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Why Some US Cities are Fighting 'Dollar Stores' (eastbaytimes.com)
The Washington Post reports on why some U.S. cities are restricting the spread of discount "dollar stores":
Residents fear the stores deter other business, especially in neighborhoods without grocers or options for healthy food. Dollar stores rarely sell fresh produce or meats, but they undercut grocery stores on prices of everyday items, often pushing them out of business...Grocery stores run on thin profit margins -- usually between 1 and 3 percent. And they employ more workers than dollar stores to keep perishable food stocked.
"It's no longer the big-box grocery store" that threatens local businesses, said David Procter, a Kansas State University professor who studies rural grocery stores. "But it's the discount retailer that's coming to town and setting up shop right across the street."
"As the stores cluster in low-income neighborhoods," the Post writes, "their critics worry they are not just a response to poverty -- but a cause."
"It's no longer the big-box grocery store" that threatens local businesses, said David Procter, a Kansas State University professor who studies rural grocery stores. "But it's the discount retailer that's coming to town and setting up shop right across the street."
"As the stores cluster in low-income neighborhoods," the Post writes, "their critics worry they are not just a response to poverty -- but a cause."
If produce stores can't be profitable without also selling sundries, then I guess people don't want produce bad enough.
Near where I live, there's a produce store that is always jam-packed full of people. It's like Black Friday at Walmart, all day every day. So the "produce stores can't compete" argument is BS, they just need to make prices reasonable and aim for volume. Produce sections at other grocery stores I go to don't get much traffic, though, probably because the prices are ridiculous and apparently targeted at middle-class shoppers, even the non-organic stuff.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
The problem is that the unhealthy crap sold by fast food joints and convenience stores and dollar stores and the like is cheaper (thanks to farm subsidies and other factors that distort the market) than the good healthy stuff.
So the retailers who sell the healthy stuff can't complete with the retailers selling the crap which leads to "food deserts" in these lower-class areas where there just aren't healthy options.
I thought this was America, where people have choice and freedom to choose what they want to eat. If they are choosing unhealthy shit, that's their choice. There will still be some supermarket if there is a demand.
There’s another dynamic at play as well. For some people, buying at the dollar store is a budget issue. They cannot afford to buy things like detergent at a grocery store because, even if it is cheaper on a per unit basis, the $5 spent on it means not enough left over for gas or even food. The dollar store is a better match to their cash flow than a grocery store, even if it a worse long run choice. In other cases, the dollar store is near where they live and the nearest grocery store is miles away, making the dollar store the store of choice.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
I mean, Ikea sells pizza. I don't know why anyone would expect a furniture store to sell pizza but... here we are.
The problem with IKEA’s pizza is the damn instructions for making it. By the time you figure out how to attach the cheese, the special pepperoni connectors, etc., you’ll have starved to death.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
McDonald's sells cheap food. This is the reason why, in America, "fresh food" is expensive.
I'm quite sure that people can cook a home meal for less than a McDonalds meal, especially if you have to drive there. Going to McDonalds is just less effort, and very tasty.
And on the other end of the volume scale, Costco skims off the profitable customers who can and want to buy bulk. Costco also skims off any profitable sector it can simplify and remove from the traditional shop accoutrements around it, like tires. The Costco tire shop only does two things: sell tires and maintain tires. No other repair of any type.
Prices are not actually that great at Costco, but quality is assured. The quality at the dollar store is typically suspect. I remember some outrageous price for a cell phone charger at a Radio Shack. The clerk told me to go next door to the dollar store. It was a hope-for-the-best situation there. The Radio Shack is out of business though.
Both dollar stores and Costco are highly capitalized and can big-foot into new markets. They have that in common against locally owned retail. It's the scale of it that makes people nervous, not anti-capitalist ideology. No one doubts these entities give people what they want at the price/quality they more or less want, given the choices (which the companies help create).
"They may have one isle with some canned food"
That's a pretty big store. Where do you find decent parking near an isle?
Here in Canada, our stores are not nearly as large as in the States apparently.
Our stores simply use aisles.
Mostly random stuff.
There are no barriers to better budgeting.
You need to read Boots theory of socio-economic unfairness to understand why I think you are mistaken in your point of view.
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.
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>"Now if we want a start in fixing things simply disallow all export of produce and meats from US businesses and that would push down grocery prices quite a bit."
The economy is more complicated than that. If you cut all exports, there will be oversupply and prices will drop greatly. This is true. But THEN the free market will react and many agricultural businesses will not be able to survive on those lower prices. They will do a combination of shutting down production, raising prices, laying off workers, lowering quality, seek cheap replacement imports, etc... or go out of business. If you subsidize production more, then taxes go up and people have less money and their purchasing power goes down, which is similar to higher prices.
How is this News for Nerds?
Is it because dollar stores sell electronic parts?
Or they have a wide selection of computer games?
They sell the latest laptops?
Or they have really advanced IT?
They compute bitcoin hashes with your body heat when you walk through the door?
Maybe it's me, but there doesn't seem to be any relevance whatsoever.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
Even though the story about the boots is fictional, there's a way out of that trap. You have to realize that you only need to buy a single pair of the good leather boots, to solve that particular problem for the rest of your life. After you get your first pair, you slowly save up the $50 for the next pair over the next 10 years. And then with the net money saved, you can get out of other traps.
The reason why people fail is because they cannot hold savings long enough to buy the expensive but durable goods. Instead, they'll spend their savings on something they don't need (as much).
Pratchett wrote comedic fantasy, not economic research. He made things up, including Sam Vimes, the relative costs of boots, and especially their durability.
So Captain Pedantic, never in your life have you experienced cheaply made goods not lasting as long as more expensive goods?
And yes Sam Vines is a work of fiction, but it is a work of fiction used to illustrate a genuine point - That having money increases your options for saving money. For example at some point up the socio-economic tree it becomes financially viable for a person to establish a presence in a tax haven in order to reduce/eliminate a tax burden. (Double Irish with a Dutch sandwich anyone?) Such options are out of the reach of people with lesser means.
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Even though the story about the boots is fictional, there's a way out of that trap. You have to realize that you only need to buy a single pair of the good leather boots, to solve that particular problem for the rest of your life. After you get your first pair, you slowly save up the $50 for the next pair over the next 10 years. And then with the net money saved, you can get out of other traps.
The reason why people fail is because they cannot hold savings long enough to buy the expensive but durable goods. Instead, they'll spend their savings on something they don't need (as much).
It's even worse today with credit. Now you can buy what you want now, and pay over time for it. What ends up happening for the undisciplined is they buy frivolous stuff on credit, then end up struggling to make the payments WITH INTEREST and that drives their eventual standard of living down. You have less to live on if you have to service that interest on your debt because that big TV you purchased on "sale" now costs you 30 months of interest too, making it cost more than the bigger TV outright. Or that new car costs you more than you can afford for 80 months and when it's 5 years old and you want to trade, you still have 20 months of payments.. But don't worry, they will roll that onto your next car's payment... It's a slippery slope and it take discipline to get off of it, lots of discipline.
But that's really what makes the difference here, discipline and hard work. I've meet very few folks who where poor because they didn't have the ability or opportunity to not be poor. And I've meet some desperately poor people growing up in the back woods of North Carolina. Many where living this way by choice, they didn't want more, or couldn't be bothered to make it happen. It was a social thing for them. One young man who graduated high school with me, 4th in the class, had a dream of moving out of his mother's house so he could get his own address and start collecting his own welfare checks. He was a bright guy, could have gone to college for nearly free and easily pulled himself, and his family out of poverty, but that's not what he chose to do.
Not all poor are there by choice, but unless they are unable to work though no fault of their own, they need not stay in poverty.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Apparently communities and groups of individuals have zero rights according to you. Just the single individual.
So the communities of people who fight for municipal broadband are all wrong. Because it comes between the right for an individual to choose Comcast. (Because that's his only choice.)
I'm libertarian myself and these 3rd grade libertarian fantasies regularly spouted embarass the fuck out of me.
Your are mixing a discussion about 'rights' with market principles, hence your confusion. If you are open to allowing market principles, communities are free to get together and decide not to buy from dollar stores which in the end results in their shutdown or lack of desire to expand in those communities. If enough individuals still shop there, the market will know. However, using legislation to determine who can sell in a community would not be market driven result.
As to who has 'rights', that is defined constitutionally, and communities do have the 'right' to create such legislation, even if it does not follow market principles.
Should communities have the 'right' to limit shopping choices for individuals in the community, some or many of who may want to shop at dollar stores?
Striking the right balance between both can be a challenge, different people will have different opinions on to where that balance line should be.
First, I think you should consider that your sample space is pretty skewed. I don't think that you live in poverty, so your exposure to that population is quite low.
Second, the working poor is a surpassingly large segment of the population. Real wages haven’t increased with inflation for years, and while things like TVs and electronics have gone down in price relative to inflation, essential goods haven't.
There's some location dependency as well. Consider a worker in San Francisco that drives a bus or works at contracted janitorial staff. Many of them have to live far outside the city and spend enormous amounts of time commuting. It leaves very little time to do anything that might get them into a better job, and they’re spending every penny they have on rent and survival; many have low or non-existent credit (though that may be a blessing in disguise, because you're not wrong about the dangers of credit or how businesses extending credit are predatory nightmares).
Poverty isn't just a matter of how hard you work. There are a lot of circumstances that go into how it plays out, and once you're poor, the options for getting out become more and more limited. Social mobility is getting lower by the year.
Lastly, there are "frivolous" purchases that poor people make that bring them just a bit of joy or relief, and while it's easy to say that they shouldn't be smoking or eating a bag of chips, life is hard enough without letting yourself just have something small for yourself.
The working poor are just that, and it can be nearly impossible for them to break out of the cycles of poverty once they're in them. Plenty of them are perfectly willing to work to get out of the mess they're in but circumstances don't always allow for it.
Grew up poor, am doing well right now.
My success is due to a few things. Hard work helps. Being in the right field helps. Having a partner helps.
But so does luck. Luck in my gender, my height, even my name all have been shown to increase the chance of financial success in life. Luck in where I was born, and in what state, gave my poor family the ability to have state programs that were pretty good, and a local school that was also pretty damn good. Luck in my family, especially my mother, who didn't sabotage my life or my siblings. Luck I didn't make any irreversible mistakes in my teens and young adult hood that would have nailed me with a felony, huge debt, or a kid to support. Luck in my health, which is pretty good.
When we criticize the poor for being poor, we do two things:
The first is to feel better about ourselves - by believing that poverty is within our control, it shields us from it - we won't become poor because we won't make the wrong mistakes.
The second is that we hold the poor up to a standard that we don't require of the middle class. The middle class makes a slew of financial mistakes to screw over their lives, and we don't hold them accountable for it. Why is it that we require the poor to be saints with their meager incomes, while we don't hold the middle class to the same standard. The middle class is burdened with avoidable debt, consuming a ton of crap, underfunding their retirements, and often without an emergency fund. Yet we don't criticize them for buying things they don't need, even if they are making bad financial decisions. We'll even empathize with the middle class for not having enough money to go around.
But buy something nice for yourself as a poor person, and everyone will judge. Even own something nice as a poor person, and people will make assumptions.
It's a double standard, and an unfair one at that.
Spoken like a man who never had problems affording or purchasing a good pair of boots.
If you can't grasp a metaphor, maybe an anecdote (or two) will help?
I'm a kinda guy who destroys footwear. High instep plus an old ankle injury... I have a funny step.
I've worn out three pairs of army boots during less than a year of service - and I was in personnel.
And you can bet your ass I was maintaining those boots, being a lowly conscript surrounded by officers and NCOs all day.
Important caveat - I'm a Bosnian. But rules of the market still apply.
Anyway... for years I would buy a pair of boots around November... wear them until the spring... then start wearing them in September-October while looking for a new pair.
Tried out civilian versions of army boots (no worse or better than the actual thing issued to recruits), various hiking shoes/boots, supposedly fancier (2-3 times the price of the army kind) boots... all the same crap.
One pair of hiking shoes literally fell apart as I was cleaning them for the next season - soles fell off.
Granted... none of those boots were ever more than maybe $75 (the fancy kind). But they were all crap, regardless of price.
Now... I could maybe shell out much more than that for a fancy pair of hiking boots... those look robust...
But who's to say those won't fall apart in a year? They are sold in the same boutique.
Then... I discovered work boots. Not "work boots" sold at boutiques - the real deal. Steel toecaps, heavy, hard and ugly.
And actually cheaper than most boots cause they tend to be "ugly" and a single boot will weigh as much as a pair of fancy boots. A decent pair would be $20-30.
Then I found the REALLY good ones.
Italian manufacturer, high shaft, laces and zippers, all the regular trimmings, ten-year warranty...
Sure... at around $60 a bit pricier, for that kind of footwear, but still cheaper than what I used to pay shopping for "civilian" boots.
And I even got to test that warranty - cause thanks to my "magic feet" the leather started tearing.
Yes, you can technically use that quick-access zipper to put them on quickly... but that may not be such a great idea.
But hey... they were under warranty, so I replaced them, wore those for 3 seasons... and as they were starting to show quite a bit of wear and tear (still not leaking though) - I went to the same shop to buy another pair.
They are no more.
Thing is, those were some REALLY good boots.
So good in fact that the manufacturer stopped making them. Thought of ordering some directly from the manufacturer - they don't make them anymore.
You want all those features (it's the quick-release zipper) on a pair of work boots? Competition sells that for twice as much and in a wider color range.
Clearly, not because it costs twice as much to make them or cause the manufacturer would be losing money.
It's cause that's what "the market will bear" and the manufacturer would be losing "potential earnings".
And to add insult to injury, I'm clearly so far out of "the market" that even should those other boots (with the same features) be worth the price, I'd have to take a 5-hour ride just to try them on.
Ended up buying a pair of "similar but clearly not the same quality" Romanian-made boots for around $50.
Similarly... We went shopping for a freezer a few months back.
After digging around online, driving around local malls and shops, checking and comparing features, sizes, quality, price...
Turns out you can either buy cheap crap, cheap crap that is too big, cheap crap which spends twice as much electricity as it should in that price-feature range - or you can buy large freezer-fridge combos, which are more expensive and for which we don't have room. And they might be crap too... didn't check.
Buuuuut... if I check the manufacturer's website - they DO produce and sell better freezers.
More isolation, use less electricity...
They just don't sell them here.
Cause they sell for about $60 more.
Market won't bear such a high
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens