To Save a Neighborhood, Ban a Dollar Store?
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What about, "We need local people to open up local mom & pop stores"? Why can't we think, "We need to provide incentives, education and security for local people to pull themselves up by the bootstraps and service themselves" instead of "We need to find a way to funnel money from poor people to rich people"?
I totally understand that I'm misrepresenting the actual thinking going on here :-). People in the west are so far removed from traditional ways of doing things that they think that the only way to buy food is to have a 2 acre parking lot for minivans and a stadium sized store with razor thin margins selling pre-packaged food.
Around the world, poor people start small stores and sell things to other poor people. People walk to the store because they don't own cars. They carry their food for today because they don't own refrigerators. And it's definitely not as efficient, but it keeps the money local.
Those cases involving eminent domain and rats are the most dramatic, but it works at a more pedestrian level too. Say a government wants to dispose of some disused rail-yard or something. A developer who says "I'm going build some big shiny shops and attractions here" has better optics than a developer who says "I'm going to lay down some infrastructure and parcel the land up to whoever wants to buy it, nature will decide what the land is used for".
The latter is actually quite likely to produce the higher economic value land use, but there is no good political narrative. And in a world of strict zoning rules, there might not even be a legal framework for it.
I grew up in a small town with a mostly local mom and pop shops.
As our population grew, so did the store size. Eventually Walmart came in and wiped out several local shops.
We watched business owners who lived, worked, hired and spent money in our community close up shop.
Walmart & others are a vacuum for money, sucking up local dollars and redirecting it to shareholders.
I have nothing against naked capitalism, but these large companies aren’t producing the results we want.
Unless you’re a shareholder...
a small town should be able to decide on their own if they allow someone like walmarts to outcompete their local stores.
Instead, we figure out ways to scale insane business models. Amazon is the greatest achievement of financial engineering ever. It adds inefficiency in many markets if anything.
The cities are so worried but there is no evidence health is impacted.
Maybe they should look at the reasons why supermarkets don't want to open, but convenience stores do.
It may simply be that it is unprofitable. Supermarkets run on razor thin margins and require significant volume.
No amount of zoning will change that.
Edit: Maybe providing discounted/free public transport to new or existing supermarkets would change things.
In the US we have tax-exempt businesses, but I don't think we have partial tax?
Yet it seems like a host of businesses provide value to the community that would make up for their property tax income. Full service grocery stores, child care, etc.
Of course, in reality businesses would expand their margins as much as possible. But at least they'd be there.
We can both probably agree that real estate property value has a loose correlation with actual value, and is subject to a large number of external factors. Not least the suboptimal-for-community inflationary pressured California is infamous for.
By partially abating taxes, you're simply adjusting profit calculation for a plot of land for a specific use.
Now that I think about it we already do this, just in more coarse grained terms, via zoning. C3 is taxed one way, R3 another.
Have you tried using public transit for grocery shopping? Where?
Oklahoma City has 20 bus routes, which seem to run every 30 to 60 mins. Unless you're lucky enough to live right on a bus route that goes to those supermarkets, or happens to line up perfectly with a transfer to another bus that does, it's going to take forever to get to the supermarket via public transit.
I've done it (in a different, but seemingly similar city). You leave early to make sure you're not going to miss the bus, and then you wait. If you're lucky, your first bus isn't late and the second bus isn't early... If it's just one bus, you trip is hopefully only like 10-15 minutes (you've already spent at least that walking and waiting), and then you're there! You probably want to shop for about 45 minutes -- even if your bus comes every half hour, making it back to the bus stop in 20 minutes ( remember, buses can come early or late!) is probably not going to happen, especially given that this whole venture isn't something you're doing every day, and you've got to stock up! But not too much, because you've got to carry it back with you. Speaking of, easy-to-carry packages of toilet paper or paper towels are typically astronomically more expensive than the giant packs, wtf. So, you get back to the bus stop laden down with stuff, everything goes pretty well on the trip back, and it only took, let's say, an hour and a half! Yay. You're never buying ice cream again.
But, you didn't get enough for your family for the whole week. You do it all again two days later -- you could have waited a couple more days, but the restricted weekend hours don't work out, or maybe you only have two days a week where that 7pm-latest-bus-run isn't too late (assuming you're comfortable trusting the last bus to get you home). You head out again, but this time, your first bus is very late. Or your second bus never shows. Or you miss your bus home, the last bus of the night, and now you have to call a friend or Uber.
This is all if you're lucky enough to live anywhere where trying this even makes sense. This is assuming your schedule isn't entirely incompatible with the bus schedule, and you can afford to be gone for however long the ordeal takes (my grandmother is a retired nurse living with her friend, who has Parkinson's; my grandmother tries not to leave for more than about an hour without someone else to watch her friend).
The price of public transport is not the $ for the ride; that could often be accounted for simply by the price difference between convenience store milk and Walmart milk.
In many cities, public transportation is used nearly exclusively by 1) lucky people who live right on the most reliable routes, 2) unlucky people who have very little else to do with their time.
The other day, I missed a bus in downtown Seattle. I could wait 5 minutes for the next bus (different route) coming by that stop, but have to walk an extra block at the end, or wait 10 minutes for the next bus of the route I missed. I said fuck it, didn't take any bus, and instead grabbed a delicious lunch at a hole-in-the-wall place a block away. This is not an accurate representation of public transportation in most cities.
Sprawl and cars are mutually reinforcing. In a sprawl (even it's formally a city), where walking is impractical, and public transportation is expensive to run, all grocery customers drive, so a store attracts customers from miles around, and has to be huge.
This blows my mind. How many times have I watched co-workers waiting because they decided to carpool in b/c of bad parking, but their ride isn't really yet? How many times have plans had to be rearranged because somebody left their car somewhere, or someone's car is in the shop?
Not to mention the time wasted commuting, nor, way more importantly, how many people die in car accidents.
Hopefully, technology and new transportation models will help break us out of this.
But I like the idea of being able to walk and explore the city! Here in the suburbs, you can just walk in circles without actually going anywhere. Not sure if Austin would be a good city or not to go carless. I guess depends on which part of the city. I know Amazon and also other apps now that deliver groceries in more popular cities too. I think though you are supposed to tip, and they charge a delivery fee too but convenience I guess. So all the apps and services is probably easier than it was a decade ago. I figured I'd probably walk to the nearest grocery for some things, order other things. Then there's Uber and Lyft... Uber never has cars where I am, Lyft doesn't seem to say as it looks like maybe but unsure when I hit the next screen. I have been wanting to go on a solo trip someday anyways so great apps when traveling but don't think they are useful here at home as doubt enough people want that here. But would be useful for a ride to the airport over an hour away so wouldn't have to bother someone for a ride early in the morning.
Not sure if I'd always want to live in a big city, but something different to try and feel like I'd probably be happier and healthier even. I love walking but walking the same thing over and over is boring.
I've been reading a lot of people are leaving the midwest and northern states for places like Florida and Texas. Warmer weather and lower taxes. Not sure why anyone would want to live where I'm from unless they have family, other commitments or funds that making moving hard. I know if you want to work at a factory, tons of jobs like that here. I know they say places like Ohio are suffering a huge brain drain. People who are young end up going to college or being offered a job somewhere else and never comes back home. I guess that's why it's called the rust belt. Not sure why anyone would want to voluntarily live here, it's like a punishment to live here. I don't see the appeal of why anyone would actually want to live here or even vacation here. Sure there's some interesting stuff but spread out so maybe if you were retired exploring the country in a RV, but if you only have a week of vacation and a limited budget flying to Orlando or Miami is more appealing to me. Maybe I'm a bit bias though since my mind has been set lately on heading south.
What the heck is wrong with them? They're awesome for many miscellaneous items. If there aren't grocery stores, that's on the local municipality to attract/incentivize the type of businesses they want in their area. Most dollar stores aren't grocery stores anyhow, nor should they be forced to be anything, they're more like bric-a-brac American drug/discount stores mixed with convenience stores. It's a strawman/red herring to blame dollar stores for people's health... that's their municipality's and personal responsibility to have farmer's markets, grocery stores, health food stores, fresh food stands. They are what they are.. vote with your feet, or tell the muncipalities to also bring other type of stores. And if they don't like Walmartification, keep them zoned out.
Dollar Stores usurp business from grocery stores and turn neighborhoods into food deserts. What the heck is wrong with that? Dude, a lot.
People with opportunities to eat healthy food keep choosing to eat unhealthy food. This isn't a secret. I have personally annoyed all my friends and my girlfriend with my constant hypochondriac nudging about nutrition.
If you want to change eating habits you have to communicate with the consumers. You can't pull strings at the city-planning level and hope that the marionettes will march in tune. Even if dollar stores were prevented by magical aliens from selling produce (they're not), they still have freezers. They could still sell frozen vegetables. They could sell oats, beans or unsalted nuts in bulk. They could sell canned produce, high-fiber noodles, refrigerated tempeh...
They are not selling these things because people aren't buying them. Dollar General is not intentionally trying to kill people. That's not a good business model.
People are generally woefully uninformed about nutrition. People have been confused by the raging public debate about dietary theories that are almost never really practiced -- I had a friend tell me he didn't want to eat a mango because of the sugar content. The same friend had no trouble ordering soda at a drive-thru. That is how the average American thinks about food.
If you want change, put the Doritos behind the counter. That's how you get change.
You claim that better food isn’t available because people don’t buy it, but I’m not convinced. Can you provide any examples of food deserts that once had great selections of produce and non-processed foods, which disappeared because people weren’t choosing to shop there due to “too healthy” of a selection?
No ones saying Dollar General’s business model is to ensure people only get access to unhealthy options. This is an absurd straw man that no one is claiming. What people _are_ pointing out is that Dollar General has virtually zero incentive to ensure consumers have access to healthy food. Grocery stores in America are essentially unregulated, and it appears that this is a clear example of the free market not providing a solution that ensures everyone has equal access to healthy food.
Who do you think has more data regarding consumer behavior: you, me, or Dollar General?
If you, me, and Dollar General were to try to predict the purchasing habits of 100 store customers, who would win?
I don't have this data. Dollar General does. If Dollar General's data said something else, Dollar General's shelves would carry something else.
>No ones saying Dollar General’s business model is to ensure people only get access to unhealthy options. This is an absurd straw man that no one is claiming.
You are correct, that is an absurd distortion of my argument. My argument is that Dollar General wants to give its customers what its customers want to buy. If Dollar General's customers wanted healthy food, Dollar General would give it to them.
Look, when I used to drive between cities on a nil budget, I would eat sardines and unsalted nuts at gas stations. I would walk up and down aisles full of brightly colored candy and crackers and find the little shelf in the corner with a tin of sardines. True story.
You know why that shelf is in the corner and the candy is front and center? Because most customers will buy the candy. If people were walking in to the gas station every day and buying them out of sardines, they'd have to branch out into other healthy foods. If people kept buying those they'd diversify more. Eventually the candy might disappear.
Guess what? This will not happen. Consumers aren't going to choose healthy food when modern engineered food products are singing sirens' lullabies on the next aisle. Not unless you change the consumers.
>Can you provide any examples of food deserts that once had great selections of produce and non-processed foods, which disappeared because people weren’t choosing to shop there due to “too healthy” of a selection?
All of them! Processed food is a modern invention. Every neighborhood has had to have some kind of food, as long as it has had people. Before the 50s it was a foregone conclusion that they sold relatively unprocessed foods. Those were the only ones! At some point between then and now, the balance shifted, and the real food was pushed aside. You can nitpick this by specifying neighborhoods that haven't gotten much denser since the '50s, but there are still plenty of those in food deserts.
Every neighborhood market that exists evolved over time and became what it is today by responding to the needs of its customers. Markets don't close because people don't buy a product. They just stop selling that product.
Look, this is not a defense of "the free market". This is about common sense. Just look around you. Look at what people are eating. Look at the options available to them. Look at how they choose from those options.
This isn't even an argument against regulation. I am in favor of regulation. I am also in favor of regulations that make sense! You have to regulate food products, not food stores!
Limit the sizes of snack food bags. Tax sugary drinks. Put warning labels on products that have been optimized with behavioral psychology. But for God's sake, do not simply regulate the size of stores and order them to stock lettuce! All that will get you is rotten lettuce.
Inexorable? Various cities have managed to prevent this phenomenon. Zoning is the root of the issue, but now everyone views their house as their primary investment and they'll fight to protect the eye-popping growth they've seen in their property value.
More people want to live next to more people.
Neither are present in many rural areas and the amount of investment needed especially for infra to catch up is enormous - too much for governments facing a tax competition to rock bottom.
the amount of investment needed especially for infra to catch up is enormous
Much of the third world skipped ISDN/DSL/etc and went straight to mobile for data.
Any 4G/5G tower worth its salt requires digging for a fiber uplink, and that "long haul" is the expensive thing. The difference between linking up a cell tower and a village is not much.
I lived in Provo (college town, 50 miles south of Salt Lake City) a few years ago. Had Google Fiber, lots of jobs, and houses for <$200k.
People want to live next to other people.
The fiftieth largest high school stadium in Texas seats more than 2x that number. [2]
Yellowstone National Park staffs that many people during the summer. [3]
So, yeah, that's small.
I understand why actually rural communities are popular for only a few people. But there's a lot that available between 10 people/sqmi farmland and NY/LA/DC/SF/Chicago metro area. Yet, big cities are still exploding. Because people like them.
[1] https://suburbanstats.org/population/washington/how-many-peo...
[2] https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/the-largest-high-school-...
In addition, I often see people propagate the myth that eating healthy costs more, which couldn't be further from the truth.
The reality is that meal preparation and home cooked meals from basic ingredients are some of the healthiest things people can eat, assuming they understand basic concepts such as macro-nutrients and how they relate to body composition.
Shopping for everyday necessities at a grocery store or supermarket is incredibly stressful if you're poor. You can quickly reach a $100+ shopping bill with just a handful of items in your cart. Dollar stores offer a decent selection of goods and, more importantly, consistent prices.
They are usually expensive but better than bodegas.
I have asked many, many people the same question and the answer is always the same: convenience. The dollar store is five minutes away or less. DGs are practically weeds, I live in the country and there are more Dollar Generals around me than gas stations or anything else.
They have food, but it’s a very poor selection and mostly processed junk food with a few staples thrown in.
Edit: reading the other comments, it’s a little shocking to see how many people have evidently never set foot in a dollar general or family dollar. Definitely a reminder I live in a different world than most of HN.
You have not asked me. I have a grocery store, and a TON of other stores of all sorts in walking distance, but I drive to the dollar store because it's cheaper.
For example the dollar store popcorn kernels are about half the price of the grocery store ones. Simple glass dishes are 1/3 to 1/4 the price of anywhere else. You can get a pregnancy test for $1, vs $6 to $30 anywhere else.
I don’t think the UK vs US situation is comparable.
And if one is capable of recognizing where the cheap vs expensive stuff is they can take advantage of it like savvy shoppers have been for literal ages.
There is the pattern of being willing to hoist restrictions and spend money on enforcement of the lower incomes but not being willing to add more to anything that would actually help them or reduce restrictions - and then rationalizing why that would be a good thing.
Its another way of saying "the cheapest list price isn't always the best price" but it also means accepting price support, income support, or, huge glaring inequality outcomes at point of sale.
The up-side is that economics isn't kitchen-economics its town-scale economics. More shops means more shopworkers means more jobs for money and slightly less welfare. So its a virtuous circle.
Small towns which keep a farmers coop alive survive. They often morph into the town coop petrol/gas, the town coop bank, the town coop pub/hotel, sports complex.. Because thats how resilient towns work. And, if it does work, they bring new small business alongside.
Sometimes they even bring the majors to town, but they have to fight back against the category-killer chain on the edge of town.
British high-streets have been hollowed out by Tesco on the edge of town.
Another part of this story is commercial rents, rates, and tenancy agreements. If the landlords are "my price or its empty" then its empty in the downturn. Renting property for commerce needs something different, but not 1000km away from the tenancy laws people need for homes. The town has an interest. The rent rate needs some limits. Just because amazon opened 3000 new people in a hi-rise next door doesn't mean the shop rent can go up to amazon rent prices. Thats the story of S.F. in some ways (except for the building controls NIMBYism)
Schools should probably also have cooking classes. Eating is something everyone does three or more times a day. Why not learn how to do it right. I’m sure something like that would have a huge ROI for state and local governments.
Taxing sugar is not an incentive to sell more nutritious food, unless we're taking those taxes and subsidizing produce with them. Those sweet, highly-processed foods are also a way better purchase for grocery stores, which don't have to worry about the food going bad before it's purchased.
I do think banning these types of stores is likely to cause more harm than good, though. To take it to extremes, there's simply never going to be a farmer's market where my closest Dollar General is.
Also, healthy food is cheap, but people buy junk because it is superficially more fun. Compare what you get from $10 of Lucky Charms vs $10 of veggies, beans and cheese, and, if you must, simple bread and low quality cuts of meat.
$10 in dried beans is lunch for a month, but it's damn inconvenient, and yes, difficult to make taste good.
These are both extremes but yes, I am very confident that healthy food is more expensive than less healthy food. Yes, a cucumber is "cheap". But 8 cucumbers (.50/each) isn't going to get you nearly as far as a 6pack of GV mac and cheese ($3.98). Not even the same ballpark. 5 servings of GV thin-sliced honey ham costs $2.50, a loaf of the cheapest white bread is $1.50, 8 servings of GV block cheese goes for roughly $2.22, so now I have let's say 10 shitty sandwiches for roughly $8, when I could have had easily 12 meals of mac & cheese for half that and with less prep time.
Where cheap and healthy come closer together, I see the staples of my (well, my friends', but that's another story) childhoods; lots of potatoes, scrambled eggs, beans.
The end result is that poorer neighborhoods often don't have the type of service infrastructure that is generally provided by for profit companies. Retail banking and internet providers are two other examples beyond the grocery store example in the article.
With regards to ISPs, i often see that richer neighborhoods have wore coverage than poorer neighborhoods, as it is much cheaper to cover big block of flats with fiber than villa neighborhoods (so these are often limited to wireless ISPs).
On the issue of ISPs, you are conflating neighborhood density with the economic status of a neighborhood. I would bet that in two neighborhoods with similar density, the wealthier neighborhood generally has the more developed internet infrastructure.
That's quite easily disproven throughout the modern history of market economies. For one relevant large example, low and high margin retail rapidly expanded and evolved simultaneously throughout the US market during the 19th and 20th centuries. Dollar - nickel & dime - stores didn't wait until all the high margin business potential was gone.
Sam Walton didn't decide to go high margin just because there was still some obvious growth left in Macy's business in the 1960s. He saw an opportunity elsewhere.
There is tremendous value in getting there before someone else does, rather than wading into extreme competition just because a segment is higher margin (which does you no good if you die in the fierce competition). Low margin can be a spectacular business thanks to volume. Just ask Walmart, as a low margin retailer they've generated more net income over time than any other retailer that has existed.
Another counter to your premise, is that if you build a successful, high volume, low margin business, it is extraordinarily difficult to compete with. And you can easily end up earning as much as a high margin retailer with lower volume. Walmart and Amazon understand this very well, as do dollar stores.
The myth of profit maximization is perhaps the greatest myth having to do with Capitalism. I'd argue that in fact few businesses pursue max profit, much less profit at all costs. It's a caricature of S&P 500 type companies. It goes along with the commonly espoused myth that there is a legal responsibility to shareholders to maximize profit. Most businesses that stay in business understand there are dangerous, very negative consequences to pursuing max profit, as it pertains to customers, employees, reinvestment, etc.
Your premise is strict on theory, weak on actually being how business founders & operators think and how / why they start a business in the first place. The typical business founder doesn't run a massive analysis of the US market city to city, for years on end at great cost, and decide there's a bit of profit left in high margin, therefore they won't enter low margin. That isn't how a business founder thinks at all. The actual chaos involved is breathtaking, it's high on impulse, gut feelings, 'instinct,' intuition, a sense of opportunity, and low on following some kind of rigid theory and massive market analysis.
Edit: Just to be clear, I'm not anti Dollar General, though I do think we need to take better care of each other. Was just very funny to see DG come up when I was looking at their house.
Does everything there look like it costs a dollar?
If you need a temporary office, are you really on vacation?
2) It is a very, very nice house. Gated house in a gated community.
3) You make a good point... But we are out here for a month and I only have a week and a half of vacation on hand, plus a big project due in 6 weeks, so...
That's how they keep their prices down
"... sell products that are not actually much more affordable than those at Walmart or Costco"
"Not actually much more affordable" translated to plain English is "more affordable". Pennies, nickels, and dimes count more when you're poor.
"And push out full-service grocery stores"
Because people can't afford them.
Like all good liberals, I also find dollar stores aesthetically distasteful, and I wish they provided more nutritious food. Lawmakers who want to ban these stores, as usual, have their causation backwards - dollar stores and payday lenders don't cause poverty, they are created by poverty, and (sadly) serve to mitigate the crushing awfulness of being poor.
by no means do they mitigate poverty
When your options are let the power go out, or take a payday loan... Guess which option people with children are going to take.
Then, they had riots where the police were told to do nothing. The black panthers and the organized crime gangs coordinated to knock over all of the drug stores, shoe stores, and liquor stores. However, many other stores were also hit.
Now, they have no Target, no drug stores, no grocery stores. It's highly unlikely without adequate security that they will ever come back.
The next city over, they had smaller riots, but several grocery and walmart/target projects were cancelled.
It seems to me that poorly run cities and politicians following misguided policies are far more hazardous to health.