Hacker News Reader

Comment by gkoberger | Hacker News Reader

I don't think that people in this thread appreciate how prevalent grocery shopping in dollar stores is. In the US, half of shoppers buy groceries from a dollar store. They do it because it's literally all they can afford anything else. There are more dollar stores than Walmart, Starbucks and McDonald’s combined.

"Kyle Dishman can’t afford to shop at the local grocery store anymore. Instead he goes to Dollar General, where he can make $40 stretch into a week’s worth of groceries and the occasional can of motor oil for his Chrysler 300."

Sources:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/08/20/growing-n...

https://www.mashed.com/224027/think-twice-before-buying-food...

EDIT: Of course not all things cost $1, but it's certainly weighted in that direction. You don't go to a dollar store for nice things; you do it because it's the only option for you. A lot of the responses seem to want to debate how poor people are making choices, and I think that misses the point.

View on HN

> They do it because it’s literally all they can afford anything else.

Dollar stores very often aren’t cheaper than other sources for similar products especially for grocery items (which they tend to have very limited selections of.)

People that shop for groceries at dollar stores do it because:

1. They shop for other things at dollar stores (either for price, or for reason #2, or because its the only place close by that carries the type of thing involved) and getting groceries there saves a trip,

2. Reputation for price without actual comparison,

3. Lack of actual grocery stores conveniently located,

Your own second article notes the relatively high prices (as well as quality issues) of dollar store groceries.

This is my experience with Dollar General when on trips and stopping for cheap snacks. Only the no brand generic items are cheap. Name brand items are not.

Dollar Tree, on the other hand, every item is a dollar and it's possible to get cheap cereal and other groceries but many small things like candy are more expensive.

>Dollar stores very often aren’t cheaper than other sources for similar products especially for grocery items (which they tend to have very limited selections of.)

Some products are. Especially the unhealthy-- candy and soda is cheaper. I used to get bread there, they'd have the same bread as nicer stores just closer to the 'best by' date. But it tasted fine to me. I would get dishes and cups, silverware, and socks. Are ended up being cheaper than even Walmart. It can be cost effective even if you have other options

How often do you need to buy dishes, cups and socks?

"Buy once cry once" only works when you have money. If all you can afford are dollar store socks, you're going to be buying a lot of dollar store socks. Being poor sucks.

Of course dollar store socks don't last as long as nicer ones but (I haven't run the numbers) they may very well still be the cheapest (or damn close) on a per day of use basis.

The cheapest things being the most cost effective uncommon for goods that are consumable due to long term wear and tear. You need to actually run the analysis for any given class of product.

This for sure. Been wearing a particular brand of socks for the last few years, a little more expensive. They fit great but I’m not sure they last any longer than my cheap ones did.

There are also plenty of items that will be treated as disposable no matter the “quality” in real life. A $20 toilet plunger that sits unused for a couple of years will have dry rot on the rubber and break on the first or second use the same as a $1 plunger.

My point is it's such a rare purchase it doesn't really matter if the price even doubles for the cheapest ones, especially compared to regular quality items, that may last marginally longer but are a lot more expensive.

1$ socks 4 times/year << 20$ socks 1 time/year even if the socks double in price. And that's with the assumption that 1$ socks are 4 times more likely to break, which is incredibly pessimistic.

Not the case for bread! 1$ bread twice a week for a year starts to look bleak if it increases in price.

Everytime you get evicted and the landlord throws your stuff on the curb

In addition, there's people that run out of money at the end of the month and need smaller size packages even if the per unit cost is higher.

> People that shop for groceries at dollar stores do it because:

4. They only have a dollar.

Yes, it's cheaper by the fluid ounce to buy a barrel of Pine-sol at Costco. But if you have $100 for groceries and household expenses this week, you'll pay more per ounce to minimize the cash-flow problem.

Their cash-flow constraints and cost of credit both prevent them from economizing. That is how most Americans shop.

$100 is plenty to afford groceries at a grocery store. If they only had $4 or something your point would make more sense.

You can take $30 to a grocery store and walk out with a decent quantity of rice and beans, at good prices per ounce.

I'm not sure where "poor people should subsist on only rice and beans" became a valid idea. Sure, I mean, it's a cheap meal. But it's also boring and soulcrushing to have everyday.

You're also aside the fact that rice and beans takes a good amount of time to prepare, which is a problem if you're working 16 hours a day - making rice takes 30 minutes and that is coming out of your sleep.

But most importantly, only having $4 at a time is how a lot of poor people have to shop. They have $4 today. Maybe they have $4 every work day as a day laborer. But they don't necessarily have $100 at the start of the week to plan everything out.

"But it's also boring and soulcrushing to have everyday" It's also rich in vegetable protein and a great source of fiber. Geez, when I think of "boring and soulcrushing" meals I think of SOYLENT not a nutritious meal enjoyed by tens of millions across LATAM on a daily basis.

Just plain rice and plain beans every day? I think there is a lot of work that goes into preparation you're willfully ignoring for in making it less boring and soulcrushing.

This is precisely why I avoided using adjectives such as savory or delicious. Taste is entirely subjective and varies widely from individual to individual. Nutrition on the other is based on scientific fact, hence why I chose to use terms such as: nutrients, fiber, protein.

Btw, I find the term "souldcrushing" to be an insult to the millions of individuals who rely on such food staples for their daily nutritional intake. Go do a quick search for levels of diabetes and obesity among nations which rely on plant based diets and then come back and talk to me about soulcrushing.

You seem to have a very utilitarian view of food that most people do not have: the average person does not quantify food purely in terms of their nutritional value, and enjoying the taste of it is a pretty big factor for if they want to eat it every day or not!

And again, comparing subsisting on "$30 of rice and beans" is a completely different proposition to "nations which rely on plant based diets": people in these nations are not eating unflavored rice and beans every day.

The op mentioned "$100 is plenty to afford groceries at a grocery store." Surely some of that could go into things like: salt and garlic, no? You also talk about "the average person" which makes me seriously wonder what you mean by this? What is an average person in your world view? I've had the opportunity to live in 3 different continents and I'd be hard pressed to describe an average person to you. Perhaps you are right and my views are a bit utilitarian, but I can assure you that my soul is not crushed whenever I sit down to eat a plate of moros y cristianos.

At $100/week you can trivially have have chicken every dinner. You made it $30/week to justify rice and beans as the sole meal. Which makes it harder to purchase addons. Especially if that works out to $7.50/person/week for a family of 4. Just over $1.07/person/day doesn't leave a lot of extra money.

>and enjoying the taste of it is a pretty big factor for if they want to eat it every day or not!

Yeah and people only enjoy the loudest music because they have to turn the volume down which makes everything else sound worse...

Sugar is like that, as you get used to the sugar rush, everything else tastes worse but only relatively worse, not absolutely worse.

I'm sorry but

>username

> Go do a quick search for levels of diabetes and obesity among nations which rely on plant based diets

And none of them rely on just rice and beans. They use spices and herb to make things taste better. You keep reading "rice and beans are soulcrushing" as "vegan food bad". When it's really a) repetitive and b) requires a lot of labor to make tasty. Most Asian saucy dishes are around making rice tastier.

If you believe that anyone counting cents is aware or concerned with it being "rich in protein" by your standards then count yourself among the disconnected. Survival is first.

"Geez"

I used to volunteer to feed the homeless vegan meals in downtown LA and also spent 2 years volunteering for a vegetarian soup kitchen in Copenhagen. Clearly you are the expert on the matter and I'm clearly the one "disconnected" from reality.

I don't know why we blame the poor for this but a bad diet is quite literally bad macro economics and good micro economics for the companies making the profits.

It's especially bad with all the fake/bullshit nutritional science that has to be debunked which created a whole weight loss industry.

Shitty refined carbs and sugar/corn syrup might save you money over the short term but over the long term you're going to pay the price with massive health issues. Considering most poor people's greatest asset is their own body that's false economics.

With an electric pressure cooker, say Instapot ($60 new, 11/23/21), prep time for rice is less than 3 minutes, and beans even less. Just did it. Cooking time from 1 cup beans (no presoak) to cooked is 1 hour, two cups rice to cooked is 20 minutes. Maybe you can do both combined at the same time in an hour. Total time of involvement by chef…about 5 minutes. And the pot keeps it warm until you wake up from your nap.

Don’t go “Four Yorkshiremen” on the price of the pressure cooker. You can get it for less used, and it’s a perfect present from anyone who knows money is an issue for you. Maybe free at dumpsters when college students are clearing out their dorm rooms.

Re: the “boring and soul rushing” bit…I recommend bringing that up with anyone in Mexico or Latin America. Or are those type of people just…different (or more creative)?

I also have a pressure cooker, cooking time for rice is nowhere close to 3 minutes, it's about 30 minutes.

You misread their comment: prep time 3 mins (i.e. the time you are actively doing anything), the rest is it cooking away on its own.

For folks who are keeping 2 jobs just to stay afloat that cooking time is carved from sleep time.

Rice and beans is a basis. There's also a lot of corn. But it's not that those people are different, it's that preparation takes a real amount of time.

There's also the time cost and, in the case of Costco, membership cost. Plus the general lack of knowledge of all of the above.

With $100 perhaps I could walk into Costco and get huge quantities of maybe 1/4 of what I need in a given week, and because I bought it at Costco instead of Dollar Tree those items will last me two months instead of a week. But now I have to go to Dollar Tree anyway and that's hard because I work 6 days a week and Costco is really far away because I live in a rural town where even a Walmart is at least 20 minutes away.

It's of course smarter to take the 20 minute drive to Walmart and save even there, but if I'm rural and uneducated I probably don't know that and assume that the per unit price at Dollar Tree is roughly the same as Walmart.

They may not have the space for a barrel of Pine-sol either.

> Yes, it's cheaper by the fluid ounce to buy a barrel of Pine-sol at Costco.

Its frequently cheaper to buy the same size package of a grocery item at a traditional grocery store than a dollar store; I've seen cases as extreme as things that regularly go 4/$1 (and occasionally go on sale at 10/$1) at regular grocery stores going for 1/$1 at a dollar store.

But if you don't have a regular grocery store in convenient distance (walking/biking distance if you don't have working car!), that doesn't matter. (Costco and similar stores present another level of problem; they tend to both be more distant for most people than even standard grocery stores and to bias toward larger package sizes—aside from whether you can afford to tie up money in the larger item even with a smaller unit cost, storage space becomes a problem.)

I have seen the same loss leaders at “traditional” supermarkets, but it’s also true that stores like that are disappearing from rural areas. And they’re usually losing out to a Dollar General or Dollar Tree. So even in head-to head competition, dollar stores are meeting some perceived need.

Then, in the suburbs, it seems grocery stores are trying to go up the chain by focusing on prepared foods. The cheap cafe has been replaced by bar covered in shiplap and the fruit trays run $25 after labor.

Except it's not just a cash flow problem, it's first and foremost a community collapse problem. Poor immigrants buy in bulk and share all the time. Eventually the only way to avoid poverty is effectively cooperating with other people - at work to accomplish tasks worth paying for, social networking to get a job, staying married to provide for children. I am not patronizing anyone here, just acknowledging that their troubles have many more dimensions than just unit prices of small portions of various goods.

Yes, depopulation of small towns accompanies a lot of this, which means you have isolated seniors and the disadvantaged making up a lot of rural places.

But the economic incentives to leave it all behind for the big city are strong. The internet makes it better, in theory, but there’s an online political divide, too.

When I was a college student I priced Walmart and the dollar store on over one hundred items. My experience was that the dollar store was indeed cheaper than other sources.

I did notice that some of the products (like deodorant) typically "the sell by" date was much faster, but that wasn't a deterrent to me at the time.

I bought from the Dollar Store exclusively for 3 years for two reasons : 1) It was cheaper 2) the closest competitive store was 20 miles away

Classic analysis by someone who seemingly has never been dirt poor. It may be tough to believe, but y'know what'd surprise literally none of the poors if you told them? That they pay more money for less product at the dollar store than elsewhere.

Despite their limited ability, they ARE able to look at price tags in different stores and go "hey, wait a minute!"

If you're dollar store level poor, it's expensive and stressful, and you're constantly weighing spending money now versus keeping what little remains for whatever awful thing is going to leave you destitute. There's a fair amount of conflicting and complex psychology going on in that shopping decision beyond not just knowing that they should comparison shop.

Your first sentence sums up the majority of this site on any socioeconomic issue. At this point the term “financial literacy” is exclusively used by armchair poverty quarterbacks.

> armchair poverty quarterbacks

HA! I'm picturing the kid that owned the football and would threaten to take it home if he didn't get to be quarterback :)

I'm very bad with money. I never look at my account balance when I spend money. Heck, often months pass without me looking at my account at all. When I end up seeing the balance it is always much higher than I expected.

What am I missing? Oh right, I earn more than the average person in my country and I'm so busy I don't even have time to spend the money.

Earning more money than average and spending less money than average is typically considered being “good” with money. Not the best if you are not investing it to keep up with inflation, but most people do not get past the “earning more money” requirement of being good with money.

I have been dirt poor most of my life. And I can tell you I was careful about where I shopped.

And many other poor people I knew _blew_ tons of money on McDonald's because "they couldn't afford to cook"

It's not so cut and dry.

> Classic analysis by someone who seemingly has never been dirt poor.

I’ve been dirt poor; I’ve never been in a situation where “dollar store as regular grocery source” made sense (though I’ve shopped in dollar stores, and occasionally when I did found deals on grocery items that were worthwhile), and I am very much aware of why that was never the case for me and why it is and was sometimes for other people.

Also, not all people who shop at dollar stores are dirt poor.

> It may be tough to believe, but y'know what'd surprise literally none of the poors if you told them? That they pay more money for less product at the dollar store than elsewhere.

Actually, it would probably suprise some of them. Believe it or not, poorly informed poor people do exist. The idea that they don't is as misguided as the idea that all poor people are poorly informed.

> Despite their limited ability, they ARE able to look at price tags in different stores

Not really, when reason #3 (“Lack of actual grocery stores conveniently located”) applies. Comparison shopping takes time and effort that is something of a luxury in the best of cases, but it also takes having alternatives in the first place.

> If you're dollar store level poor, it's expensive and stressful, and you're constantly weighing spending money now versus keeping what little remains for whatever awful thing is going to leave you destitute.

That's true, but it doesn't contradict anything I said. It's like you have a canned rant about poor people that you arr trotting out independent of its actual relevance to the discussion.

> There's a fair amount of conflicting and complex psychology going on in that shopping decision beyond not just knowing that they should comparison shop.

Which would perhaps be an insightful counterargument if I had said something even approximately like “poor people who shop at dollar stores do it because they don't realize they should comparison shop”. Of the three reasons I gave for people shopping at dollar stores, only one relates to a failure to understand the price realities, and I never suggested that one was particularly common among the poor.

Dollar stores are a relatively recent phenomenon, a consequence of the destruction of local retail by various chains--first chain groceries, then Wal-Mart, etc. Dollar stores have slowly filled in the gaps left by the closure of local retailers and low-end chains like A&P. At first chains drove down prices, such as precipitous price declines brought by chain groceries, and then those Wal-Mart brought to everything else. But consolidation in the chain industry, including Wal-Mart displacing lower end chains and then slowly moving up market, left gaps, especially at the very low end. Dollar stores slowly filled in those gaps, but as they did so they ceased being literal dollar stores. And like any for-profit chain, they've begun using their market dominance to increase prices.

> Despite their limited ability, they ARE able to look at price tags in different stores and go "hey, wait a minute!"

Not really. Dollar stores have become so ubiquitous precisely because of their market dominance in areas without options--retail deserts, if you will. If you've really been dirt poor--and dirt poor outside the major cities and suburbs--you would know that driving 20-30 miles to the Wal-Mart two towns over, presuming they even have lower prices, can be cost prohibitive (especially when considering wear-and-tear and the risk of breaking down) when you're living day-to-day, even though in the long-term you end up paying more at the dollar store. Drive across the vast areas of rural and poor America and you'll see dollar stores in the most random and remotest of places; places that 10, 20, or 30 years ago had more options--you may even see their long shuttered remains somewhere nearby.

This is the classic dilemma the impoverished face, and have always faced--it takes money to make (or save) money. Yes, increases in prices at dollar stores will negatively impact alot of people. But when decrying the state of the nation you have to understand why that is and what it means. For example, before someone blames inflation, maybe they should look at profit margins. AFAICT, they've rose relatively sharply since COVID-19: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/DG/dollar-general/... Indeed, the "narrowing" of Dollar Tree's earnings forecast mentioned in the article, from $5.40-$5.60 to $5.48-$5.58, is maybe better described as an upward adjustment. I suspect the price increase will help margins even further.

> Dollar stores are a relatively recent phenomenon

Kind of, but only because of the brief interregnum of the ~1970s-1990s height of suburban shopping malls. Dollar stores are a revival of the general variety discount stores — “five-and-dime” or “dime stores” — that largely either fell to suburbanization and shopping malls or morphed out of the model into mega-retailers (Walton’s Five-and-Dime, for instance, is now known as WalMart) or did the latter but still ended up doing the fomer (e..g, Kmart); the new dollar stores were rising just as many of the earlier giants of the same model were taking their last breaths in the late 1990s and 2000s; at least one of the early dollar store chains (Dollar Zone) was a rebranding of a classic general variety discount store chain that had started as a literal dime store chain (McCrory’s).

The rise of dollar stores tracks pretty well with the decline of the malls that had marginalized the original variety discount stores. They weren’t so much a new phenomenon as something that went through about a generation of marginalization.

> y'know what'd surprise literally none of the poors if you told them?

Because apparently all poor people all the same in your mind.

>Dollar stores very often aren’t cheaper than other sources for similar products especially for grocery items (which they tend to have very limited selections of.)

Yep. They're usually not competitive on unit price. In areas that aren't shopping deserts, they cater to folks who can't afford to fill their car's gas tank on a whim -- they need X, they need it today, so they'll get what they can today. "It's expensive to be poor."

What I've found them good for is stuff I use super sparingly, and odd items. For example, envelopes. A box of 20 for $1 isn't great per unit, but it takes me FIVE YEARS to go through that box that takes up less space than a larger one, so still a win. Toothbrush for $1 is hard to argue. Gift bags and greeting cards are a fraction of where you easily find them elsewhere. If I'm out and really need a drink, if it's the closest option I may get a diet soda or a bottle of water.

I rarely go to one, but I'll go through one periodically to observe what's there and make a mental note of the few things that are the obvious deal given my situation.

> "It's expensive to be poor."

This is a talking point I wish more people on HN understood.

Can't afford a dental cavity filling? It becomes a root canal next year. Maybe you'll settle on just a simple extraction, and now you're down a tooth with no hope of ever affording a dental bridge, let alone an implant.

Can't afford to get a lump checked out? Three years later, you're unable to afford the stage 3 cancer treatment.

Buying the massive 30-roll pack of toilet paper from Costco for $15 is cheaper than buying 6-packs for $5, but you only have $20 to last the week, and you gotta buy food, too.

>Dollar stores very often aren’t cheaper than other sources for similar products especially for grocery items (which they tend to have very limited selections of.)

This isn't true for many of the core staple items sold by traditional retail and dollar channels. There are many identical or equivalent products that are sold at significantly lower price points.

I know this because I've literally read product cannibalization reports the retailers produce to quantify the margin loss associated with sales via the dollar channel.

Can also see this by finding basically any product on Amazon and then being suggested like 30 competitors offering the same the same thing made in the same factory.

Just because a store has 'dollar' in its name doesn't mean it's a dollar store. Dollar General in particular is not the kind of store where all or even most things are a dollar, which was the traditional meaning of 'dollar store'.

At least your own source notes this: "And despite their names, many dollar chains, including Family Dollar and Dollar General, sell items that cost $10 or more. Dollar Tree remains the only major retailer that continues to price its entire inventory for $1."

I shopped at a couple Dollar Generals on a road trip this past summer (it was interesting to see how many towns we passed through had one, as opposed to some other brand) and it seemed to me like a scaled down Fred Meyer, or a super scaled down Walmart. Maybe a scaled up gas station? And that's fine for most people, as evidenced by their market success. They tend to stock the same popular stuff as a bigger grocery store would. But you're not magically going to pay $1 for your full sized frozen pizza just because of the name. Indeed I can see an ad advertising two-for-$8 Tombstone pizzas, which is about the same as routine sales at my local Safeway in the rich Seattle area.

(And an edit for your edit, you're vaguely complaining that something is wrong for the subset of people where such stores are the only option, as if shipping and delivery don't exist, but whatever, you want them to have no options? I know you probably don't but it'd be more constructive to articulate what you actually want.)

"In the US, half of shoppers buy groceries from a dollar store."

I do not think it means half of Americans buy groceries from dollar general. I do not think it means of all those who shop groceries, half of them buy it from dollar general. I think it means, half of the people who buy stuff at dollar store also buy some groceries there. It does not mean much when put it that way.

I am familiar with poor people's shopping habits. The biggest advantage that Dollar stores have over others is not the price but rather their convenient location. A lot of Indians/Chinese students who come on shoestring budget would often buy lot of junk food from dollar store because they did not own car. For other items such as rice etc. they would request me to buy a large bag for them and then divide it among themselves. Similarly, trip to walmart etc. were rationed mostly because they did not own cars. People who owned cars on other hand could stretch their budgets even more. It was not uncommon for 5 of the folks to share one car, share a costco membership and buy in bulk and save lot of money in the process.

The big problem with this is that Dollar Stores generally don't have a produce section. Everything is in a box, bag, or can. This is not healthy. $40/week for a single person isn't an easy food budget, but I think could manage that at my grocery store. It's $5.71 per day for three meals. You really need to optimize for calories. Pasta, dried beans, potatoes, not much meat or dairy, even produce is a bit of a luxury. This is the kind of budget that puts those "just drink one less Starbucks coffee a day" comments into perspective. And forget about eating out, even a single fast food meal would blow your entire budget for the day. This becomes a very serious challenge if he's trying to feed a family of 4 on that budget.

> $40/week for a single person isn't an easy food budget

What? One person can easily get by on $40/week for food.

Start working it out at your grocery store. It's not as easy as it looks.

I'm not saying it is impossible, far from it, but you do have to be conscious of every single purchase. That head of broccoli is $2 this week? Maybe not in the budget. Apples are up to $1/each again, those are right out. These aren't crazy organic prices either, this is regular produce and store brands. This goes double if you're trying to eat a healthy balanced diet and not going for a college kid ramen diet.

Even worse with a budget so small it is hard to take advantage of buying in bulk to save money. Buy a 50lb sack of potatoes and you can't afford to each much of anything else for the week. Buying flour to make bread is a great cost saver when you are buying in 40lb bags, but not so great in the 5lb bags with the markup.

Completely off topic but as someone who had to do something equivalent in an European country you can eat well for less than 40$ a week if you know how to cook.

Buying a whole chicken is far less expensive that buying cuts and is a cheap source of meat. You can make good stock from the bones. Vegetables at the end of their shelf life are often substantially marked down and you can often freeze what you cook with them (sauce and curry for exemple). Rice is very cheap, polenta too. Fresh pasta are easy to make and delicious as are homemade tortillas. Eggs are only 16c a piece. Fresh garlic and ginger are not too expensive and with a small selection of spices and soy sauce they will go a long way in making things better. Then, you can somewhat easily grow basil, parsley, thymes and cilantro on a window sill.

Olive oil and butter were the only expensive product I used to buy but a little goes a long way.

Everything may be in a box, bag, or can (perhaps even frozen!) but that doesn't mean it's not healthy. Nor does availability of produce mean a particular individual is going to buy a (presumably healthy?) sack of apples over that (presumably unhealthy?) super sugary apple juice, or box of Apple Jacks cereal.

Philosophically, man, humans weren't meant to have fresh produce of all kinds from all over the world year-round. That a lot of us do can be a nice luxury for some, but I think it'd be really hard to justify such a state as a necessary component of a healthy diet.

I agree with you that budgeting sucks and is harder the less you have, though.

> You really need to optimize for calories. Pasta, dried beans, potatoes, not much meat or dairy, even produce is a bit of a luxury.

Pasta, rice, beans, and potatoes are good for calories but time consuming to prepare. They're also difficult to prepare if you've got a shitty stove, a lot of cheap apartments have ridiculously terrible electric stoves. The above food are also bland without some seasoning which is another thing to buy. A microwave a one or two good microwave safe containers is usually much cheaper, faster, and more consistent.

If you're on $5 a day to eat you'll get more variety and options just getting canned food. While dollar stores lack fresh produce they usually have a fair amount of canned produce. While obviously not as good it's better than pasta and rice every day.

The dollar store I go to has a big frozen food section including frozen veggies which are as nutritious as fresh as far as I’ve heard.

> In the US, half of shoppers buy groceries from a dollar store.

I think you are misreading the (ambiguous) mashed.com text, "More than half of shoppers now visit dollar stores to buy groceries, eMarketer reports, up from 21 percent just a few years ago.". It does not mean that more than half of all grocery shoppers buy their groceries at dollar stores, but that more than half of dollar store shoppers are shopping at the dollar store to buy groceries.

Actual market share of dollar stores in the grocery business is 2.9%, but this is expected to increase to 3.2%

https://www.supermarketnews.com/issues-trends/will-supermark...

> afford

Afford is an elusive concept. Dollar stores are often more expensive per-unit, but cheaper per-package. If the shoppers had better access to financing, some might choose to take a longer trip to, say, Costco, and buy things at a cheaper per-unit price in a more expensive package.

Pretty sure the idea of financing groceries, or common daily/weekly expendables isn't a very good one.

Why do you think payday loan shops exist?

Primarily to pay government fines and auto repair bills. Nobody is getting a payday loan to buy groceries. They're doing it to stave off things that if ignored will cause them to lose their income and slide further into poverty.

They're poor, not stupid.

Actually the most common reason is to pay rent because you can't bill that on a credit cart.

Depends on the price, of course. Compare the per-unit prices, your warehousing costs, and the interest rate on the loan.

Dollar General is not a "dollar store"

> Even though Dollar General has the word “dollar” in its name, everything in the store doesn’t go for a buck; their merchandise is just low priced.

https://www.rd.com/article/dollar-tree-vs-dollar-general/

Also, a lot of places that don't have a local grocery store do have a dollar store. You can make $40 into a pretty luxurious week of food at Aldi if you know how to cook, and a perfectly fine week of food if you don't. The problem is when the nearest Aldi is miles away, or you don't drive.

Maybe HN is richer than I thought, but I shop at Dollar Stores all the time and have a very good paying job. And I’m not alone, it’s not just poor people who shop there (go to the one in Daly City and see the clientele).

This thread comes across as incredibly out of touch. It’s like a bunch of upper middle class who imagine themselves lower middle class and anyone who shops at Walmart (yuck!) or Dollar Store must be destitute. Despite those stores being pretty average places to shop for most Americans.

You can get killer deals there. They tend to sell two different things:1) excess stock they got cheap and sell cheap and 2) normally high margin items for less.

Their health section is amazing compared to say CVS or Walgreens. We’re talking 80% cheaper for the same thing.

Not everything is cheaper but a lot of it is.

There are other reasons that people buy from dollar stores. I occasionally buy a few things at Dollar Tree when I want a smaller portion sizes for some basic goods. I also just like going when I'm in the mood to impulse buy stuff for hobbies etc.

Dollar General, on the other hand, has notoriously positioned itself in underserved areas. While it's true that many of these areas are underserved because they are low-income areas, that's not necessarily the case. In semi-rural areas, Dollar General is often the closest general goods store, and people of all income levels will go there.

His Chrysler 300?

This thing Wikipedia describes as a V8 powered “full-size luxury car”?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrysler_300

Probably more like a cheap V6 leaking or burning oil. Something like this [0] (Not that I'm accusing that specific one, but I wouldn't bet against it either)

[0] https://www.autotrader.com/cars-for-sale/vehicledetails.xhtm...

My first car was a luxury car... fifteen years before I bought it. I like to think I got a good deal thanks to the ugly tomato red interior.

In no world is a Chrysler 300 a luxury car.

It isn't a good luxury car, but it objectively is one. "Luxury car" is a description of market segment, not a measure of quality.

These are a dime a dozen on the used market.. Could easily be one from the mid 2000s. Literally 1-3k for a 2005-08 (condition varies of course)

In my experience it is incredibly common for people without much money to have cars that seem impractical, because they are easy to buy but hard to maintain. I think this is pretty common with cars that were very popular when they were first released (the 300 was) so the market is saturated with old ones in rough condition that are cheap to purchase but terrible to maintain.

Sample size of 1, but my roommate in college (I was in college, he was not) went through 3 cars in the amount of time I had just 1 because he only ever had enough money to buy a crappy car and had terrible credit. They all broke down pretty quickly so he ended up spending more in the long-run, but in the end he had to get to work, so he did what he had to do.

Well cared for FCA products (and several other makes) are rare because they offer permissive financing and tons of incentives and intentionally design to keep low MSRPs. This results in lots of of people of more modest means owning them initially. That is a recipe for hard miles and minimal maintenance.

Your average Chrysler 300 is likely to have far more wear on the bump stops and in the back seats and trunk and far fewer scheduled maintenance items done than a 4Runner or some other car that has high class first owners.

I was wondering why my dodge dropped in value so fast. I kept it over 8 years so it averaged out but those first years were tough.

I had to repair a thermostat and condenser in those 8 years, but I found it was much easier to work on then my brother in law’s Ford - the thermostat was impossible to get to without destroying your hand on that one.

It probably has way more to do with quality & reliability. You could treat a 4Runner like absolute shit for a decade and it would probably have more quality miles & years left in it than most other makes (much less American vehicles, sadly).

If you really want to take a gamble though, buy a Porsche Cayenne from 2002-2009, there’s like 3 or more for sale in every medium sized city for $8k max. If you drive it for 2 years and the transmission explodes, hey $333 / month Porsche SUV minus scrap! If it dies in 6 months, not such a great deal.

Just about every full size luxury car depreciates faster then anything else on the market meaning an older luxury sedan COULD be affordable to the average person. All though I would not consider this a smart idea unless you are mechanically inclined. Chrysler sold more V6 300's than V8's anyway -- Try again.

I mean, it probably was a "luxury" car when it was new. They do not hold their value though.

It's usually a greater-than decade old vehicle, common in the early-mid 2000's. Luxury cars (especially American luxury cars) have a trend of being extremely inexpensive to purchase compared to other vehicles when the age vs. their original price.

For example, a similar year Toyota, Subaru, or pre-CVT Nissans will hold higher values than equivalent American brand vehicles, with some exceptions.

>For example, a similar year Toyota, Subaru, or pre-CVT Nissans will hold higher values than equivalent American brand vehicles, with some exceptions.

Cars move down the economic ladder as they age. A similiar year Camry, Accord, or other InternetApproved(TM) cheap to run commuter car, is going to be in much nicer shape because it started a few dozen rungs higher than that '04 Impala, Sebring or whatever domestic we're comparing to. The price will reflect that niceness.

The Camry that's the same price as the average '04 Impala is going to be in equivalently rough shape and will be an older model year because it took it longer to get to that point because it started in nicer hands.

Seriously, punch in a $3000 price limit into your preferred classified section and see what it gets you.

These people are poor, not stupid. They're buying Big3/Korean/VW/Nissan sedans because that's what's available in the best condition and lowest miles at that price point because nobody wants them because they're not as practical as crossovers and people making white collar money don't fetishize them as ideal beater cars the way they do Toyotas and Hondas of that era.

And there are 2006 Chrysler 300s in the Bay Area for under $4 grand a piece on craigslist. As an asking price. The parts seem fairly affordable as well, judging from the parted out ones also on the bay area craiglist.

It's entirely reasonable that poor people have older model luxury cars, either purchased 3rd hand or from when they were better off financially. After all, how much do you think you'd pocket selling your old 2006 [any non-collectable car] if you had to buy something new to drive around.

Yeah. If you want a V8 sedan on a budget Chrysler 300s are a great option (as were the used Ford panther family of cars that preceded them in that market niche).

....which is why they're so stigmatized by the white collar well to do crowd.

They are stigmatized because they are garbage quality FCA vehicles.

My city’s Craigslist has several listed for sale:

- 06, $500

- 06, $4k

- 06, $12k

- 07, $5.9k

- 08, $2k

- 08, $6.2k

- 11, $17k

- 12, $12k

- 13, $7.5k

- 13, $7.9k

A 50lb bag of white rice can be had on Amazon for $88, which translates into roughly 1k calories/$1 delivered to your doorstep for free in two-three days. You can get similar calorie/$ value with pasta, peanut butter, oatmeal. No one who has $40/week to spend on food in America needs to go anywhere close to hungry if they don't waste their money and time driving to dollar stores to buy overpriced non-bulk groceries. You Americans can't afford frozen pizza and think that means you're suffering

If someone only has $40 for groceries, how will they be able to come up with $88 for just plain rice?

The answer is that they can’t get those same discounts buying larger scale items.

I agree there are still some cases where people may spend irresponsibly, but it’s a different problem than “cheaper calories exist in large enough quantities”

Ok, so you now need:

A credit card + bank account

A stable address and room to store bulk stuff

A place to get packages where they won't be stolen

$88

You’re talking homeless which is a subset of poor.

Whenever someone says “the poor can do this” someone comes along to give an example of poor people who can’t. We get it, but there are plenty of poor who can do those things.

You can add cash to your Amazon account at AllPoint ATMs, CVS, Walgreens, RiteAid, GameStop, 7-11 and many other stores.

That price is not even cheap, grocery stores have rice at a much lower unit price in much smaller packages. Dollar store rice is likely in between them and still a very solid calorie deal. There is still a requirement that one has time, equipment & energy to cook with, though.

> A 50lb bag of white rice can be had on Amazon for $88

There's an obvious problem with cost per unit tricks like this. You have to be able to front the money to buy the big bag of rice. If your food budget is $40/wk, how are you going to spend $88 on a bag of rice? With your non-existent savings account? By eating plain rice and literally nothing else for > two weeks?

I think the point is that people on the poverty line eventually have to start making decisions that will break them out of the cycle. There are plenty of programs out there that will do just that. A 50lb bag of rice might very well be too much upfront but it might mean hitting the local food pantry while building up a pantry full of staples from EBT. I don't pretend this is an easy process but continuing to do that same and getting the same results shouldn't be surprising to anyone. Additionally, it can't be stated enough how important it is to build up credit for these people.

You could do a community purchase with your neighbors. Where I'm from people even register officially as cooperatives in order to buy stuff at bulk with proper accounting. Now some people who are super poor might also have horrible social skills, but that is already a compounding issue and moves goal posts.

I'm picking your response, but it's typical of an archetype that's bothersome in a different way to the GP's archetype of pointing out that volume discounts exist. When you're poor, your food budget isn't a crisp reliable $40/wk that you give like an API call to the store for a constant amount of the same food with $0 left. No, the amount varies up and down, as does the kind of food you get that week, as does the amount left over after all ordinary expenses. This leads to the conclusion that if your time frame expands beyond one week, saving is possible! Even poor people understand saving up, despite archetypes like the GP imagining this is unknown to them and that their particular proposal is the best course of action, or archetypes like yours imagining that it's somehow impossible for them. Oh, and a savings account is unnecessary.

Incidentally, the median US household is said by the BLS to be capable of saving $1k/mo after all ordinary expenses. For those who actually save, a savings account typically isn't the mechanism to do it. This leads to "funny" statistics pushed by news outlets on how a huge percentage of people, even HNers who have thousands or even millions saved up in mostly liquid assets, have no savings, because they're sampling either non-existent or non-useful-and-thus-empty savings accounts.

All good points. I was using GP’s $40/wk for the sake of argument, and “savings account” more as a figure of speech than to literally refer to a savings account (for the reasons you pointed out). I do contend that, for people who have such a small amount available for food every week, saving any amount of money (let alone $1k/mo) is extremely difficult. Life is a never ending barrage of unexpected financial hits, especially when you’re already living frugally.

As pointed out elsewhere, when you are dirt poor it's not about unit price. It's about cash flow. Very often it's impossible to drop $90 at once on anything, not to mention the luxury of having Amazon Prime.

I don’t think that was supposed to be the bottom example, it’s half as expensive per unit at Target for 2 lb bags.

All of the people objecting to your comment seem to believe that the poor have no access to credit. Obviously, they do, often to a dangerous extent. And obviously, a wise use of the same credit that gets plastic trash at Walmart could get bulk food. But there are people (and not just "the poor") who simply don't plan ahead, ever, and sure don't plan ahead something that will require very bland-sounding food prep, week after week after week.

I don’t think you appreciate that everything at “Dollar Tree” actually costs a dollar or at leas did.

They have a higher priced section now. Not everything is $1 at Dollar Tree any more. At least here in Colorado.

If you want to save money on groceries you should be going to Aldi or Sav a Lot, not Dollar stores. Their products are terrible (mostly house brands) and prices aren't even good.

The first model of the recent generation was 2005, so it could be a 16 year old car. A quick check on Autotrader shows these cars selling for about $6500.

Neither of those are in rural areas. Heck, people I know in urban areas are still excited when the Aldi's come to town.

There’s one in the town of 20,000 next to me (15 minutes away) along with two other grocery stores and a Walmart.

There’s nothing in my town of 2,000 of course, though I believe there’s a Dollar-Something in another local town.

I mean, nexuses of grocery stores exist in rural areas. But 15 minutes is pretty close for such a town. 5% of rural people live in a food desert. Meanwhile you probably live in Ohio or Illinois, because if you look at the Aldi map, that seems to be where most rural Aldis are. (WI and FL are the next guesses.) But, with three exceptions in NM and a bunch in Cali, there are no Aldis west of Dallas. That's a huge area.

Minnesota, actually.

For what it’s worth I don’t shop there. The one time I did I was unimpressed - that was the first time I’ve ever seen fruit flies in a grocery store. I also needed to go to my regular grocery store after and it was a huge timesuck.

Also, you're implying (2,000; 20,000) that you live in a rural area (that was the topic.) But there are a lot of suburbs of Minneapolis that seem to fit that bill.

I found Aldi to be perfectly fine, although you had to want whatever random stuff you got outside of a few fresh fruits. No flies at the ones I've been to, but that could just be because it's closer to a distribution hub? MN is the extreme ccorner of the area they serve.

Save a Lot's packaging and bags are extremely poor quality. Try dropping one of their yogurt containers (when it's not past its expiry date or moldy before that) or walking a distance with one of their paper bags.

That's the significance of Dollar Tree making this announcement - they are the dollar store chain that does actually price everything at $1.

> grocery shopping in dollar stores

> Dollar General

Dollar General has never been a "dollar store" in the way you're thinking.

Are they selling the same goods as walmart/target etc. or have their own branded goods?

Isn't that the motor oil that's not rated for cars after the mid-80s or something?

It was probably thrown in to give a sense of the variety available, but just about every grocery store or even gas station has cheap motor oil available. It's not like you need very much of it very often. It's just a bad article with bad quotes. I'm sure a huge number of people on HN remember weeks as a poor student and having to hack $10 to last a week or more. $40 a week, that's a luxury!

> It's not like you need very much of it very often

You never drove an old hooptie, like I did in my early years!

Oh, how I am reminded that I need to add yet another quart of oil into my Isuzu for the next two weeks.

So that’s how you keep it from rolling over.

Dollar Tree motor oil is API SN rated. It is basic oil that will work in many basic late model vehicles.

Whenever an article says cheap food is bad, just close it.

You can get a loaf of whole wheat bread for $1, or you can buy a TV dinner for $1.

Efficiency Is Everything website has researched this.

This is a low information problem, not a capitalism problem.

hear hear

That quote is absurd. A Chrysler 300 is a luxury car.

Not necessarily, let's say it's a 2008, you can easily find 300 junkers now worth almost nothing.

Are these any good? I might need a car on the cheap soon.

It depends on what your criteria for "any good" are. Most cars that have depreciated rapidly do so because their maintenance burden is high. If you think you have a better-than-average ability to absorb or mitigate this risk, then it might be a wise purchase. If you cannot, it is probably an unwise purchase.

If you're mechanically inclined and have a place to do the work, pretty much any old American (due to parts availability) car is "good enough." Buying your own tools is almost always far less expensive than going to a mechanic. Time is the real cost!

It's easier now than it has been to learn how to keep cars running.

Chrysler 300s have been on the road for a long time. Just because new one is in the $35k range doesn’t mean that one from 10-15 years ago is that expensive. Chryslers also generally depreciate faster than say a Toyota Camry or Corolla.

Eh. I mean, I know it wants to be one. And brand new I'm sure they're nice. But most 300s I see around me are old beaters you can buy (even now) for less than $6k. [0]

And if someone needs an occasional quart of oil for their car, it's likely got some miles on it. It's not some pricey luxury automobile anymore. It's just an old Chrysler.

[0] https://www.autotrader.com/cars-for-sale/vehicledetails.xhtm...

I may be mistaking it for another car, but they also seemed to be popular with Uber drivers. So maybe he got conned into the “buy a Chrysler 300 on this here loan and drive for Uber black” thing.

Cool. Get hung up on one aspect of the story (for no good reason) and ignore the broader economic and societal implications.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com