veteran+ wrote: ↑April 2nd, 2023, 7:58 am
The problems with these types of stores and the neighborhoods they "serve" are much more complicated and deserve deeper critical analysis.
The stores do NOT help the situation by extreme understaffing, insufficient security personnel, inferior security measures and dangerous housekeeping (refusing to take law enforcemnet suggestions). Corporate profits suggest they can indeed afford to run these stores the right way in these special needs and problematic neighborhoods. They do NOT do the right thing. They do not even try.
These neighborhoods took decades to become this way. I would argue the opening of a Dollar General or Family Dollar helps the neighborhood if nothing else because it takes a space that was previously abandoned/blight and it opens up the space. It puts up some lights. It adds a few jobs. It gives people a place to buy some items including an assortment of dairy products and frozen foods and in some cases some fresh produce (usually doesn't sell well though). Would a full service store be better? Yes. But I think these are better than nothing. I would also argue they are better than a Save a Lot type place since they have an assortment of general merchandise (and it is really a very useful little assortment they carry if you are doing light repairs, gardening, need towels/sheets, shower curtain, a trash can, etc.).
Do you know how often these chains take city incentives to open a Dollar General or Family Dollar in these tough neighborhoods? Do they even take incentives from the city (I didn't see that in the articles...). I think a potential "tooth" to call them out for crime around their stores could be to make it a condition of taking city money that they will, for instance, have security positioned inside the store whenever it is open (armed security?) or they will safeguard employees by putting them behind bulletproof glass or something.
I know often smaller businesses/franchises like Save a Lot will look for city incentives to open stores in these really bad neighborhoods but I don't know the terms of those arrangements.
As you know major chain grocers abandoned these neighborhoods decades ago, as did the drugstore chains. Those companies should have a lot more resources, yet they left. So Dollar General had profits of $3.3 billion last year, so divide that by 19,000 stores and that is an average profit per store of $174,000 when all is said and done. Expense wise these stores run on a tight rope. The question is do they spend $150k on extra security and then the store barely breaks even then the store closes? Then what?
I guess what I am getting at is these neighborhoods lost the chain grocer and chain drug store decades ago that they would have been better off with... now they get these stores... is it better than no stores? Plus at least in the case of Dollar General they seem to be trying to add more things like fresh produce, "better for you foods" etc. which are hard sells in these types of locations as demand seems to be weak, but they do at least try to provide access to these items with recent initiatives.
