This is why you need to get the government out of business. They shouldn't be choosing what stores are built where nor should they be giving certain businesses tax breaks over others.
What does "get the government out of business" even mean in this context? What do you think should have happened instead?
Dollar General asks for a tax break and says they won't build a store if they don't get one, and the government can either accept or refuse. It's not clear to me how you can prevent this situation, short of passing a law at the state or federal level that forbids municipalities from offering tax breaks. (Which I actually think the government should do, to prevent races to the bottom, but that would by definition mean more state/federal control over local tax policy, and is not likely to be popular.)
Please think for a minute before you post comments like "This is why you need to get the government out of business." They're so easy to make that often people post them before realizing they don't make any sense.
Not to mention, let's assume that government "got out of business". Had no say in business at all. No zoning laws, no permission needed to open a shop wherever you wanted, etc.
Then while Dollar General wouldn't get any sort of tax break for building in a town, nothing could stop them either. Buhler wouldn't have been able to reject the store.
From the article it looks like the local government was what kept Dollar General out of a town after seeing what happened to a neighboring town that gave Dollar General some breaks to come in. So local government, while it did make a bad decision in the first town, made the opposite decision in the second town.
A question the article doesn't explore is what effect government policies and actions at higher levels (county, state, federal) have on the ability of a large chain like Dollar General to drive out local competitors. It might well be that getting government out of business, in the sense of stopping it from playing favorites, at those higher levels would be a net benefit.
Get government out of business?? I think it should be the other way round. Get business out of government.
Government has a place in prescribing how business is conducted. Without local government zoning for businesses your cities would be pretty shitty places to live. Light or heavy touch is the contentious point.
The bigger problem is that businesses by and large control America. Sort that problem out, complaining about government pushing business around is laughable.
These places are just awful. I went in one last summer and the girls working there were drenched in sweat. The management refused to set the thermostat below 80 degrees! And the cashiers had to stock shelves when there are no customers at the cash register so of course they were sweating. Usually when you go in one, the only employees will be somewhere deep in the store and you have to wait a long time until they check the register for a line.
The idea is to have no stock room so they don’t have to hire stocking staff, and make the cashiers do it when they aren’t actively checking people out. The trucks unload everything right in the store so aisles are always blocked with giant piles of boxes. It’s gotta be a nightmare for someone in a wheelchair.
But the worst part is of course the way they treat employees.
Meh. Those conditions are par for the course in jobs like that. IMO it beats working fast food any day of the week.
Working at a franchised establishment (like Dollar General or Walmart or Wendy's) is usually pretty middle of the road because they use their scale figure out how to optimize for every last but of productivity and that usually means working employees as hard as they can reasonably work. However, at the same time the franchise usually decrees something like "thou shalt not drag the brand name through the mud by running your location like a sweatshop." Small businesses have much more deviation in quality. If you think getting minimum wage for doing retail work in an 80deg store is a particularly bad deal then you're probably living in a little bit of a bubble.
>If you think getting minimum wage for doing retail work in an 80deg store is a particularly bad deal then you're probably living in a little bit of a bubble.
No. It's not a joke. There's tons of jobs out there that pay the same and involve more labor and/or a work environment with a less pleasant temperature. Pretty much any outdoor manual labor job and many food service jobs will meet those criteria.
This was not an act of nature. It was the manager cutting the costs. 80 degrees is not a normal accepted indoor temperature. This is unusual punishment given the context and norms.
Expecting something different from a job outdoors or in a kitchen would, I agree, be a little ridiculous. The wage should of course be adjusted accordingly, but this is just disrespectful.
>If you think getting minimum wage for doing retail work in an 80deg store is a particularly bad deal then you're probably living in a little bit of a bubble.
I can't even begin to elaborate on how fucking delusional this sentence is.
I’ve worked some spectacularly shitty minimum wage jobs in my life, and never came close to the conditions of a Dollar Store. Being asked to come off the register and restock is normal, but the rest just sounds cruel and weird. 80 degrees indoors is also messed up, not just for staff, but for customers. Given how poor air circulation is in a lot of those places, it must get really stuffy and grotesque too. Then the pay is abysmal.
Almost any job would be better, including being a cashier at a competing store that at least pretends not to hate you. Working in hot weather or bad conditions is acceptable only if you’re being paid well enough to make it worthwhile. $8 an hour before taxes? You can make more doing almost anything else, including McDonalds or begging on a corner, and neither of those things sound like they’d be any more dignity-destroying than what’s been described here.
Since when was “cashier” a manual labor position? “Stocking staff” might be, and is consistently paid a higher wage because of that. These people are hired as cashiers. The “additional job duties” are where the manual labor comes in.
We are literally talking $8.00/hr. before taxes. This looks inhumane to me.
Someone who started working there in high school and completed it. Hopefully prior to 35. Hopefully while continuing to improve their marketable skills.
> But to blame this on the workers is immoral, heartless, definitely a sign you have something wrong with yourself.
Yes, I am blaming the workers. Making personal attacks against me doesn't change the facts.
The fact is, the reason people make minimum wage is because they haven't developed (or proven to the right person that they have developed) marketable skills.
That's why it's important to study hard in school and to work hard in your job. People get paid what they are worth in the marketplace.
I don't know anything about DG's business practices, but if the workers are not satisfied, there are other places they can get a job.
I do realize that some people face inherent difficulties in life. They weren't born with the same advantages or they were born with disadvantages. Maybe they made some mistakes in life. I'm not saying they shouldn't have a chance. I'm saying that there are things (education, discipline, etc) that they can take advantage of to better their situation.
Maybe they are content in their situation. That's fine too.
> And the cashiers had to stock shelves when there are no customers at the cash register so of course they were sweating.
> The idea is to have no stock room so they don’t have to hire stocking staff, and make the cashiers do it when they aren’t actively checking people out.
What's wrong with cashiers stocking shelves? Seems perfectly reasonable to simply keep working while you are on the clock.
I wonder if this is somehow a very USA-specific issue, and I wonder why that would be. I recently moved to the countryside in Finland, to a place that isn't even a town, just a road with houses and farms. There are a couple of rather crummy grocery stores within a few minutes driving distance, but mostly people shop at the stores in the nearest city, maybe half an hour away.
Where I live is kind of an extreme. There are a lot of places that do qualify as towns, and urbanization is definitely taking its toll on them. Local stores close down, and people have to shop further away. Still, this idea of a store that doesn't sell fresh produce seems completely alien - I haven't seen that pop up anywhere. Why does that work in the USA?
Dollar General is closer to a Target than it is a grocery store. 80% of the floor is not food, and the remaining 20% is boxed/canned/bottled. Its a decent middle point for low income households who only have time to make 1 stop and need a few grocery items and a few non-grocery items.
>Still, this idea of a store that doesn't sell fresh produce seems completely alien - I haven't seen that pop up anywhere
Yes you have. The Finnish equivalent is called Tokmanni. It's pretty much the exact same low quality crap. The only difference is that Tokmanni sells some stuff over €10.
I hadn't thought about Tokmanni as a grocery store replacement, more a general goods store. Now that you mention it, they do have a crappy food section that consists of edibles in cardboard boxes. I always pass by that part since I don't go there for food, but maybe that explains my blind spot.
> For all that, while Alfers feels sympathy for Nech, he said the Dollar General is the future. “The Model-T put horses out of business. It’s hard to protect existing businesses,” he said. “I would still vote for Dollar General. If one state didn’t accept the Model-T it wouldn’t have changed the outcome. I think Buhler voted their sentiment. The question is, in five years will they have a Dollar General or something similar?”
How sad. One of these is a technology change. The other is local policy. We make choices about the communities we want to live in. This one was under his control, and his justification for a choice I think he regrets sounds like cognitive dissonance to me.
Do dollar stores has aggressive pricing? I've found they are a bad deal for many common day goods. Usually the $/qty is pretty bad. One example that sticks to my mind is aluminum foil. Those rolls are pretty small for the price.
The main thing I find them good for is things like cleaning supplies, brooms, greeting cards, gift wraps which tend to be marked up elsewhere.
Every store has its loss leaders. Come for the cheap cleaning supplies, brooms and greeting cards, then you start to assume everything else is reasonably priced. Before you know it you're walking out with an armful of overpriced junk to negate your savvier purchases.
Dollar General and Family Dollar are general stores, like used to be common in days of old. They are not "dollar stores," which refers specifically to stores where all or almost all merchandise costs about one dollar. This is a point of confusion on every article about Family Dollar and Dollar General, because most people commenting apparently never go there.
The bargains vary. Some of the standards at both mentioned general stores and Dollar Tree (a widely-known dollar store chain) meet Walmart's prices, e.g. for ammonia, which beats any other grocery store by nearly a third.
Why do they frame it as only “poor middle America”. I use to live in apartments that were going for
$1700/month for a three bedroom (now $2100 a month less than
3 years later) and there is a Dollar Store in the same complex as a Publix across the street. The city had a median household income of $100,000.
Suburbia welcomes dollar stores just as much as rural America.
reply