“Essentially what the dollar stores are betting on in a large way is that we are going to have a permanent underclass in America. It’s based on the concept that the jobs went away, and the jobs are never coming back, and that things aren’t going to get better in any of these places.”
That's a pretty strong quote to bury halfway through the article.
I live all of 20 minutes from the article's location and drive through it twice a week on average (I live in Grove, OK)
DG's got several stores around here, and it's amazing on the placement of them to be honest. It isn't really just a "find a hole in the ground where there's no competition"
Dollar General (at least in this area) likes to plant a store in a location that is just outside of the city limits and soaks in a TON of business on the dynamic of "do I drive all the way in town for X, or do I make a quick trip."
Across the board, they aren't cheaper on a unit by unit cost, they just offer smaller amounts/package and sell for slightly less to give that perception.
One down the road next to me is always packed. They're just too accessible when the alternative is driving half an hour into town.
I think a lot of the appeal of Dollar General, in particular, is that they're selling name brand goods at reasonable prices, close to where you are. Instead of driving or taking the bus to the Kroger or Walmart, you can stop in at the nearby Dollar General. Their stores are more like Walgreens or CVS without pharmacies than like traditional "dollar stores."
Dollar Tree is a little bit different--they are a traditional dollar store, where everything is $1 or less and the offerings reflect that. You have to hunt for the bargains that are actually worth it, and some of their aisles have omissions that only make sense because of the price limit (like the tools section won't have hammers).
> Dollar Tree [...] You have to hunt for the bargains that are actually worth it
Ain't that the truth.
Sure, you can get a roll of aluminum foil for $1 at Dollar Tree, while a roll is $4 at Kroger. But the Dollar Tree roll is only 25 feet long, while the Kroger roll is 200 feet. And that $1 screwdriver in the tools section is made of chinesium and will either break or have the tip get warped if you have to use it on anything tough.
That all said, Dollar Tree is THE place to go for party favors. Gift bags for $1 when they'd cost me $5-12 anywhere else? That's a steal! I mean, sure they won't have licensed Disney/Nickelodeon/etc. cartoon characters on them, but I don't think even the kids notice.
You are correct. In the small town where I live, we have two options: a local overpriced grocery store and a Dollar General (also overpriced).
Both survive because they are convenient and close. I can get a gallon of milk 20 miles away at Walmart or ALDI for $1.00. A gallon of milk at one of these stores is $4.00.
I think to a degree there's some equalization happening that small towns can't handle. I can't buy a gallon of milk for under 4$ anywhere in the urban area I live. Even if I drive up to walmart on the edge of the city. When I travel to smaller towns (which is a lot - I'm gone almost every weekend camping, exploring, biking, what have you) I'm often shocked at how places so far from transportation hubs can have goods so cheap.
I don't believe it's sustainable, and the more the economy becomes de-localized, the less it can be realistically sustained. I think small towns like this are in for further decline the more centralized commerce becomes. It saddens me to say this, but many of these small towns don't provide much for the current big company driven economy, so why should the big companies care?
I don't think I'd really know until I broke down costs for overhead like rent, utilities, labor, etc. Most of those would be much higher in a urban setting than a rural. Then there's theft, spoilage, etc. Transportation is only one of those items. I think we would be shocked at how much the cost of an off the shelf physical item, isn't the item.
A lot of that, in the specific case of milk, is that farther out from cities you can sell it fast enough to make sense. Milk is, legally speaking, "good" for about 2 weeks from the time it comes out of the cow. If you're in a city where everyone eats out at all meals, you might not sell enough out of one store to avoid spoilage. This means that costs to the store go up since they either have to pass on high trucking fees per gallon for buying few gallons, or they amortize those costs and end up charging more per gallon because they throw a lot of it out. Conversely, out in farming country where I grew up, the closest restaurant was 20 minutes drive away, so we didn't eat out much and bought a lot more groceries than the people I lived with in NYC. This means that the Meijer in town rarely has to throw out milk for being passed the sell by date, and is large enough, with people coming in from a 50 mile radius, to move the volume to get volume discounts. Doesn't hurt that a reasonable quantity of their milk is bottled in town and comes from cows about a mile from my house... "Far from transportation hubs" is relative to what you're transporting...
I'm sorry but that sounds ridiculous, do you have actual experience with this sort of thing? I don't, but I'd be pretty blown away if a supply chain logistics expert came in here and said that groceries cost less in rural locations because people don't eat out as much. Why would they be unable to account for that? Do you really think urban consumers have random and unknowable patterns of grocery consumption that would lead to more spoilage?
I'm gonna need to see some sources to back up this claim.
US government stats report the national average cost for a gallon of milk is over $3 so any large retailer selling it for a buck a gallon is using it as a loss leader to draw folks into the store. And for more anecdata, our local DG runs $1 and $2 gallon milk sales frequently for the same reason.
I've not been making much lately, and at my last place I actually drew up a spreadsheet of a couple dozen staple groceries that I buy regularly and noted their standard prices at the four stores nearest to me. It was quite useful in deciding when to shop nearby and when it was worth making a longer trip.
Well where I'm from all the local businesses are either competitive on price or politically connected.
If you can't/wont be competitive on price well the selectman better be your friend. When the selectman is your friend you need not fear competitors. Their site plans will be bogged down in red tape and bureaucracy.
I don’t understand what economies of scale would have to do with being a middleman merchant. It doesn’t take a lot of capital to open a store, and there aren’t many legal barriers, and the workers don’t need to be trained. If there are only two stores, and no one is opening a third, then that must mean there’s not enough profit to make up for the risk of failing and continual operation of the business.
> It doesn’t take a lot of capital to open a store
I think you underestimate the cost. AFAIU it takes significant capital to open a store, and there are far fewer people in rural areas both capable and willing.
Real estate and labor is still a significant expense. Outside of unionized grocery stores, it's not like store clerks in New York City or San Francisco are making $25/hr.
But to even open a small convenience store you need to purchase tens of thousands of dollars in stock, plus have enough reserves to keep your store operating, able to turnover product, for at least 6 months of negative cash flow. This applies even if you're not franchising.
Basically, even in a rural area your startup costs are easily in the $100,000 to $200,000 range for a small store--at least for anything bigger than a bait shop. Plenty of people in rural areas could secure that kind of financing using mortgages, but once you factor in risk of failure and opportunity costs, you need a pretty significant pool of potential investors before you can expect one of them to take the plunge, and in rural areas the available pools are just too small.
Opportunity cost is a huge deal. Somebody with enough assets to secure a $200,000 loan _and_ who is prepared to lose it all, is probably going to see a significant cut to their earnings compared to what they could be making elsewhere. This is why you see so many immigrants as shop owners--their opportunity costs are effectively lower, by dint of them being first-time players in the local economy, than a native with equivalent assets.
Similarly, outside corporations have to answer to shareholders. Even though well-financed corporations could easily open more stores while still making a profit, such capital has more earning potential elsewhere.
The upshot of all of this is that 1) rural consumers pay significant rents for living in comparatively uncompetitive markets, and 2) theoretically there's ample opportunity for a philanthropic entrepreneur to improve the quality of life of a rural town by strategically opening small stores with more competitive prices. Indeed, professionals who retire to a small town and open a small store are often effectively doing exactly this. (Similar to how well-heeled spouses in large cities burn money on boutique shops, except compared to the retired couple they have less need to actually be profitable, or care about whether they'll put someone else out of business.)
A few hundred thousand is expensive, but not so expensive as to create a barrier to entry restricting the supply of stores in the market. My point is that the risk and possibility of return is so low that it's not worth opening a store, and if that is the case then the existing stores are not "overpriced". They're priced exactly where they should be in order for the business to operate.
The expansion of Dollar General described in the article is in places unlikely to have bus service or a Kroger or CVS/Walgreens nearby. Those chains rely on high traffic counts found at busy intersections.
Does DG carry fresh produce? You mention milk, and the article mentions groceries.
My observation has been that they seem to carry the kinds of things that never expire -- high profit, low turnover, little spoilage. Lots of soap, spam and cornflakes, but you wouldn't find many fresh vegetables.
I disagree with the assertion that discount stores are dependent on economic stagnation. I live in a dense urban area well served by traditional retailers, and have a great job that allows me to shop wherever I want. And yet, half my shopping trips for household goods seem to be to Dollar Tree. They've got equivalent products to other stores, except that almost everything is 50%+ cheaper. You don't have to be part of a "permanent underclass" to appreciate cheap.
I don't know about Dollar General but the demographics of Walmart shoppers is not especially low-end. If my own experience is any indication, there's one that's convenient to me, they have good prices, and they're a one-stop shop for a lot of things. I don't particularly like shopping there but it's a convenient place to pick up staples.
According to Kantar Retail’s ShopperScape, the average Walmart customer is a 51-year-old female with an annual household income of $56,482. Interestingly, that number exceeds the U.S. median household income by $4,500, as measured by the U.S. Census Bureau in 2013, which goes against the perception of Walmart as a low-end discount chain. Eighteen percent of Walmart shoppers earn more than $100,000 per household annually. And Walmart shoppers as a whole, actually earn more than Kmart shoppers.
That perception becomes even more laughable when you realize that the 51 year old female in question is in the top .3% of income globally, while the "permanent underclass" are in the .4% - .8%.
global averages are also meaningless. No one cares if you're doing better than subsistence farmers in west africa if you're having trouble paying rent on your shitty apartment and living paycheck to paycheck in the wealthiest country in the world
You know in movies where the villain rich kid goes to a nice upper middle class home and calls the place a dump? That's what the global poor (as in virtually everyone on the planet) see when western "poor people" complain. It's really tone deaf and quite frankly it only takes a few minutes thought to realize all the talk of "fairness" and "equality" is window dressing and all they are purposing is the .1%'s wealth being redistributed to the .2% - .8%, ignoring the 99.2% of human beings who are actually poor and suffer on a scale that no westerner will ever experience.
If 99% of the world would swap places with you economically speaking how on earth do you get to call yourself poor?
Ignoring your completely made up percentiles and the fact that you're a right-wing troll, poor people in the US get to call themselves poor because they face real problems where the not-poor don't. Access to healthy food, healthcare, housing, quality education, etc. are all diminished for low-income people.
"Access to healthy food, healthcare, housing, quality education, etc. are all diminished for low-income people."
And non existent for most of the planet.
EDIT: In regards to the numbers not adding up, You do understand that children don't work right? Remove children (the largest generation ever is currently in high school), then the roughly 40% or so of adults that are unemployed, retired or otherwise out of the workforce and it makes more sense. If you aren't convinced take a look at salaries in European nations, if you happen to find some reasonably high ones on average take a look at the population numbers of those nations.
Why am I expected to be more concerned with fixing the problems of someone ten thousand miles away instead of the guy I see on the street near where I live? Are we both lucky? Sure. Should we feel bad for that?
I also wonder how a world with 7,600 million people can have a country of 323 million people that's all in the top 1% of people worldwide.
this is the adult version of "there's starving kids in africa, so finish your food". It does absolutely nothing but try to delegitimize the real struggles that the poor face in America.
These numbers aren't even close to accurate. The actual position of the US underclass (bottom quintile) is more like the 60-85th percentile of global income. After adjusting for CPI it's clear that poverty in the United States is very real.
The US underclass also suffer the social and psychological effects of being the underclass, i.e. weaker social support networks and exclusion from the millieu of political priorities.
I feel like this should be a banner on every comment page: your anecdotal experience is completely irrelevant when discussing something on a country-wide scale. What you personally choose to do has no bearing on the conversation.
I wouldn't say it's irrelevant, as they're directly related to the OP and are in some cases interesting.
You could certainly say that it's "not conclusive proof" of anything. However, this isn't a crowdsourced thesis paper. It's a web forum discussion thread, about a topic with only a thin tangential connection to the forum's main subject matter (i.e. technology and tech entrepreneurship).
You would need to know what to buy. Helium balloons...$1. Greeting cards, $.50, there are certain things that are much cheaper at Dollar Tree than else where. There are some items that they get you to splurge on impulse on that have a higher profit...Some candy you can get for $.70 at Walmart is $1 at Dollar Tree.
I have noticed that too. Some items are a good deal, some are average, and some overpriced relative to standard discount stores. Clearly Dollar Tree cuts the corner on materials and durability.
The items I am pleased are things like ceramic or glass dishes that are painted slightly imperfectly.
Which is only annoying because similar stores in Japan (which for me are a highlight of any trip to Japan) only charge ¥100.
I don't know if it's because of proximity to China or because Daiso knows they're offering better stuff than their literally $1 competitors here in the U.S.
Thanks for that - there's one near me in Mountain View but I could not for the life of me tell what Daiso was from window shopping while going on trips to Trader Joes.
That's not the right comparison. The reported spend level for that card is $250,000 a year. Spending 250K on a credit card annually is not living frugally.
"You get rich by saving what you have" is a nice feel-good story, but you get a lot richer by getting magnitudes more in income.
Thank you, this string was beginning to sound like r/personalfinance was leaking -- a place where people think they can save their way to ultra-wealth.
You can be frugal enough to live a comfortable middle class lifestyle -- but the people who are rich just make a ton more than you. That's it, that's the secret!
Exactly. How does someone with money stay in money? Buy it cheap, stack it deep. Get stuff for super cheap and get a lot of it while it's cheap, so you don't have to buy it again when it's much more expensive, and can wait for it to be cheaper again.
I have the same experience. I am probably upper middle class (whatever that means) and my kids, as well as my wife like dollar stores. Whenever we visit one I also end up buying at least $10 of random stuff myself (jigsaw puzzles or light sticks or toys to hack).
While I do not dispute the fact that many folks, especially in rural areas are very tight on money, the argument that Dollar Tree cannot be successful without rampant poverty seems unproven.
I think things have spread out enough where we have a true upper middle and upper class now. 750k+ is probably a solid upper class person, and 250K+ is probably solidly "upper-middle".
Maybe you feel middle class among the people that you're friends with, but the facts are that in the US, $85k puts you in the top third and $120k in the top fifth, so $250k which is top 4.3% is far from middle for most definitions of it.
> You don't have to be part of a "permanent underclass" to appreciate cheap.
Right, but they're talking about their business plan. They are growing and expanding into rural, economically depressed areas.
You can be rich and still enjoy Dollar General, but if they are expanding massively into areas that mostly just contain the new "underclass," then their claim that "what the dollar stores are betting on in a large way is that we are going to have a permanent underclass in America" can still be accurate.
Yes, but for whatever reason, people who have the means tend to prefer 'higher end' stores, even if there is no reason to, in the purely economic/material sense.
I can speak to why I prefer Target over Walmart: much quicker to get in and out (because the Target parking lot is smaller and less congested, and the store is much smaller and less congested) and... if I have to need to speak to an employee I am much more likely to have a productive pleasant experience.
It's something I will never understand. A box of Kraft Mac and Cheese is the same whether I get it from Walmart or Whole Foods. Why would I pay more that I have to?
Because you wouldn’t be buying Kraft Mac and Cheese at a Whole Foods. I’d be surprised if they even sell it.
Also, time. I would rather pay more at Target than wal mart because in my experience it takes longer to check out at Walmart, and god forbid the person paying has a problem with their debit card or coupons or whatever.
And I pay more to shop at Amazon.com so that I don't have to go to Target.
Yeah, can't understand it over here either. All the supermarkets in the UK sell virtually the same products, at least as far as major brands are concerned. Why pay say, £3 for something if the exact same product is available for £1.50 or so in another supermarket down the road?
In the US, most major grocers sell big brand products at roughly the same price. There's variance week-to-week as sales come and go, but if you were to plot the prices of P&G, Kraft, or Nestle products at stores in a specific area, there would be strong overlap.
High-end grocery stores do not tend to sell these brands -- You'll find 0 P&G products at a Whole Foods or Fresh Market. So in that sense, they are selling the same exact products.
I'd disagree with it as well. Over here in the UK, shops like Poundland and Poundstretcher are doing a booming trade, even in areas with both wealthier populations and a ton of retail options in general. Same goes with cheaper supermarkets too, with the likes of Aldi and Lidl opening up a lot more shops now than they did in the past and gaining a much larger share of the market than the established brands.
It's not just those with few options. It's a general shift towards extremely cheap goods in general, which seems to often be true regardless of the amount of options in the area or the demographics of the folks that live there.
>“It reminds me of a craps table,” Brown, the commercial real estate analyst, says. “Essentially what the dollar stores are betting on in a large way is that we are going to have a permanent underclass in America. It’s based on the concept that the jobs went away, and the jobs are never coming back, and that things aren’t going to get better in any of these places.”
To it sounds like he doesn't understand that:
1) Being able to exist in places other stores cannot lets DG capture a ton of sales that would otherwise be rolled into a planned trip somewhere else.
If you need more toothpaste and your options are Walmart that's 1hr away or DG that's 30min away where are you going?
If DG or some other store can pay the bills the month that nobody happens to run out of toothpaste ahead of schedule they are around to turn a profit on a good month.
2)Rural areas are sparsely populated by definition. They do not have enough customers to support many stores that sell the same thing.
In suburban and urban areas some stores turn a profit with volume by attracting poor people with razor margins and other stores run thicker margins (or have higher costs) which make the poor people shop elsewhere but they make it back because the people who don't want to shop among poor people shop there instead. There just aren't enough customers to sustain this in a lot of rural areas.
3) You don't have to be poor to want to buy things at low prices.
To your third point: I think there issue here is that wealthy people are also more likely to buy different products. I got example only buy Jersey milk and pasteur raised eggs. Because of that alone I have to stop either at Whole Foods or a similar local chain. I but most other staples at Costco. Stopping at one more store to save a small amount of money most of the time isn't worth the hassle.
3) You don't have to be poor to want to buy things at low prices
A ridiculous number of "analysts" either ignore, or don't realize this. I have a 6-figure income, yet my wife will buy the cheapest crap she can find that will do what we need. Boots? Buy expensive ones that will last and not leak. Hallowe'en decorations? Head for the dollar store.
I would concur with that paragraph. When I was driving through South Indiana and Kentucky, I saw dollar store after dollar store after Dollar Store. I would see a little town with one to three dollar stores.
These little towns all had something in common. They had no noticeable industry, very limited business opportunities, and dilapidated and or dying community.
My and assessment, just driving through, is that these towns were all dead ends. I really hate saying that about people because it shouldn't be true. But for all intents and purposes they looked like they were in the last stage of existence.
But would people still shop at dollar stores if they had more money? I sort of think so--New York is incredibly prosperous, and there are dollar stores everywhere, visited by rich and poor.
I can't speak for New York. I've never been there. My experiences are that of portions of the Midwest in Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, Missouri. Larger places will have Walmarts and will have grocers and more industry.
What I see time and again our little towns that are too small to support even a Walmart or a grocery have one or two Dollar Generals. I'm not an economist and not sure what to make of that other than that a Dollar General seem to be pretty cheap to set up pretty cheap to stock and I guess and implicit acknowledgement that these markets are failures for anything other than dinky stores.
Uh... What? Not true. Living in NYC for the past 4 years, before that I lived in rural Ohio and Texas. There are no dollar general or dollar tree stores here, just kinda expensive mishmash-of-crap stores, Duane Reades and Rite-Aids.
Yes. At the other end of Indiana there are small towns continuing to do well due to the RV industry (which only seems to grow). At least in the town I'm from the DG is always busy.
OTOH in Indianapolis we also have dollar stores but not everyone uses them.
I'm curious how those towns even got started. It's not like there was ever much going on in small towns in Indiana. How did it manage to get even worse?
1. It used to be possible to make a bit of a living by doing your own farming. Now if you aren't industrial scale you probably won't even make a profit, let alone a living.
2. Globalization - Look around - there are almost always old warehouses either for food, lumber, or a small manufacturing plant that are run down - usually a few blocks away from downtown. These places one by one couldn't compete manufacturing cheaper goods from china or elsewhere
3. Walmartization - big box stores come in from out of town, suck up all the economic activity, pay people nothing, and ship all of the profits to HQ. Then the walmart closes, and there is nothing left.
I'm from small town Indiana - the biggest "city" I lived in had maybe 50,000 people. The average town I lived in had about 3000 or something.
There has never truly been anything in most of these towns. A good number had rail, canal, or other trasnportation connections, which made them viable (yet still small) at one time. Now most are really dependent on the next biggest "city" outside of the farming communities that bring them together. I Think the reason they get worse is because the hub cities - places like Kokomo, Marion, Muncie, and to a lesser degree Lafayette - have suffered. Manufacturing jobs that held these together no longer do that. Even outside of the "good-paying" factory jobs, it used to be OK to drive to the nearest city for a basic job. That's no longer the case (even though fuel prices have improved). And you wind up feeling like you are stuck.
Farming used to take a lot of manpower. So, the industry was largely what's going on between these small towns.
Cars reshaped the landscape as stores / restaurants / movie theaters etc could draw from a large enough population to support themselves. However, farm automation drastically reduced the number of jobs causing young people to move out. Eventually you can't really support much, but the travel distance allows for some shops in these nano towns.
Remember, 80 acres used to be a viable small farm. Now 800 acres are generally just a hobby unless your raising livestock and buying a lot of feed.
I think you underestimate the scale and magnitude of the industrial, steel, and auto industry dominance in some of these areas, and then the precipitous decline since.
“Before World War II, the cities in the Rust Belt region were among the largest in the United States. However, by the twentieth century's end their population had fallen the most in the country.”
Knowing nothing else about the particulars of why this was the case, it’s easy to see that this change would have drastic consequences for these areas.
From the article, talking about Decatur but generally describing "many rural towns":
> Like many rural towns, Decatur once fed itself and shared its bounty with the rest of America. At the turn of the 20th century, it had a tomato cannery and exported peaches, apples, strawberries, and beans by the boxcar from a downtown train depot. A population of 245 in 1915 supported two grocery stores and four general stores. But in the 1930s, blight outbreaks and insect invasions largely wiped out local orchards. The depot is now a museum where antique bushel baskets and poplar harvest crates hang from the ceiling.
Given the scale of technology at the time, it was a hotbed of agriculture, timber, mining and transport.
To New York and London of the 1800s, the Midwest (especially) looked a lot like China did to us 20 years ago -- a massive pool of resources that could be exploited using the new technology.
I live in a dying, rural small town. Well, dying is too strong a word. The population isn't growing, but it's not shrinking either. Stable for the past 20 years. Has around 800 people.
Anyways, this town was founded as a railroad hub in the 1880's. Both a freight hub taking farmers' harvests and delivering goods to the farmers, and a passenger hub transporting people from the surrounding counties into the nearest big cities. The town also provided necessary services at a time when traveling more than 15-20 miles was a hardship. There was a grocery store, general store, cinema, funeral home, pharmacy, bars, couple of hotels, hardware store, and so on. Was a central gathering place for the farmers, and the people who provided services for the farmers.
Many of those businesses are long gone now. The town is still vital for farming because of its mill & grain elevator, and the hardware store still does great business. But the rest is gone. Even the railroad moved away. There are no tracks left in town and the main route is 20-30 miles away. The town survives because of inertia. And because some people are willing to commute an hour to their work in exchange for having a house in the country, and a school with small class sizes for their kids.
Michigan is peppered with old railroad stops and logging towns.
My parents grew up on either side of a small village that now has a dollar store as one of 4 or 5 shops. It started when the railroad came in to log and became a "potato town" where farmers brought their potatoes to the railroad.
My friends and I argue about this all the time - does the world go the way of Star Trek, or Blade Runner? "The Culture Series," or "Snow Crash?"
I think dystopic cyberpunk universes are unsustainable - I don't get how you can cram hundreds of millions of under-classed people into what are essentially poverty ghettos without a total outright revolution, or just an apocalypse event that resets the technological scale or eradicates the human race. My perspective is that improvements in automation will lead to inevitably a realization that "working for food" is a dated concept that will go away. Hopeful, sure, but it's that or death in my opinion.
To see a business betting on the other end-game... that's harrowing.
But that's how it has been for years, at least on third world countries. I live in Mexico and we know that the big companies here have been betting on that end-game since last century =P. The two biggest and most influential companies in Mexico: Telmex (from Carlos Slim) and Televisa are known to cater to the low income audience. Televisa's owner, in 1993 said that they made TV programs for "jodidos" (slur for poor people)[1].
> I don't get how you can cram hundreds of millions of under-classed people into what are essentially poverty ghettos without a total outright revolution
a number of these universes seem inspired by a real life city... Hong Kong.
> I don't get how you can cram hundreds of millions of under-classed people into what are essentially poverty ghettos without a total outright revolution
> I don't get how you can cram hundreds of millions of under-classed people into what are essentially poverty ghettos without a total outright revolution
DG has pivoted to focus much more heavily on brand name common use items. They still carry extremely cheap stuff, but the vast majority of their sales comes from everyday items like toothpaste, medicine, snacks, etc...
its not a truth, it is merely what some believe or want others to believe. the simple matter is many small towns were abandoned by larger retailers when they consolidated their stores in far larger models.
there is always an allure of only having to drive a short distance to obtain regularly needed goods. it gives a feeling to many that they aren't in the backwoods. for some it is all the community they will ever have outside of church and school. yet what the larger stores forgot is the good prices aren't always key, being quick to get to is. Dollar Tree/Dollar store remind me in some ways of some European grocery chains that have and are coming to America, shying away from large "centrally" located stores with tens of thousands of items instead for a tightly controlled and easily managed inventory in smaller lower cost areas.
That's a pretty strong quote to bury halfway through the article.