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Comment by knzhou | Hacker News Reader

This article reminds me of the time the city of Philadelphia tried to ban corner stores from installing bulletproof glass to protect themselves in robberies. Or the numerous education reformers trying to ban remedial classes by making all classes nominally "honors".

Bulletproof glass, remedial classes, and dollar stores reflect societal problems, so outside observers, in their great wisdom and compassion, decide they must be the cause of the problems. They campaign to get rid of them, completely oblivious to the fact that this would only hurt the people they supposedly care about, while doing absolutely nothing to address the real problems. Their injunctions are not even self-consistent: the dollar store is bad for not having the resources to prevent theft, while the corner store is bad for trying to.

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> Bulletproof glass, remedial classes, and dollar stores reflect societal problems, so outside observers, in their great wisdom and compassion, decide they must be the cause of the problems.

This is related to the phenomenon wherein someone warns about an obvious failure coming up in the future, nobody believes in it, it happens, and all the blame "logically" falls on the person who sounded the warning. Why did they want the failure to occur in the first place?

This article is not talking about the woes of Ma and Pa shops trying to install bullet proof glass. It's talking about exactly the opposite, with mayors of cities like Dayton asking large corporations - Dollar General and Family Dollar - to please go ahead and install bullet proof glass so that less employees and customers die on their premises (i.e. the call for more Security Guards).

The chains’ executives are candid about what is driving their growth: widening income inequality and the decline of many city neighborhoods and entire swaths of the country. Todd Vasos, the C.E.O. of Dollar General, told the Wall Street Journal in 2017, “The economy is continuing to create more of our core customer.”

The bottom line is Dollar General knows exactly what communities to target - already ailing ones:

This correlation is not a coincidence, according to a 2018 research brief by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, which advocates for small businesses. The stores undercut traditional grocery stores by having few employees, often only three per store, and paying them little. “While dollar stores sometimes fill a need in cash-strapped communities, growing evidence suggests these stores are not merely a byproduct of economic distress,” the brief reported. “[Sometimes] they’re a cause of it."

But just because you didn't start the fire does not mean you have carte blanche in adding gasoline to the flames.

Because they're one of the few businesses that have figured out how to make it work there. Look, just because penguins thrive in the Antarctic does not mean they are making it difficult for other species to live there. Sometimes an environment is just harsh.

If their method of "making it work there" requires them to actively (if subtly) make conditions worse for the people living there, is it worth it in the long run?

Sounds like there's a revenue opportunity for a competitor with proper security measures to make a move and eat Dollar General's lunch.

Why hasn't anyone stepped up?

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