Small Town America vs. Big Box Stores | Hacker News Reader

Small Town America vs. Big Box Stores

strongtowns.org

58 pointsspking73 comments

> "we're not against change, we're not against business, if you want to open a nice little coffee shop and bookstore, but Dollar General just isn't quite a good fit."

this line stood out to me because it mirrored a lot of debate in my small rural community when a dollar general proposed moving in (spoiler alert: DG won).

the debates around DG had a way of exposing some previously-unseen class and economic divisions in the the community. it wasn't a NIMBY vs YIMBY thing -- both wanted development -- but they just had very different needs and expectations.

you have one group that wants the cute little bookstores/coffeeshops to preserve "local character". they may not be rich, but they aren't struggling day to day so they say "I don't mind paying a little extra to support local business".

then there's the other group which says "i don't have any extra money to support local business". they'd love to be in a position to worry about local character, but today they just need to be able to afford another single roll of TP and have some snacks for their kid after school.

in my community, these two groups existed in their own little bubbles never really interacted until the DG debate came up, so in a way it was good for dissolving some of those boundaries.

“it wasn't a NIMBY vs YIMBY thing -- both wanted development”

This distinction isnt the most important point here but this is very much NIMBY-ism. Blocking a development because the community has different opinions about what should be built, particularly opinions they don’t want to fund via their tax dollars is basically textbook NIMBY-ism.

It doesn’t have to be tax dollars funded. It’s about what they “want” and don’t “want”. It’s about having an opinion, almost entirely shaped by self interest, and not caring about anything else. That’s textbook NIMBY-ism.

in this particular case you're probably right, especially for the people opposed to DG on 'local character' grounds.

but it's not like YIMBYs literally say "yes" to every development. there's also DG opposition on the basis of creating sprawl on the outskirts of town, and that's the type of opposition you'd probably hear from the strongtowns-loving YIMBY types. they are strongly opposed to the types of developments that increase sprawl because of long-term infrastructure costs, reduced walkability, etc.

The principled approach to YIMBYism is to say yes to (or rather, to not artificially stand in the way of) every development (within reason). Otherwise you're just another NIMBY with slightly different opinions about what types of things you don't want in your backyard. Generally speaking the market is pretty good about sorting out what what developments provide value on its own without interference from the loud minority of people who want to vote on everything with their voices rather than their feet.

Yes, people do unfairly call me a NIMBY but ultimately I’m just trying to make sure that the thing that is being built in my backyard is community-oriented, socially-responsible, ethical, environmentally conscious, and built by local artisans using local materials.

And if we can’t do it right, then maybe we shouldn’t do it.

That's a great attitude if you can afford it.

But try telling it to the single low-income parent trying to raise their kids who just needs to make ends meet at the end of the month.

Unless you have a massive wealth redistribution plan in place, with massive, extremely progressive local taxes so everyone can afford the massively higher prices you'll be forcing on everyone?

An angle on that: Imagine getting rid of the big cost factor, the car. And having a walkable neighborhood with school, stores, medical care, workplaces in workable (or short bicycle ride) away.

Of course this won't magically happen when a single DG is rejected.

We can also do a lot to help low income families by decreasing housing costs and medical costs, both of which seem as likely as building walkable communities in the US.

Yeah I see a lot of stuff in America where decades of single-minded optimization towards cheap & convenient has had knock-on effects that ultimately don't serve people very well, or wind up creating second order costs—like hollowing out downtowns for cheap stuff at Walmart being a big part of making car ownership a prerequisite for daily living, or the cheap and convenient food options that have precipitated a nationwide public health crisis, or the way we've constructed our built environment in a way that has seemingly left people unhappy and isolated.

I'd tell them about the importance of union rights. We're all sacrificing a little but the important thing is to protect unions.

People never consider the chapter of local artisans anymore

The problem is that the big corporate stores end up making the town poorer. They siphon money out of the community, undercut local businesses, and turn over control of a tax-producing plot of land to a corporate office out-of-state (country?) that probably doesn't care what happens to the town. If they pull out, you're screwed. If they stay and have deleterious policies of one kind or another, you're screwed.

The local businesses and well-to-do need to come together and make a plan to make keeping these companies out a more palatable notion. Special pricing for people on government assistance is the way one of my local co-op grocers does it. I'm sure there are other ways to innovate, too, but adopting them requires realizing that the less affluent are your neighbors, not obstacles.

Is this satire or are you actually serious with that nonsense? I can't even tell.

I'm pretty sure it's satire. "built by local artisans" is the give away. Other than that line, there are lots of people who would post that unironically.

People are generally in agreement against lower wages and higher property prices, but when it comes time to sell the store, they're gonna sell to the highest bidder. If that bidder wants to put in something that has the effect of putting more locals out of business and lowering regional wages, it has the effect of extracting wealth from the local community. But that's the next generation's problem. I want my cheap stuff now. I want the highest price for the assets I'm turning over to the 1%, which only wants to extract wealth from the community long term.

I believe there's no way to resolve this except to use the tax system to put society back in balance. Regular workers need to be able to afford to live a normal life again. The Dollar Generals of the world have become too good at wealth extraction. They look good in the short term, but over time through extremely low wages they drain local communities dry until they become a husk of what they were. Then people can't afford to fight against Dollar General and Walmart any more. They need the lower prices to survive, but in making these bad deals they further impoverish their own communities.

The people who say they want to "keep the coffee shop character" are focusing on the wrong thing. That's a bad strategy. They need to be looking at the long-term economics of their communities and bringing that danger to the forefront. It's not about character. Character doesn't pay the bills. It's about wealth extraction. About lowering regional wages to the point your community becomes dependent on government assistance and can no longer afford to shop anywhere else but Dollar General.

> People are generally in agreement against lower wages and higher property prices

Neither of those are economic policies. People are very much in agreement that they want cheap goods, high wages, high property values, low housing costs, walkable neighborhoods, and free parking despite many of those things being in direct opposition to one another or even completely contradictory. You can't just say "people universally want this obviously good thing, therefore we should ignore everything else in order to achieve that one goal".

Businesses in a competitive market don't "extract wealth", they create it. When I buy something from Walmart it makes both me and Walmart wealthier, because I value the thing I bought more than the money I spent to buy it, and they value my money more than the product sitting in their inventory. When I work for Walmart it makes both me and Walmart wealthier, because they value my labor more than the money they spent to employ me, and I value the money they're paying me more than the time I spent to make it.

What creates poverty isn't "wealth extraction", it's market inefficiency. When you artificially pull money out of the market through taxes and waste it on something worth less than the money itself is (which unlike private individuals or businesses you as the government can afford to do indefinitely, because you didn't earn that money through a voluntary transaction, you took it by force) that results in wealth being destroyed rather than created.

Are markets perfect? No. Markets are a stochastic system so there will obviously be inefficiencies at the margins. Markets also don't work when there's no competition, and they are only concerned with efficiency, not loftier ideals like morality and compassion. But so far creating wealth is concerned, markets are unmatched.

Since you seem concerned with the "long-term economics of a community" rather than the long-term economics of the world as a whole though, things are a little more complicated. Saying that we should favor local businesses over businesses foreign to the community because we want to avoid sending money out of the community is essentially the same argument made by those in favor of tariffs at the national level; that even if free trade is more efficient as a whole it's not in the local community's best interest for it to be importing more goods than it's exporting. There's some truth to this; spending more than you make isn't sustainable long term. But I don't think artificial barriers to trade are a good solution to this problem; you need to address the underlying cause of your community/country's exports being unable to compete in the wider market.

Note also that retail businesses in a local community are not a closed system regardless of whether the business itself is local or foreign to the community. If I buy $20 of goods from Mom and Pop's general store, they probably still had to buy those goods from somewhere outside the community. The fact that the retail business itself is local doesn't really change that; there's still wealth flowing out of the community which has to be replaced by something of equivalent value being exported; otherwise the community will be unable to sustain itself long term.

The tension this article writes about can be expressed to a tech audience as a compression problem.

Dollar General wins out on low prices - essentially compressing their value prop onto a single dimension, prices. They won't do the Strong Towns things like sponsor a park or thoughtfully curate what they sell to fit community needs. There's no button to press in a DG that says "sell more eggplants please".

The value of a small scale community business is many things on different axes, of which delivering goods for money is one. Much like when you compress a jpeg for size at the expense of image quality, you can optimize for one thing to the total exclusion of others.

For a customer at the till it's totally reasonable to think on that one axis, but it's important that there be voices tasked with appreciating the whole. It's a need of society to think of what's a better lossless algorithm so that we can efficiently enjoy the benefits of all dimensions.

> There's no button to press in a DG that says "sell more eggplants please".

Yes, there is. They absolutely manage stock based on demand, as does every other chain store.

I took that request not literally as "make more sales" (they can't control demand, after all), but rather as "stock more varieties." Your local Dollar General is likely going to have the same eggplants available as all the other ones in the country, or at least that's the idea behind that line.

As someone who worked at a corporate-private-equity-owned Dollar store (but not DG, specifically), I highly doubt that's true.

They "manage stock on demand" in that they count SKUs sold and replenish as needed / as they have availability, sure. And they probably do a inventory / count day once in a while, to account for loss(shrink). But that's about it.

They might occasionally get to pick from a few custom options from the internal catalog, but they likely aren't doing any kind of active stock management, and store staff (even store managers) likely have close-to-zero direct influence over what is carried.

I'm familiar with chain auto parts. They all try and cater to local needs. A store in Texas is gonna have more varieties of A/C stuff on the shelf (we're talking retail parts here, not vehicle specific stuff you buy at the counter). Stores in the rust belt are gonna have more exhaust stuff, etc. I'm only familiar with Napa from a management level and they're kind of the odd one out but as far as the other chains go whether it's corporate calling the shots or store management clearly the work is being done by someone.

I’ve seen the manager at a home depot make this call in real time. They had a case of umbrellas up on some racking. I heard him say “lets put those umbrellas down now its going to rain this week.” Shifting the store floor to meet demand. When our baseball team won the world series they also changed all the 5 gal buckets to team color and branding no HD logo at all. I wish I grabbed 5 at the time…

Vastly different business model than Dollar General. DG customers, by definition, have to take what they can get. If you don't like what NAPA has, you can go online or to another store.

No, DG customers can shop elsewhere. Everything they sell is available at Walmarts, supermarkets, convenience stores, hardware stores, drug stores, online, etc.

My understanding is that dollar stores tend to pop up particularly where mega-retailers like Walmart are too far for basic supplies. That's obviously not universally true, but for many Americans it's not as simple as going to another store - another store might be a 60 minute round trip that costs $10 in gas that they don't have.

“Managing stock on demand” is entirely driven by what the store stocks in the first place. Dollar stores often don’t store fresh produce and if they do, it’s not the best, nor is it the variety you need in a community. No amount of filling up feedback forms is going to convince the corporate overlords to change that because “profit”. Our local community supermarket got bought out by Safeway. Everything from less processed pasta to multigrain baked nacho chips disappeared in favor of generic big brand stuff. The meat counter shrunk and the seafood counter almost disappeared. But you could now get 20-30 types of sausages because they come packed, sodium infused and stay on the shelves for months. The locals kept sending feedback, but nothing changed. I stopped shopping there and eventually moved out of the neighborhood because I could.

Not necessarily, there's many products DG won't touch, either because of their durability, price range, lack of good sell spots, etc

No, they definitely sell you what they want you to buy, not necessarily what you want to buy. Demand is an input, but not a determinant, of what gets stocked. The calculus ultimately determining what gets stocked happens far away from the storefront, and way above the heads of your given GM, involving relationships with suppliers and the image the store brand wants to project, at scale. In fact, in most stores, GMs are barred from making deals with suppliers to determine stock. You HAVE to go to corporate if, say, you want your local CVS to sell your locally-produced product. A GM who puts something that isn't in the planogram on a shelf is getting sacked.

Demand that they recognize. Businesses only recognize demand in narrow bands... if they don't sell eggplant, then they can't check to see how much eggplant is moving and increase supply of it. At best, they have to rely on business intelligence that 3 years after the entire country has gone eggplant wild "hey, maybe we should be selling eggplant too". In other words, they're completely blind to demand that doesn't rise to the level of "some fad or mania for this product has emerged".

My family lived in a smallish town for a while, and I've gotta say that chain stores were a godsend. We did business with local shops whenever we could, but the stock variety was inherently much smaller than we found at Target (or even Dollar General). Much as we would have preferred to be able to pay our neighbor $1.50 for an item, it was awfully nice to find nicer items for $1 at the chain place.

Don't get me started at the local groceries which were associated with the large employer in town, a giant grocery wholesaler. I definitely want to support my neighbors, but I don't want to buy Local Brand Ketchup. I want Heinz, darnit.

> I definitely want to support my neighbors, but I don't want to buy Local Brand Ketchup. I want Heinz, darnit.

For the love of God, why??

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2004/09/06/the-ketchup-co...

Probably because they've become accustomed to the taste so that taste is what their brain associates with as Ketchup. Switching to someone's local brand that will have a different recipe/formula (probably a lot less sugar), the taste will be different. To their brain, this is not ketchup rather some tomato paste sauce.

Obviously, ketchup is not going to be the only thing that this fits. Pretty much any processed food sold in the US under major labels are going to be loaded with sugar that decent folks would question why it's being used.

I picked that as a random example, but yeah. We all have brands that we think of as "the" canonical version of that thing. There are certain chili powders I prefer. Certain spaghetti sauces. Certain grape jellies. Certain barbeque sauces. The others aren't bad. They're also generally high quality items. It's just that they're different from what my mouth expects.

Because you never tried this Local Brand Ketchup, which was ketchup in the same way that a Yugo was a car. It met the legal definition but no one was holding it up as the platonic ideal of its kind.

Whatever brand of ketchup you prefer, it’s better than this one was, unless you worked for that grocer and convinced yourself you liked it, in which case bless your heart.

Nah, I think that's just the perspective of a petulant bourgeois brat. No serious adult would have that reaction to a condiment earnestly fabricated—especially not at the cost of outsourcing taste—let alone property ownership—to an absentee landlord!

I've spent the majority of my adult life in small towns, some co-opted by chain stores and some resisting. Have to agree that the terrible space usage and car-centric design of these buildings has a huge impact. I don't totally get the "keep your money local" angle - nobody is going to locally produce toilet paper or toothpaste or affordable home goods that you need today and don't exist in thrift stores, but yes the chain stores don't source local goods even when locals are desperate enough to sell for competitive prices, and that's not good for your local economy.

But another aspect I didn't see mentioned is the disruption of skill and network development. The jobs these places bring are largely entry-level menial jobs. Anyone who takes that job is not learning business skills or apprenticing in something their town needs. Not only that, but the new chain store is not going to build relationships with small businesses in the region, leaving your town more exposed to national/global economic disruptions.

I've also heard gossip about some dollar generals in small towns being fronts for drug activity, but I don't know.

I _love_ Strong Towns but I want to push back against this article.

Strong Towns is a leading voice on YIMBY, but this is reminiscent of the common arguments I hear from NIMBY folks..."they shouldn't be allowed to build here because ____" is definitionally NIMBY.

While I don't love Dollar General or shop there very often, I have a hard time understanding why it's a "swindle." The reason people shop there is because the store provides what they need at a lower price. If I can buy the same milk for $3 from DG or $4.50 from Grandma's Really Adorable Milk Store, I'm going to Dollar General. No swindle here...that's just a better deal.

> “We feed off of what they don’t do, they can’t do,” the owner of Mike’s Hardware & Supply explained.

Great! Do that. Outcompete them on what makes you distinctly valuable, and if you're right, people will pick you. I go to my hardware store instead of Lowes because I know there's a 70-year-old guy who knows more about my project than I do, and I'm happy to pay an extra couple dollars to ask him questions while I buy a socket wrench.

Now, I get that government subsidies tilt the scales...but rather than yell that it's unfair, let's elect politicians who are ready to build incentive programs to provide similar (or better) subsidies for small businesses who provide fresh food and other goods which are crucial for local communities. Small businesses may need to gather together in some cooperative or union-type organization in order to present a more unified bloc to the political class but that's just the nature of living in a big country.

Big business is here to stay, whether we like it or not. And people are _choosing_ those businesses because they think they provide good value for money.

> While I don't love Dollar General or shop there very often, I have a hard time understanding why it's a "swindle."

In the case of Dollar General specifically, it is literally a swindle, with high levels of violations of deceptive pricing laws (higher prices at checkout that marked) — and which has followed up on those by removing customer-facing POS screens in many stors, high levels of weights and measures violations, and — swindling a different side of the community — labor and occupational safety violations.

That may be the case, but that’s not the point the article is making.

Obviously if they’re breaking the law, they should be held accountable.

I have mixed feelings about local small businesses. Like you, if I have the time, I go to a small hardware store about 40 minutes away instead of the Home Depot, which is within 10 minutes. I usually use Amazon as a catalog and then try to find a different on line outlet that sells that item. Usually, shopping at local stores involves an afternoon of driving around from store to store looking for what I want. Then I discover nobody sells what I want or they sell the same Chinese crap you would find on Amazon at twice the price.

> I get that government subsidies tilt the scales

it's not just the subsidies that tilt the scales, its also efficiency of scale with the chains being able to do more/cheaper because they are a big chain. and it's really hard to fight that, or even argue against it because it is more efficient.

the only thing a small local could do to compete on that front would be able to exploit local features that the chains don't know about -- tailoring inventory to local taste, making deals with other small local producers -- but once you start doing that it's more like the local is evolving into a different niche of 'serve regionally-specific needs' while the bigbox is 'serve generic needs'

I don't have the reference, but apparently there used to be US laws requiring producer / manufacturing / distributing companies to sell to all grocery stores at the same price. Because of this regional and local grocery stores could buy inventory at the same price that Walmart does, and because of that there were a lot more local and regional grocery stores.

At some point (under Regan?) the US got rid of these laws, Walmart in particular realized that it could compete on scale (and aggressively negotiating Walmart-specific deals), and that's a huge part of why we don't have as many smaller grocery stores anymore.

I don't have the article handy but if anyone else knows details about this I'd love to hear more.

(Bonus points for a LMGTFY answer :) )

Robinson-Patman act of 1936? Wasn't got rid of but they stopped enforcing it?

>Strong Towns is a leading voice on YIMBY, but this is reminiscent of the common arguments I hear from NIMBY folks..."they shouldn't be allowed to build here because ____" is definitionally NIMBY.

I've come to the realization that strong towns are basically just moderate NIMBYs.

On a scale from 65yo California suburbanite to Ron Paul they're basically the suburbanite but they're but they're self aware enough to realize if they push too far, ask too much, destroy too much wealth, that they'll bring the whole house of cards crashing down.

Ultimately I think it's best to just shitcan all pretense of local zoning, let the states regulate the stuff they do (i.e. hazmat processing and junkyards and the other truly unsightly things that NIMBYs always pretend they are the only line of defense from) and let the developers and the businesses and residents deal with the opportunities and the fallout that arises. Sure, there will be some losers but everyone will lose a heck of a lot less than they do with the status quo wherein only big interests can actually do much of anything.

I've noticed DG stocks oddball sizes of packaged foods I've never seen anywhere else, not even at gas station convenience stores. It's usually their "large" size, and significantly smaller than the "large" size at other stores.

Next time I'm in there I'll check the unit price on those. I'm betting it's pretty bad, because usually if a business is doing anything distinctive like that, it's to screw people.

There's a minute or two in this video(1) about DG from Wendover Productions last year that discusses this. Apparently they're so powerful they can get better deals from suppliers than Walmart and even get custom SKUs ($1 sizes of Tide Detergent, for example) from them to be the product on shelves in DG. Kinda crazy.

1) https://youtu.be/vQpUV--2Jao?t=318

Dollar stores are generally more expensive in the long run than other stores. They make their money on higher per unit margins and/or vastly lower quality of products.

No. In rural areas dollar stores are the cheapest around. I guess you are not familiar with small town prices. In urban areas dollar stores are more expensive than Walmarts--but there is something to be said for getting in and out of a store in 5 minutes vs 20 minutes in a supercenter. But a Dollar General is still going to be cheaper than Walgreens.

Being YIMBY for everything is just as absurd as NIMBY for everything. If you're not making the call on a case by case basis for what you think will be best for the community and you, then you're just being dogmatic.

Is there anything in DG that's healthy? The garbage these stores are feeding people is an externality that is contributing to negative health outcomes. To allow it is to condemn the rural underclass to eating toxic waste, it's equivalent to allowing them to live in lean to slums and shouldn't be allowed.

If they only sold healthy things it wouldn't change anything. The jobs are low wage. Local businesses employed more workers and paid more than DG or Walmart do, so they went out of business. Workers had no choice but to work at DG or WM for the lower wage. Regional wages cratered. Eventually the community economically just can't afford to exist anymore and also becomes dependent on government assistance. This story has been replayed across the entire country but it happens in big cities too.

This is what the neo-liberal economic program has been doing all my life. "Free-trade" and globalization just mean that companies deploy lobbyists to DC and state houses to write legislation that picks winners and losers, erect barriers for some and tear them down for others, and concentrate wealth in the hands of a tiny few while spreading enough of it around to the professional managerial class and petit-bourgeoisie to keep the whole machine running. Blue-collar workers were put in direct competition with low wage workers overseas while white-collar workers were protected from foreign competition, unionization declined under constant attack, and middle-class wages stagnated while coastal and urban elites pulled away. Middle-class people were mollified, however, by rising living standards courtesy of cheap goods delivered by long supply chains connecting far-flung places with big box stores that landed right on the outskirts of their little towns, by the good graces of their hardworking counterparts toiling away in those far-flung places, and by large trade surpluses and easy money. And, it did have social consequences: the withering of small town life, the atomization of community, and the working-class revolts of the last 20 years as the machine started to sputter.

It's important to note that it doesn't have to be this way. This isn't the natural order of things. There IS no "natural order of things." This is a choice. You're free to like that choice if it suits you, but nobody is obliged to like it, and if you don't there is a tried-and-true program for forcing other choices: organize, unionize, and galvanize.

On aside, visiting Mexico City now and I went to Sears and Woolworths. These are extinct in the US but could we still consider them Big Box Stores?

Department stores. I think the strategy was different. Big box focus on driving down prices by working with the cheapest suppliers they can get away with. IIUC Sears in particular was more vertically-integrated, and focused more on in-house brands that cost only a bit less than name brands, but were of high-enough quality that they became brand names themselves.

Would love someone with knowledge of this to chime in.

> We don't want a corporate, faceless box store coming in with no stake in our community.

Who is “we?”

If the community wants Washington General, then they’ll shop there. If they want the lowest possible prices, they’ll shop at Dollar General.

What it sounds like is that Washington General wants effectively a tariff on Dollar General so people won’t shop there. Because if it’s strictly “what’s best for the community,” then the community will decide what they value.

It sounds like Washington General doesn’t want the community to be able to make that choice. If nobody shops at Dollar General, then they’ll close it down. Not that it matters, but I despise Dollar General-type stores: generally cheap junk, so I personally chose the more expensive specialty store: but I can easily afford to do that. The Dollar General ICP is a person that doesn’t have a lot of disposable income. So it’s a bit arrogant to suggest that people without a lot of money should be subsidizing someone’s business just because it makes people feel better. That’s a luxury many people don’t have.

The NIMBY mindset cares about "neighborhood character" more than poor people, at least in general.

Edit: Ah, I see the source now. It comes at basically everything from . . . a particular point of view.

That’s a pretty dishonest reading of this topic. Do you think DG “cares” about poor people? Do you think people might worry about poor people being exploited and ending up worse off?

Or is this just a “Label X is my whole entire personality so anything that isn’t Label X must be horrible and the only people in favor of it are actually evil” terminally online thing?

Uhh . . . that's a pretty dishonest reading of my reading.

I have no inclination that DG as an institution "cares" about poor people. But neither does an institution whose goal is solely to fight suburban sprawl and ensure "neighborhood character."

StrongTowns hammers on about minor things like whether or not storefronts face the sidewalks, whether or not there are chain stores vs mom-and-pops, etc. But if I'm paycheck-to-paycheck, it matters a lot more that I have an opportunity to buy things for cheap than it does whether I'm getting my stuff from a chain store or a local business. Middle-class people have the luxury of being picky about where their things are sourced from. Poor people need to put food on the table regardless of whether or not it comes from Dollar General or Wal-Mart. I support local businesses when I can, but I am also a middle-class professional, not someone making minimum wage.

As an example, I have a great farmer's market I get stuff from in the summer. But the price of vegetables or meat there is like twice what it is at Safeway. If someone is poor, it matters more that they have an opportunity to buy healthy vegetables and chicken for cheap that it is that they're buying locally-sourced organic free-range vegetables and chicken for twice the cost, or else you're just furthering the obesity epidemic.

Dollar General is a mega corporation that can operate on an entirely different level than local stores. They pay their workers less and the profits go out of state. On a store-by-store basis though, Dollar general is a fragile establishment, management will not hesitate to abandon the location if they are spending too much money propping up the store. And the overhead for these stores is higher than it needs to be - they build way larger stores and parking lots than they actually need. The local dry goods store has grown only to the size that it requires, and those profits go towards its own survival. It provides cultural value, economic opportunities, and is more likely to improve the lives of people living nearby.

Strong towns (who made the article) is a grassroots nonprofit that finds concrete ways for US cities to curb the effects of urban sprawl. One of those ways is to acknowledge that inviting huge commercial ventures into your small local economy is like bringing a giant mammal to roam free on a small island nation. It's probably going to affect the ecosystem in ways that don't suit the environment.

They can also operate at a loss until they drive out all competition, and then raise prices - so that you probably end up at the same prices as before (or worse) - but with a much worse quality product (i.e. how they achieve better margins).

Or open up more stores then the region can support, remove the local competition, and then close theirs stores as uncompetitive. The small town (population < 2000) my Mom grew up in is currently supporting their IGA as well as the Dollar Store, but my understanding is that they're in better shape then a lot of their small town neighbors.

One or two successful businesses makes a huge difference at that level. If something happened to their one large employer, a food factory, then they'd really be in trouble. The other businesses are restaurant sized at the largest.

> They pay their workers less and the profits go out of state.

Almost every local retail business I know of pays less than larger businesses, simply due to not meeting the 50 employee minimum that subjects businesses to a host of other labor laws such as ACA and FMLA.

You're right - what I should have said is that a local store owner is getting the direct profits of their labor. I admit that one of the short-term benefits of a big box store coming to town is that their lowest paid employees get more protections. This comes at the cost of being held at arms length from the actual power structure of the company and makes the dollar general's business practices more unsustainable.

I feel like this article failed to effectively discuss the very important point that is how these big box stores tend to be a drain on the city's economy. It's sorta there but generally these stores tend to make communities poorer in the long run.

Seemed pretty clear to me: they not only don't pay nearly as much in taxes as local businesses but are subsidized by local taxpayers

Why would they not pay as much taxes as local businesses? I have never seen a tax rate that differentiates between local and non local businesses.

I found the answer to your question by opening the article and using Ctrl+F to find the word "tax". Here are the excerpts:

>"In an episode of the Strong Towns podcast, [Stacey Mitchell, co-director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance] explains how companies like Walmart or Target convince local officials that they’re bringing jobs and financial benefits to the area often in exchange for tax breaks and subsidies to cover the cost of land or construction. Unfortunately, many local governments are too quick to take the bait."

>"ILSR also discovered that large corporations benefit from tax loopholes, enabling them to avoid paying income taxes in about half the states they operate in. Meanwhile, small businesses don’t have that luxury—they pay taxes on 100% of their earnings."

>"This uneven playing field places local businesses at a disadvantage, as they are required to bear a higher tax burden than their corporate competitors. A similar dynamic plays out on the federal level, where corporations may operate in part through shell companies based in tax havens."

Those were all taken from the last 4 paragraphs of the section under the heading "The Big Box Swindle" (the first section after the introduction).

That specific mechanism is an example of corrupt/stupid politicians being a drain on the city’s economy, not the big box stores.

Did any of the article that I didn't include in my comment impact your opinion?

Not the opinion of who is at fault for giving away taxpayer subsidies to big businesses.

There are, of course, drawbacks of only have a handful of highly efficient businesses led by a handful of people. While buyers get lower prices (at least initially), they also lose more and more leverage in the marketplace and are exposed to risks other than higher prices.

I dont think primary taxes are a real concern, but local spending of profits is relevant.

For a local economy, it matters if the store owner lives and spends their money in town, or lives somewhere in NYC or China.

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