Lower-income American households are running out of money at the end of every month, the discount retailer Dollar General said as it released dismal results that drove its shares down more than 30 per cent for their sharpest one-day drop on record.
When the American economy is too rough for Dollar General...
Dollar General is a big part of the reason why.. that shit is not cheap, or if it's cheap it will be ineffective and you'll have to keep buying it, but its ALWAYS nearby any poor neighborhood
Remember, the coolzone will not happen without organising.
Americans will not spontaneously rise up. They will just get poorer, more miserable, more criminal, more fucked.
There are places everywhere all over the world that are more desperately poor. And without organising they too do not spontaneously rise up. They simply die.
i think ppl who say things like "once conditions are bad enough, we'll start party rockin'" is unaware of things like hierarchy of needs or how bad things used to be historically (in the us)
if you're talking about me I'm not pro amazon or whatever, but I am pro "never have customers interacting with a store full of merchandise, even under communism" like I am sorry but unless you're going to gulag bad customers who don't do the work of picking up after themselves, it is dogshit slavery that needs to be abolished. No more of it. No more hours of peoples' lives wasted cleaning up after fellow adults just because they're fucking lazy. so I am pro "warehouse distribution model" if anything.
all the grocery stores where I live are like almost 2x the price of when I was living in a bigger city. the demographics of the town are such that like half or more are on disability, SSI, foodstamps etc.
grocery stores are gouging food stamp customers because they know they have no choice.
I live in a similar place, so the lines at Dollar General and Tree are like 20-45min every time I walk in there since they hire like 1 person to do the work of 10 (all the stores declining in that report do that) reminding me of Kmart before its demise and at least 2/3 of the town shops there. Sometimes I have to make do without since I can't wait and will just have to spend more at the grocery when I can combine it with another trip to justify the gas.
i think the future of most stores is just to close the inside, turn it into a mini-warehouse that you use an app to preorder or place an order at a window
no joke i work in a retail sector and a former co-worker asked a C-suite guy what the company's "vision" was for the future and he basically said that
Honestly in store retail is a fucking nightmare of work that only exists because customers are careless and lazy. Customers will upend an entire table of folded clothes like pigs rooting through the brush for forage and SOMEONE has to fix it. It can take hours to fold and reorganize a section of clothing only for some shithead to come fuck it up again in 2 minutes.
The whole point of the reail shop was to make the shoppers do the labor of walking the storehouse, finding the items, picking them, colating them, and transporting them. Converting every store into a mini warehouse will increase labor costs. It will require consolidation to achieve the vision you have put forth.
My building have a mini market with no employees, you just take what you need and pay with the app. I guess they still have at least one employee supplying a couple of different buildings, but that makes its less that one employee for store.
None of them are good but Dollar General specifically exists to exploit underserved markets. Dollar Tree still has cheap stuff of slightly dubious quality, but you can find good stuff there for cheap.
When I first moved into this neighborhood we had a Bottom Dollar, then Aldi bought them out and closed almost all of them getting rid of the closest grocery store that served a fair amount of the community. There was one like another 5 minutes away or another one 10 minutes away on arterial streets. Then the one that was 5 minutes away closed after it was sold and the only reason it's a grocery store today is because the previous owners insisted the buyer had to make it a grocery store, otherwise you'd just have a food desert for a lot of the immediate vicinity that had the poorest families in the city.
Dollar General moved into where that original Bottom Dollar grocery store was and was the only convenient place to get food for a few years if you didn't have a car. There's another Dollar General 10 minutes up the road where a Dollar Tree used to be. There's yet another probably another 7 minutes away from that second one, after that I couldn't tell you since they're fucking everywhere and there's probably 3 I'm not even aware of because I just don't turn right at a certain intersection.