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Comment by seibelj | Hacker News Reader

The gut-reaction is that this is some horrible thing rather than a scalable business model that provides low-cost goods to customers in rural areas that were previously underserved. My family in rural Oklahoma and Texas have to drive over an hour to Wal Mart, the dollar stores have a similar but curated subset of goods at a cheap price, and the distance is much closer.

HN monoculture loves to crap all over things like this. I see it as deeply beneficial to society. Not everyone lives in SF or NYC and can use their iPhone to order delivery 24/7.

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> HN monoculture loves to crap all over things like this. I see it as deeply beneficial to society. Not everyone lives in SF or NYC and can use their iPhone to order delivery 24/7.

I'm disappointed that your comment was downvoted because you're absolutely correct.

The top comment says pretty much the same, except without the stupid generalization about the HN community. Just FYI, according to dang only 50% of HN users are even from the US, and only 10% in the Bay Area, so there is a fairly large contingent you are going to annoy with such generalizations.

The OP's comment is still absolutely correct if you replace NYC with Berlin or another European city. HN is very biased when it comes to certain subjects and, in all fairness, there is a large contingent of users here who are very willing to downvote comments simply because they disagree with their personal opinions.

Let me add context to why I upvoted the OP's comment. There are large portions of the United States (and I'm currently visiting one) where big-box discount stores simply don't exist. These are the same places where Amazon two day shipping is either not available or unreliable - Amazon doesn't pack everything in their inventory in every warehouse. Smaller discount stores add some variety, and are a benefit to people who would otherwise have to spend more in fuel and lost time to get to the nearest Costco/Walmart/what ever than they would save from lower prices.

This is an issue for a large minority of the United States, and may very well be an issue for a geographic majority (if not a large majority) of the country. I'm sure there are plenty of HN users who live in places like this, but it's also very, very likely that a majority of HN users, such as myself, live in urbanized regions - whether in the US, the EU, or in other developed areas.

While it's certainly expected that these users will have different views and opinions based on their situations and life experiences, echoing the OP's comment, I've noticed that many of them have a concerning lack of empathy for people who come from different backgrounds.

Nah everything closes too early in SF good luck getting anything but McDonalds after 2am.

I think many believe that the dollar store preys on shoppers who may think they are getting a better deal, but don't realize that the unit price is not better for many items, and often in deceptive ways.

This is like saying that vending machines prey on unfortunate office workers who didn't have the foresight to pack a 2 liter soda in their brief case.

Convenience is absolutely a justification for charging higher prices.

That type of 'dollar store' is basically defunct (edit: must be a local phenomenon) Family Dollar and Dollar General are essentially small Wal-Marts and sell products for approximately the same price.

There are over 15,000 Dollar Tree stores in the US that operate on the "$1 for each item" model.

There are several Dollar Trees that are fully stocked and busy in the suburban Southern California city I used to live in. Not sure how that makes them "defunct"

Edited to say it must be local. They have largely disappeared around here. They usually only sold Tupperware and beach toys anyway, so I’m not sure how they apply to the article, but I’m just moving the goalposts there.

Your example is already biased, because you use Walmart as the other option.

Walmart already came through and blew away the local mom and pop market in these rural areas.

Are they more convenient than driving an hour to a walmart? probably.

I've seen small family run stores go out of business specifically because they can't compete with a dollar general that opened a mile away.

"Deeply beneficial" seems like a strong phrase for something you might want to reflect on more.

Ask some of your older family members what they did before Walmart

For anyone reading this thread who still has an open mind, I recommend this 2009 episode of the EconTalk podcast that talks about actually working at Walmart and how supposedly-great the "mom and pops" were before Walmart took over:

https://www.econtalk.org/platt-on-working-at-wal-mart/

The truth about the mom and pops is that they had very limited selection, high prices, long delivery times, and often were owned by the local business man rather than a decentralized group of independent business owners. I recommend listening to the podcast before knee-jerk deciding that you know everything.

That's just a set of anecdotes though. Maybe mom and pop stores came in all kinds of varieties, some were better and some were worse. Maybe we shouldn't automatically praise them but maybe we shouldn't also automatically assume that because some of them weren't good most of them weren't good. I doubt anyone has the data to advance a definitive view of mom and pop vs walmart.

What I do think we can say definitively is that any market that has few competitors over time will atrophy. Having the store landscape reduced to a few big chains with little variety is not healthy for that market.

> often were owned by the local business man rather than a decentralized group of independent business owners

You imply this is undesirable. Care to elaborate? A large talking point during the protests last year was businesses in Black communities being owned by people outside those communities, or more often than not, by large corporations.

Or are you suggesting that a lot of the owners actually owned multiple such shops and that this isn't true for the shops that replaced them?

If the idea is that every mom and pop was ran by self-directed, profit-motivated independent business persons who captured more of the profit, this is not often the case - the employees of these stores made the same going labor rate of any retail employee, it was just a local business man who ran the businesses rather than a conglomerate. One benefit of a large corporation like Walmart is the share holders are far more distributed.

My general point is that this fantasy of a "mom and pop utopia" of small businesses that Walmart and similar destroyed is just that - a total fantasy. They were not a dream situation and they went away because they were not the best for consumers or their community, not because of some grand conspiracy.

This is assuming "mom and pop stores" are beneficial. We certainly like them when driving through picturesque small towns but I know a lot of people living in those towns that prefer an efficient supplier. They understand what they lose but prefer to save money on their shopping trips.

Right.

Walmart not only sells merchandise cheaper than "Mom and Pop", they almost certainly pay their employees higher wages than Mom and Pop ever did. They also have a 401(k) (fully-vested after only 7 years) and an education program that covers tuition, books, and fees for majors of interest to Walmart (e.g., IT and supply-chain management).

The opportunities for advancement at "Mom and Pop" were pretty much limited to "Son or Daughter". By contrast, the current CEO of Walmart (annual compensation $22 million, net worth > $100 million) started working there as a summer job in high school, unloading trucks, and has never worked anywhere else.

Dollar General is wildly successful because they are filling a need.

No, not usually. Usually they are replacing a less profitable, but larger grocery store with a highly profitable, smaller dollar store. It's a greater profit at the cost of product selection.

In much of the midwest wallmart in 90s went to the biggest cities every 40-60 miles then that led to all local non chain spartan grocery stores going under. Driving back to my parents over past few years have seen all the small towns that used to have a grocery store now have a DG to take care of at least some needs and having to drive an hour for some laundry soap. DG has spent a lot of time figuring out the 60% of what you need with almost all goods same price as walmart

Not around here. They are showing up where there is no retail as well.

There is no such thing as a monoculyure here. posts that are critical of dollar stores get down-voted plenty. The only type of post / viewpoint that tends to get down-voted a lot is anything too conspiratorial. Or too extreme left/right on the economic spectrum.

The difficulty is that it can be both. Dollar stores almost certainly do SOME kind of good, otherwise they wouldn't exist. Unlike SV startups, I doubt the companies behind them are interested in burning piles of money without turning a profit. They ARE turning a profit, which means people are coming it, which means people find the service offered attractive.

That said, people also find the service offered by drug dealers attractive. And yet if the number of crack dealers in your neighborhood explodes overnight, it's unlikely most people will see that as a positive development. A healthy neighborhood is not one riddled with drug pushers, and a healthy economy is not one riddled with dollar stores. There's nothing wrong with a few discount stores, in the same way there's nothing wrong with someone stopping at a fast food place every once in a while. But if you're eating every meal there, something isn't right.

Why are we conflating discount stores with (illegal) drug dealing?

One offers convenience, along with relatively cheap products at relatively cheap prices. They occupy retail spaces in lower-end retail outlets that would - in current conditions - likely go unoccupied.

The other is an illegal activity engaged in norms-violating economic behavior outside of the rule of law.

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