Comment by alibrarydweller | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alibrarydweller | Hacker News Reader

alibrarydweller

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".

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