anything in this world. A lot of these day to day necessities are like that.
I’m doing reasonably well now – by no means a millionaire – but I have to say that one of the things that I notice and am in awe of is, for example, the diminished impact that daily necessities have upon your budget and time ***once you are able to buy them in bulk***. For instance, I now buy shaving cream in 6 packs. It probably costs $35 but this thing will literally last me 3 years. The bulk price is probably 10% less than buying individually, and significantly less than buying travel size (which I have had to do at points in my life). However, if 68 beans is what you have in the checking account, it is impossible for you to do this. So, you buy travel size (shitbrand, btw) and pay the Poor Tax.
This says nothing, by the way, of the opportunity and leisure time cost of having to go to the store X-number of instances over the course of the same time to re-buy the same shaving cream. It is expensive to be poor.
So spending $1 on containers, water pails, paint brushes, rubber bands, batteries, night lights, eye glasses, dish cloths, Disposable gloves and masks, etc. etc. have been nothing but a scam? Spoken like someone living in an Ivory Tower.
I can drive 100 miles across middle of no where upper midwest and not see any other stores but gas stations and Dollar General. The food desert is not just an urban thing.
Better consumer education is needed for low to moderate income folks. I always wonder why do so most poor folks have so many tattoo and piercings?
I think the success here is due to the average American being a moron.
So they make 2-6 cents extra per dollar by selling smaller quantity packaging? That’s not a scam, that’s how retail sales work. Buy a single can of soda for $1 buy a 12-pack for for $5
I think what should be looked at isn’t that these stores sell cheaper items that in the end don’t actually save people any money, but that it’s always been more expensive to be poor than to be rich. Capitalism, baby!And while these stores still pay their employees shit wages, I will say that they are the only chains that will open up in small towns that the Wal-Marts and the Targets in this world won’t touch. For example, look at Boswell, Oklahoma, which is at least an hour east and west from bigger cities (Durant, Hugo) which have actual grocery stores and box stores for people there to shop at. Now, people in Boswell still go to either of these bigger cities to shop, but for day-to-day needs they’re able to just run up to the Dollar General or, thanks to the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, the Choctaw Country Mart to do what shopping they need, which does save them time and gas that they would be using to drive an hour for most of the goods they need.It’s not a perfect situation, because yes what is being sold in these stores may lower volume products, but at the end of the day they are allowing people living in these “food deserts” to be able to have their needs met.
This seems like a “sky blue says star witness” sort of complaint. In any free market society, Big Business is naturally predatory. Makeup companies and gyms exploit our insecurities. Pharmaceuticals tell us we’re sick and unhealthy. Car dealerships convince us leasing a sports car is a smart idea. We’re not a Medieval economy where we have one cobbler, one apothecary, and one butcher. The modern economy is competitive, and if Dollar Tree, Dollar General, and Family Dollar aren’t doing it right, Five Below will step in and do it better. Target, Walmart, and Amazon aren’t nonprofit organizations. If you want to fault dollar stores for market research and targeted markets, fault society.Also, why is this an A.V. Club article?
Kinja keeps “scamming” its readers by offering up these woke, “successful business is evil” writers. Pretend to care about the poors while brow beating them over choices you don’t understand. So brave..
Definitely Audio/Video related! XD
The closest Walmart is 15 miles away from where I live and Amazon doesn’t deliver. I know I pay more to have a Dollar store 3 miles from my ranch, but overall it is less if I consider the cost of gas to get to a big box store. (Eagle Lake, TX)
Family Dollar isn’t a dollar store
I feel like this ‘article” is incomplete at best.Dollar General, etc have put countless mom and pop stores out of business. I remember a time when there were all kinds of privately owned or franchise stores that specialized in groceries, household tools/supplies, and even a small pharmacy. They are almost all gone now, replaced by one of the three chains.They also intentionally understaff their stores, so checkout clerks are also stockers, and anytime you go into one of these stores, there are stock trucks (floats as we used to call them) in the isle, which is already too narrow, so getting around the store and finding what you need is a major hassle. And yet, they are always out of the one thing you need.
Dollar Tree is my jam for Hard cover books, gifts for children I don’t know and Halloween decorations.
Dollar Tree is my jam for Hard cover books, gifts for children I don’t know and Halloween decorations.
They arent scamming anyone. They are in markets ignored by most retailers. It’s not that the people in these areas are not educated or dumb. Their core demographic tends toward lower income because small towns and rural towns dont usually have the same job opportunities. And if there is not a big enough population stores like wal mart and target wont setup shop in these places or they opt for the nearest metro areas. Dollar general puts basically a mini-walmart style general goods store in small town america. Usually people in these small towns need to drive a good distance to get to the nearest walmart or target or even a grocery store. I live in a city with a population of just over 600 and we enjoy having dollar general here in town. It is very convenient to have a store within walking distance I can grab a few things from. Do I do all my shopping there? No, i usually plan a trip once every month or two to costco, and get groceries once a week at a grocery store 20 mins away. But I know if I forgot something, or run out of something, want to grab some snacks or a last minute pack of diapers I can walk to or drive if im in a real hurry to Dollar General.
as always it pays to shop around and know what things to buy and where. I buy from the dollar store a lot purely because they get a brand of stuffed croissant that I like and is still rarely available elsewhere. likewise peace tea is cheaper at the dollar store compared to other stores for single cans since most places bumped the prices up to $1.25-1.50 so that’s a solid deal if you don’t want to buy a case from GFS. that being said most home stuff like clothes hangers are an awful deal at the dollar store compared to other stores. but their DIY sections are almost always the absolute cheapest. being able to buy a saw and a hammer for a dollar a piece is kind of crazy.
This article seems like a hot take. Just because a company has a higher margin doesn’t necessarily mean the consumer is getting a worse deal than anywhere else. Dollar Tree presumably pays employees less than Walmart or Target (which might make for a better article…), has lots of cheap off brand items that likely cost them less than buying name brand items (but can still sell for $1 at a good margin), and their locations are typically much smaller than other retailers (less rent per location).
I have saved tons of $$$ by shopping at Dollar Tree for certain items. The example of a deodorant stick is laughable because it ignores the good deals in the store and focuses on the bad. Where else can you buy 64 oz of laundry soap for $1, or a 18 oz bottle of 3 in 1 body wash/shampoo/conditioner for $1? Granted the items may be of somewhat inferior quality but you get enough of it to make up for it – and sometimes it helps people get by to be able to purchase in smaller quantities (like the laundry soap) when times are tough.
There are plenty of examples of good and bad deals in these stores – it’s the consumer’s fault if they can’t tell what deals are good or bad.
All these dollar stores will serve areas that traditional grocery stores avoid like the plague. They are scummy but for a lot of folks they are the only place to get essentials. Look at HEB in Texas, they have never been in the DFW market outside of a upscale central market. They decide to build 3 stores almost next to each other in the whitest part of town. The damn area is the size of an eastern seaboard state.
What none of the research took into consideration is that DoGen and others are building in grossly underserved areas. Instead of having to drive the 20 miles to a chain grocery or Walmart, these are based far more locally to rural markets. They provide convenience and a value that folks that are not at the edge of being poor cannot truly comprehend.Sure, they may buy close-out items in bulk but in turn offer that to a customer base who is looking to just spend X amount of their income at any given moment. Because all they have is X.
How could this be a scam? Did the consumer pay the money and get nothing and the store disappear?
And what if I need three things and only have three dollars? I’m gonna be happier at Dollar Tree getting laundry soap, dish soap and toothpaste. At a regular store, I might only be able to get one of those things.
Everyone who actually shops at dollar stores (like me!) knows the scam, and stays away from the items you mention because, duh, they’re not a good deal. But you can get greeting cards here for about 20% of the price anywhere else, you can get seasonal items far cheaper than at mainstream stores, and party supplies are a huge bargain. They also do get closeout goods, which you have to keep an eye out for. I bought Sriracha salt there a few weeks back for $1 – the same exact package (same net weight and everything, like I said, bargain-hunters are not stupid) retails for $8 online.
dollar stores are targeting demographics who either aren’t educated enough to spot the scam or who don’t make enough to have much choice in where and when they buy their household necessities.if you’re stupid enough to not see that dollar general and family dollar cost more than the same item at walmart or even target then you totally deserve to pay more. and you arent so hard up that you can only shop at dollar general.
the only TRUE dollar store, is dollar tree.
Seems racist to prejudice certain “demographics” as being unable to do the basic math of unit cost. The soft racism of low expectations.
Dollar stores embody the misery, err… form of capitalism known as the “American Dream” (read: Fake it until you make it, and by make it, I mean you eke out a living on some other sucker’s back). 99% of what is sold at dollar stores is either bad for you, or bad for the environment, as the example of that 0.8oz deodorant stick perfectly exemplifies: a bunch of plastic for a tiny amount of product. It’s the opposite of a sustainable economy that is good for the people and good for the planet.
I’d be more interested in knowing what their net profit is. Most retail stores, even these, don’t have huge net margins iirc.
So any company that isn’t a wholesaler is a scam? I can’t say I understand the central argument of the article.
When I was a kid many decades ago, there were Woolworth’s (yes, a store chain that was related to that New York skyscraper) and SS Kresege (later grew to Kmart). Some regions had Ben Franklin, etc. We called them five (or nickel) and dime stores back then (when the US dollar was worth more) and almost had a presence in every community. Most of the merchandise wasn’t any better or cost effective than these dollar stores. What I seeing here is these dollar stores filling the gap left behind by these predecessors. I do miss the cheap lunch/soda bars the old stores had.
So is the proposal to leave these area’s un served so people can ride the bus for 5 hours to the grocery superstore across town? I live in what is called a food desert, right in the middle of a downtown area. I can see the soup line every morning when I leave for work. I have been lobbing for a long time to try and get the city to find someone to develop a decent grocery store so that those without cars can buy(stamps) real food instead of beer and fried chicken. Sadly dollar general is the closet thing to a grocery store that has come in and honestly it is an improvement. I am serious, if people want to proclaim businesses as evil they must consider the alternatives to have a legitimate argument. By the way, it would not bother me at all if the market conditions that create the NEED for DG where to go away.This is a large issue that has many solutions, but dig in a little and you will find dollar general is really just birthed from bigger problems that have less to do with corporate greed and more to do with politics.
Wait so targeting a demographic is gross?The fuck?Nothing is wrong with targeting low-IQ or low-income individuals. It’s up to those individuals to make the smart decisions.What the fuck is it with this country and wanting to reward stupidity?
Not sure how horrid these people are.I can say compared to buying in Walmart, when deals are happening we can get better soda deals there than anywhere outside of huge bulk in Costco or such.We buy milk there at equivelant prices.If the kids want a treat (be it candy bar or toy) they’re equivalent prices there.Plus, my wife finds cute and affordable storage solutions there that make her look forward to going there. As fully educated people who know how to stretch a dollar, I’ve never seen Dollar General as predatory. If it’s too expensive, I leave.
They aren’t targeting low-income folks. The Dollar General nearest me is in a Florida neighborhood with $500K average home prices and $85K median household salary. They’re just everywhere, convenient, and if you don’t mind off brand stuff, cheaper than full size grocery stores. $1 gets you a Betty Crocker chocolate chip cookie mix which is just the right size for a family (dozen cookies) with no leftovers.
They fulfill a specific need. If you have limited funds, and you need deodorant, then it makes sense to spend $1 for a smaller stick of deodorant because it will only cost you $1 right then. If you have the money, have a place to store things, then getting a 4 pack of deodorant at Costco makes better sense because you pay less per ounce, and will have it the next 3 times you run out. In India there is a huge market for single use packages of self care items. That’s because homeless people only need enough shampoo (for example) to wash their hair one time, until they need to wash their hair again. Different people, different circumstances, create different needs. Dollar Stores fill a specific need.
Does anyone else imagine this being read in high society whispered tones over a fancy meal which will go mostly uneaten while collarbones are lightly touched at the utter disgust of it all?
One of my favorite road trip games when driving through rural Arizona is “Spot the Dollar General.” Because it’s never a question of if the decaying husk of a MAGA town you’re driving through has a Dollar General, but where the store is located.
To quote Sir Terry Pratchett about this kind of situation:The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.This was the Captain Samuel Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socioeconomic unfairness.
This isn’t anything new. Stuff costs money. The $1 version of a product will get to that price by giving you less of the stuff… and it can be a worse deal because a larger percentage of what you are paying is going to packaging and less to what you actually need.Thus, for a lot of things, it’s better to go to different store and get a higher quantity that gives you more units per dollar. It’s not a scam in my view. It’s just people who don’t know how to do simple division and calculate how much they are getting per dollar.
I actually shop at Dollar General semi-regularly, and they are pretty decent. The one I go to actually upgraded to a full on market, so they have fruit and veggies and stuff, including stuff that Walmart doesn’t carry. They’re not my main shopping venue, but I still get a bunch of stuff there. Plus, every Saturday they have a $5 off any purchase of $25 or more.
I stay out of dollar stores since I needed a lamp cord paid a dollar then saw a floor display at WM for 88 cents.People usually dont care about 10-20 cents but when you have a gazillion stores you’re talking big bucks. That and the fact you have a higher than average chance of being a witness to a armed robbery or murder.
Dollar Tree is where everything is $1 with the exception of some of their greeting cards, which are two for $1. Dollar General, Family Dollar, etc. don’t have that same pricing structure. I went to Dollar Tree today & bought greeting cards, a dry erase board, markers, & Post-It notes all for $8 & change. I could have gone to Walgreen’s down the block & spent $20 or more for the same stuff.
The more you spend, the more you save!
This isn’t a joke. We got a Sesame Street Alphabet book there the other day and it ends at “E”.
I agree with some of the stuff that was said in this article but I have to disagree that all of the deals are bad. If you pay attention and you know simple math you can find great deals. One glaring example is a certain name brand steak sauce. I can buy a 5 ounce bottle for $1 from Dollar General a 10 ounce bottle of the same steak sauce at my local supermarket is $5.29. I think 25 ounces of that same steak sauce for $5 is a pretty good deal! If you look hard enough deals like this are all over the shelves and you don’t have to be a highly educated genius to figure it out.
There are two points I’d like to make: The first is probably just reiterating what a lot of others have said but the existence of these stores is not the problem, but it may be a symptom. The problem is the fact that these stores need to exist in such a pervasive manner and that some people financially depend on them to get their basic needs. That speaks to the much larger issue about economic disparity in this country and a solution to that is much bigger than anything AV Club can come up with.
Secondly, I lived a few years in a small ass town that was over an hour from the nearest grocery store so our only option without driving 50+ miles was the overpriced “market” in town, gas stations or the Dollar General. And trust me when I say that the DG was the much better option of the 3 for both selection and price. So at the end of the day these types of stores do serve a purpose and to just outright say these companies are scamming America is myopic. Amazon is scamming America, cell phone and cable companies are scamming America, car dealerships are scamming America, Apple is scamming America, and so on and so on. Feels weird to blame the grocery stores.
The biggest scam at these stores is sometimes those items were “surplus” for a very good reason. Some of the products are pre-packaged for dollar store sales so the manufacturers are in on the scam. And as far as demographics go, there are a lot of well-off people using Dollar Tree for crafting and they are making bank.
It’s true that they make most of their money from poor people who buy groceries and consumable necessities there, not realizing it’s cheaper to buy larger items elsewhere.However there are some good uses for shopping at dollar stores. The main one is if you need simple tool that will last a while. Stuff like hammers, whisks, scrapers, etc. have huge markups in chains like Walmart. When you don’t have any idea of what an item normally costs, they will raise the price 800% or more. Dollar stores are also good for sampling items and getting travel-sized items for travel.
When I was a kid right out of high school I worked at a hardware store briefly. This was before everywhere had barcode readers so every piece of inventory had to be hand priced with a label gun. We had a big book with every product in it that listed the item’s shelf price right next to the item’s cost. The one that got me was a little plastic garden hose spray nozzle. Our cost was .20¢, but the shelf price was $1.89, which I thought was a bit much. I mean some markup is understandable, but on certain items the markup was kind of insane.
They’re mostly awful, but they fill a niche. More product selection at lower prices than convenience stores, less product selection at higher prices than big box stores.In my city, we have a Walmart, a Target, two large regional supermarket chains (Shaw’s and Market Basket, with a Stop and Shop on each end of the city but not IN the city, and a Whole Foods just over the line as well), a local small chain grocery, four CVS stores and two Walgreens, and within that a couple of Dollar Tree stores. Room for all.
I really have to disagree with this post. about 20 years ago when I was finishing up school and getting that all important first ‘real’ job we had the 99 cents store. Everyone I knew shopped there and yeah for a dollar you might get a little stick of deodorant that would only last a few weeks but the fact that it only cost a dollar meant that I could also get two weeks of toothpaste, razors and toilet paper and a weeks worth of food for about 25 bucks. And, yes I could have gotten more product by going to the larger stores but then I wouldn’t have been able to get the other stuff I needed. I think the maybe instead of looking only at the ‘greed’ of the people that own those stores, you should look at the needs of the people that shop there. All that being said, I don’t shop there now and I wish that they would pay the people that work there better.
As with every for-profit company, there is no ethical consumption under Capitalism. That said, when COVID first hit, Dollar General was the only chain where I could consistently find stock of brand-name toilet paper, gloves, masks, trash bags, distilled water, and bulk cleaning supplies which I could dilute according to CDC guidelines.
Help me with the math. Market cap of Dollar Tree + Dollar General is roughly $100mn. Coca-Cola is roughly $250mn. How are they worth more than Coke?
I think you’re fairly spot on. We just drove down from Baltimore to Tampa and made the comment after we passed a third dollar store in 5 minutes about the outskirts of Tampa being in worst economic shape than Baltimore. lol.
I struggle find where to land on issues like this. On one hand, these customers are adults, which means they are responsible for the quality of their own lives. And yet I recognize the tremendous obstacles that so many people face in just trying to scrape together a living. It just seems to me to be a tremendous insult to a group of adult people to assume they are idiots. I have found that people tend to rise to the occasion when challenged to do so. All for-profit businesses are trying to find opportunities and it sounds like these Dollar companies have done that. To compare them, even in spirit, to the predatory shit like pay-day loans is ludicrous, they sell cheap items at reasonable prices typically in places where said items are otherwise hard to acquire. I see that as a win-win. (not to mention the local jobs the store creates) – If we are going to talk about low-educated people let’s talk more about how these poor communities are choosing Twinkies over apples and things like that. That is the REAL issue in my mind, not convenient access to toilet paper that might be a little cheaper if they drove to Wal-Mart.
Not everything at these stores are a bad deal.
I needed spray bottles for some chemical mixes – couldn’t find cheaper elsewhere and the ones at the Dollar Tree are pretty decent (especially for $1). They sell some good cleaners there for GREAT prices – far cheaper per ounce than anywhere else. Need a card for a birthday, Christmas, etc.? Much cheaper than everywhere else. Gift bags are usually a decent price too if you buy the right ones.
If you do all your shopping at these stores, well, you don’t like your money. But there are plenty of good deals to have that are much cheaper per unit or per ounce for similar/same products elsewhere.
According to one view (apparently the author’s), any profitable business is running a scam as big as the profits because they’ve identified people willing to give them money for whatever it is they’re selling.
According to an alternate view (mine), businesses are profitable because they find creative ways to meet the unmet needs of consumers in a way that compensates them for the risks they take in meeting the need.
So my question to the author is this: is it possible that people shop at these stores because there are some things that represent legitimate bargains and value and buy the more expensive items as a convenience, or do you really think most consumers are so stupid that they think they’re getting what they want when they’re really not getting what they want? Or perhaps you think they have no choice as to where they shop. Whatever you think, you would probably like (or not) living in a truly socialist economy where stupid people won’t ever be scammed by all the choices provided to them in free markets.