Dollar Stores Became Magnets for Crime and Killing | Hacker News Reader

Dollar Stores Became Magnets for Crime and Killing

propublica.org

42 pointspaulpauper47 comments

This is ridiculous:

>>But these factors are not sufficient to explain the trend. The chains’ owners have done little to maintain order in the stores, which tend to be thinly staffed and exist in a state of physical disarray.

This is virtually every retail store out there. Go into a non-supercenter Walmart in the average town. Retail never has enough staff and never has enough time or payroll to clean.

This too: Several years ago, noticing the rise in calls to the dollar stores, the department provided training sessions for Family >>Dollar managers in how to practice what police call “crime prevention through environmental design.” Officers showed them how less trash outside and less clutter inside and fewer big ads in the windows, which block the view of responding police officers, would make their stores safer.

This has zero to do with the kind of crime that is happening to them; it's all about being often the only retailers even close to a high crime area.

Or this:

>>Residents often sent her photos of dangerously cluttered aisles, and she asked ﬁre marshals to issue warnings. “The more and more ubiquitous they’ve gotten, they’ve gotten less and less caring,” she said. “I came to see them as gloriﬁed check-cashing and payday lenders for the way they prey off the poor but don’t really care about the poor.”

...this is moronic. They do nothing of the sort, they sell goods at decent prices to underserved areas. That they are getting hit with crime is more about how shitty the average underserved area is than their policies or procedures; they do nothing that other retail doesn't do.

It's a really bad piece, and i agree its trying to blame the victim.

>This is virtually every retail store out there... Retail never has enough staff and never has enough time or payroll to clean.

Definitely true to some extent everywhere, and a serious problem for retail in general, but

>Go into a non-supercenter Walmart in the average town.

Picking Walmart specifically seems disingenuous. They are notorious for their staffing problems, and were the go-to example of a bad retail job before Amazon started hogging the bad press.

Dollar General in particular is also one of the store that I kept seeing on social media during the pandemic with signs whining that "no one wants to work" while nearby business owners would chime in and say, "I've had no issues getting staff, I'm just willing to pay a competitive wage and not treat my employees like dirt". Anecdotally, it seems like Dollar General is specifically worse to work for than your average retail chain.

The article quotes one of the founders saying their wages “placed us at the bottom of a low-paying industry.”

This reads like an emotion-driven hit piece. It even starts with the personal tragic story before actually stating a claim to pre-bias with emotional manipulation.

Possibly because otherwise the rationale seems pretty thin: Dollar stores are to blame for shootings and crime in their vicinity or the store itself because they're understaffed and messy? Not very convincing.

Where's the comparative statistical analysis of retail-related shootings for other stores, with controls for area crime rates and local socioeconomics or other confounding variables? Where is just about any hard data? It's all opinion narrative interwoven with tragic anecdotes and an occasional reference to research that might vaguely apply if you squint hard enough. Really a bad piece.

As a side note, dollar stores seem to fill a useful niche in the retail ecosystem. They purchase mass quantities of product, much of which might otherwise end up in landfills, and sell it on for cheap prices to people who will use it. (Though some items-- not all-- are made specifically for sale in their stores at smaller quantities that are actually higher on a per-unit basis)

This is ProPublica, specialized on emotion-driven hit pieces, what do you expect?

> Dollar stores are to blame for shootings and crime in their vicinity or the store itself because they're understaffed and messy?

Sounds like the old broken windows theory, where a "messy" neighborhood sends undesirable signals about how much the people in it care for the public benefit. But a dollar store is not a neighborhood that's collectively taken care of; it's literally just a store.

The thesis of the article is literally broken windows theory.

I'm amazed that they managed to write several thousand words on the topic, while managing to avoid using the words "broken windows".

And it's not even the stores themselves: They were opened in neighborhoods with "broken windows", they didn't create them. Lots of stores are messy.

I have a few near me in my average suburban neighborhood and I've never heard of any shooting, and a search of local crime blotters and newspapers doesn't turn up anything either. In the entire state I found roughly 1 robber per year over the past few years. Convenience stores with many fewer locations get hit more than that, but I don't think they cause violent crime.

Who benefits from a hit piece on a retailer that is one of the few willing to put new stores in these areas?

My thought too. They’re sticking their necks out and getting shot. This piece is blaming the victim.

Who’s “they”? The people who get shot are the local residents who work there with no security and would be fired for defending themselves.

Murder/Robberies are the cost of doing business to the executives and shareholders defining the store policies.

As the story mentions, these retailers aren't innocent bystanders -- they're responsible for accelerating the decline of other local retailers. In particular, they have a significant negative effect on local supermarkets, even though they usually don't carry fresh food.

https://civileats.com/2018/12/17/dollar-stores-are-taking-ov...

But they're not responsible for the economic and societal conditions that allow dollar stores to thrive in the first place.

I don’t agree with the statement the “crime is opportunistic,” that if you just remove the opportunity, you will remove the crime. That seems very, very narrow-sighted. I think a lot of theft crime comes from an absence of hope, no hope for better jobs, no hope for education, so why not? What stops a person from committing a crime? That’s really big big question, and I think when you have high poverty areas, high concentration of poverty, you encounter concentration of people who have no hope, no future, no jobs, no education, so why care? Steal. Anything to break the monotony seems worth the risk.

What about criminal mindset caused by criminal culture flourishing in such areas?

People are not robbing dollar stores because rap music told them to.

You’re saying the culture is just rap music and nothing else?

I'm saying blaming violence on "culture" sounds like a Republican dog-whistle for "poor black people deserve their fate". (And I'm not even American.)

It's not "criminal culture" (often used as a dog whistle...), it's poverty culture https://www.theatlantic.com/personal/archive/2010/10/a-cultu...

> "If you are a young person living in an environment where violence is frequent and random, the willingness to meet any hint of violence with yet more violence is a shield."

Bingo. It's an entirely natural reaction to a violent environment. It's not the cause of the environment though, any more than GIs brawling during R&R caused the Vietnam War.

Are there any instances of "criminal culture" flourishing in wealthy areas?

Or is "criminal culture" the byproduct of poverty and desperation?

There’s a whole gradient between total absence of hope and huge opportunity for committing a crime.

Not all criminals are completely hopeless and not all situations are lacking the opportunity to commit a crime.

If you are operating within the context of high opportunity for crime then reducing that opportunity for yourself will just drive the crime away from you. It doesn’t matter how hopeless the criminals are.

A lot of crime is opportunistic. You need to both know what you can exploit and also have some assurance there will be no repercussions.

Someone may always be looking for that opportunity, and it may be a lifestyle choice. But it is still opportunistic on an event level.

You clearly have spent no time around criminals, or as a guest of the criminal justice system. I have done both.

Nobody gives a shit about education. Nobody from the hood gives a fuck about your Stanford degree.

Why should you work for a living? You don't even keep your full paycheck: the government takes 25% right off the top. Don't argue that point, I worked in fast food.

Your honest job has no honor or glory. Nobody respects a cashier at McDonalds. You get shit on, all day long by the public, for next to nothing. But you get to see all those rich people on TV, all day long.

We value our lives not in absolute terms, but relative to the wealth we see around us.

Violence and exploitation get you both wealth and respect. Girls will fuck you for free drugs. And because you're hard. You throw down with the cops because you don't give a fuck. Nobody fucks with you, because you have a reputation.

"Tough on crime" won't fix this. Neither will social programs. Stupid has to hurt bad, and that just isn't palatable to polite society.

>Stupid has to hurt bad, and that just isn't palatable to polite society.

What does this actually mean from your POV?

What if the gov gave anonymous "evacuation loans"? The target audience is teens in crime ridden neighborhoods that want to escape, but have no means to do so, and even if they tried, the immense peer pressure wouldnt let them. The loan would allow such teens to relocate anywhere in the US, with all expenses, including tution, paid. Upon graduating the loan would be forgiven. I admit, this idea may be a fantasy.

Edit. Your comment being downvoted confirms that the politically correct left doesn't want to listen.

What do you think someone in extreme poverty would want to throw away their local family and support network, in exchange for being an outcast somewhere else? Are you going to pay them $100K/yt until they build a new life?

> throw away their local family and support network

Why do you label this as "throwing away their local family", but you wouldn't label the millions of regular students studying overseas or interstate in the same way?

Or maybe - just maybe! - behaving decently has to offer some level of comfort, safety, and status. Instead the folks who try to work face poverty wages, violence, and degrading work conditions.

Instead of trying to make people's lives even more miserable ("stupid has to hurt bad"), let's give them a path to a decent existence.

> Or maybe - just maybe! - behaving decently has to offer some level of comfort, safety, and status. Instead the folks who try to work face poverty wages, violence, and degrading work conditions.

Maybe.

> Instead of trying to make people's lives even more miserable ("stupid has to hurt bad"), let's give them a path to a decent existence.

When they have a decent existence some of them will start to think. And this shall not happen /s

"The masses could only become dangerous if the advance of industrial technique made it necessary to educate them more highly: but, since military and commercial rivalries are no longer of primary importance, the level of popular education is actually declining."

"The war is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of global society intact."

George Orwell - 1984

"Nobody respects a cashier at McDonalds" ---

I think THIS is the point: If we bring back (or better: establish) the mindset in the public, that any form of legal employment has its intrinsic honor ("I can life with the fruit of my own hands work", "workers pride" and so on) then i think the motivation for crime could go down...

McDonald’s very deliberately structured its workforce to be lower-skill and replaceable, even though it would be less expensive for them to hire skilled employees like short-order cooks. They did this very deliberately in order to make the company more resistant to labor organization efforts. When people say that McDonald’s jobs are low-status and replaceable, they’re reflecting the correct perception that these jobs were engineered to be low-status and replaceable. No amount of admonishing people is going to make humans admire a profession (the profession, not the people) that was designed this way.

IOW, they went out of their way to create more jobs than they otherwise would. Job deskilling is good for the most marginalized workers, even when those with valuable skills would oppose it.

Correct.

Legalize drugs so they are cheap and easily available, and then people will fuck you because they like you, not because you have the expensive drugs they want.

Actually, if you just legalize all the victimless crimes, making a living as a criminal is going to be a lot harder than just getting a job.

I hear this repeated everywhere, but do you have any studies or numbers that back this up?

All I could find is this survey of ~40000 shoplifters. Although there's probably a bit of selection bias, they left out homeless people for example.

"However, it [shoplifting] was more common among those with higher education and income, suggesting that financial considerations are unlikely to be the main motivator for shoplifting in most cases."

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4104590/

Shoplifting and armed robbery are very different crimes.

Here's comprehensive crime stats from FBI for year 2019:

https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

The misery we allow our fellow citizens to face in this country is absolutely gut wrenching. Dollar General is a symptom, poverty is the disease.

Shame on us, and shame on the republic.

I don't live in America and am not familiar with neighborhood crime, but in addition to the financial motivations, are these people maybe a bit too trigger happy? Or is that how it is in poor/violent neighborhoods?

There are a few reasons. An important but unfortunate one is that these areas have not received toxic chemical remediation. It is common for adults and children to have complications from lead exposure. A side effect of developmental impairment is increased aggression.

But there are reasons related to a different social culture. The cops and justice system can't help you and may very well ruin your life if you try to involve them, so it's easiest to kill people who slight you. These interactions happen because whatever small amount of money or credibility you might just shrug off is life altering to these people.

In my experience, value for life (both peoples' own life, and the life of others) is directly tied with wealth.

That is to say, poor people don't value living as much as rich people do. They're more likely to engage in behaviour that endangers their own life and the lives of others.

There's a good reason for that: life is cheap among poor people and poor countries because they have little to lose and a lot to gain. The payoff is asymmetric for violence, so it's a rational trade.

I was curious about whether dollar stores are really a magnet for crime based on this article. Just looking up the stores on Wikipedia to get their location counts I found that there were 15,115 Dollar Tree (Family Dollar) stores and 16,278 Dollar Generals. When I looked up a Dollar General in St. Louis on Google Maps I saw there was a McDonald's right next to it. Wikipedia says there are 37,855 McDonald's - which isn't great because that number is worldwide locations. Statista says 14,339[1] locations in the US as of 2014. The article also mentions Wendy's which has 6,711 locations according to Wikipedia. Walgreen's is a store that's kind of like a Dollar Store in that it isn't a restaurant, you walk around and buy things from shelves. There are 9,277 Walgreen's according to Wikipedia.

The author's method of counting gun crimes in dollar stores seems to be using the Gun Violence Archive[2]. "The Gun Violence Archive, a website that uses local news reports and law enforcement sources to tally crimes involving ﬁrearms, lists more than 200 violent incidents involving guns at Family Dollar or Dollar General".

I searched the GVA for "Family Dollar" or "Dollar General" and found 465 incidents with 126 deaths. With 31,393 combined locations this is 0.015 incidents and 0.004 deaths per location for the 7 year time period.

I searched the GVA for "McDonalds" or "McDonald's" and found 534 incidents and 148 deaths. With 14,339 US locations this is 0.0372 incidents per store and 0.01 deaths per store for the 7 year time period. Approximately 2.5 times the incidents and deaths per location of the Dollar Stores.

I searched the GVA for "Wendys" or "Wendy's" and found 104 incidents with 27 deaths. This is 0.0155 incidents per location and 0.004 deaths per location. This is approximately equal to the Dollar Stores.

I searched the GVA for "Walgreens" or "Walgreen's" and found 180 incidents and 53 deaths. This is 0.019 incidents per store and 0.0057 deaths per store for the 7 year period. This 1.3 times as many incidents and 1.4 times the deaths of the Dollar Stores.

My interpretation of this is that the Gun Violence Archive is probably not a great way to estimate violence. For example, I also searched the GVA for "Advance America" - one of the largest payday loans places in the US and found only a single incident whereas just Googling "Advance America shooting" turns up more than 1 distinct incident. Generally, it seems implausible to me that McDonald's or Walgreen's, which are widely distributed across the US, has 2.5 or 1.4 times the incident and death rate compared to the Dollar Stores or to Wendy's. If that's accurate, maybe it should be the next article!

Regardless, given that the GVA is the author's tool of choice, from my use of it, it doesn't seem justified to call out Dollar Stores as being especially violent. Wendy's is seemingly just as bad and McDonald's is worse. Unless I'm missing something, I think this article was interesting to read, but ultimately misleading.

1 - https://www.statista.com/statistics/256040/mcdonalds-restaur...

2 - https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/

Would love to see an Undercover Boss episode of this in East Side St. Louis

the solution is clearly to defund the police

Reply on news.ycombinator.com