Yeah, been there. The “crappy turkey bacon” was based on my own experience. I could have just fried up some bologna and gotten the same thing.
The old joke “horrible food. . . and such small portions” applied as well.
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This is like the shoe problem. Rich people spend less on shoes, poor people can’t afford the more economical option.
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In other words, it is expensive to be poor.
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I had to buy a pair of shoes at a so called dollar store once. The $10 shoes lasted less than a dozen wearings. It really highlights the Sisyphean task of getting out of poverty.
I am surprised to learn that you can get name brand products at dollar stores. I thought their only lever was decreasing quality. But most drugstores now have well stocked sample sections so I still can’t see much reason to visit.
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I have two people in my family. (Also two cats.) We are far, far from extraordinary in that regard.
My closest store is a Sam’s Club. I do have a Sam’s Club membership.
On a per-unit cost basis, they are cheaper than the Dollar Tree, or even Kroger’s and Aldi’s, where I do the vast majority of my grocery shopping.
So, consider bread. My favorite brand of bread, a brand that I pay a premium for. At Kroger’s, it’s about $2 per loaf. I can get two loafs at Sam’s Club for like $2.80. That’s $1.40 a loaf. Sam’s Club is actually closer to my house than Kroger’s. Why on earth would I buy it at Kroger’s and pay 30% MORE?
Because every other week I throw out the end of the loaf of bread when it expires. I’m really not paying an extra 60 cents too much, I’m saving 80 cents every two weeks by only buying one loaf. (I mean, yes, I could freeze it. But bread takes up a lot of freezer space. And my freezer is filled with a lot more high-value food that it is exceptionally unlikely that I will eat that I am waiting for it to expire before I throw it out.)
And this is most of the stuff at Sam’s Club. Yes, that #10 can of Nacho Cheese Sauce for $5 tempts me every time. I want it. I needs it, precious. A WHOLE GALLON OF CHEESE SAUCE for not much more than a tiny, small can of nacho cheese sauce? What’s not to love??!!!
But… dude, I can’t eat a whole small, scrawny jar of cheese sauce. Every time I open a can, I throw some away. Normally not much. Sometimes a half a can. Sometimes it’s just a little bit in the can so I just throw the can away, sometimes it’s enough that I put cling wrap on it and put it in the fridge and throw it away like a week later. Sometimes I leave it in the fridge long enough to grow mold on it! That’s always cool. But it never all gets eaten. When 16 ounces is more than I can use before it goes bad, what is the point of a #10 can of it?
Not to mention- when I’m at Kroger’s, I see something that looks good, and I impulse buy it, it’s like somewhere between $2 and $5. At Sam’s Club, it seems like every item I put in my cart is about $10. So if I run in for like three things, it seems like it’s $50…
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No one seems to be noting that the table in question is all name-brand stuff. Sure, maybe the Sharpie is more expensive on a per-unit basis, but sometimes you can get a Sharple for significantly less and find that it works just as good. (And sometimes you get what you pay for.)
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The Dollar Tree is perfect for my use case of having only say 5 bucks in cash and feeling like treating myself to some snacks. I can go to the Dollar Tree and get 5 different items and have a little snack buffet, rather than spending twice as much to get the same items at a regular supermarket or even worse a gas station convenience store.
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I think you could buy a peanut farm, get yourself a brand-new tractor or three, plant peanuts, buy and apply single-source organic fertilizer, hire mid-level white-collar employees to bring in your harvest, process the peanuts in a clean room, and ship the packaged peanuts nationwide in the very modest trunks of a fleet of Lamborghinis, and still come out ahead of the pricing at the theater.
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In my (now previous) neighborhood, we would call or text the group if one of the two of us with Costco memberships knew we were going, and ask if anyone needed anything. And my daughter will convince a friend to drive her to Costco once every couple of months and then do things like buy TP in bulk to split it up between 2 or 3 households.
There are a lot of creative ways to support each other in a financially-mixed local community.
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Sometimes you find crazy deals at the dollar store. Like $1 pregnancy tests and $1 reagent THC metabolite tests.
Yes, a $1 pregancy test probably isn’t very reliable. So just buy 5 of them and you’re still ahead of pharmacy brand pricing.
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One thing people seem to ignore about this type of stores is the supply chain-how to they manage to sell this stiff for so little and still make a profit? Most of comes from Chinese factories with essentially slave labor and horrible environmental practices.
The spiral of falling wages so that people can’t afford to pay the extra it costs to have stuff made in reasonable conditions by people getting paid a good wage, in America, with union protections, is infuriating. Walmart prospers partly because people see their products and say “it’s so cheap!”. But those costs are being borne by someone, somewhere. I don’t know how to change/fix this situation, but I don’t shop at any dollar store, or at Walmart. I even try to stay out of Target. I know that’s because I live in place with many options and I can get to them, and I know that for way too many people the dollar store is the available option. But I can’t help but feel that their proliferation is somehow shooting ourselves in the foot.
Do you shop on Amazon or anywhere else online? All the same stuff made in the same factories.
That doesn’t excuse the horrible conditions in those factories, but the point is it is not a problem that will be solved by individual consumer choice (any more than pollution, climate change, factory farming cruelty, or any other negative externalities will ever be solved by consumer choice).
Solving systemic problems via “personal responsibility” is a lie that’s been fed to us all by lobbying groups and corporations ever since the beverage industry created the idea of “litterbugs” so they didn’t have to fix their high profit, high impact plastics supply chains. It worked so well that everyone now does the same thing and we all morally judge each other instead of voting for better regulations.
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If I had had a Costco nearby when I was in college, my 4 roommates and I would have definitely splurged on a membership. Sadly, they didn’t come along until after I graduated. We made do with the nearby Odd Lots.
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I mean, at least around here, corner delis and bodegas are more expensive because they’re locally owned small businesses that can’t get the same kind of volume discounts from their wholesalers that Wal-Mart can, and because they might even pay their employees more than Wal-Mart does. Food deserts are absolutely a problem, but is the best solution more giant chains?
Boycotting certain brands is difficult, especially when most packaged foods are under the umbrellas of only 10 companies.
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It’s a really good question. The instant, obvious answer is local business… but the more I think about it, the more I am wondering if the chain store is better for the neighborhood?
I mean, when the chain store opens, they bring outside investment into the neighborhood. How much of that is captured by local businesses, and by local trades people and such? Is the land owner local? Do they buy the land or lease it from a local business? How many local people work on the building?
We can assume the workers are all local. While they may bring in a “training crew”, it’s likely that the employees will be from the neighborhood, or will join the neighborhood. This is probably a wash (although local owned businesses tend to concentrate that income into a smaller number of families / households)
All the profit generated by a locally owned business stays in the local community. But there isn’t much profit at all in groceries - WalMart takes out about 1% in profit. I don’t know what the profit percentage on a locally owned corner store is, but I don’t see many people making it really, really rich on a local corner store.
My intuitive guess is that most of the higher prices at the local corner grocer is going to their suppliers as increased profit to them. If this was true, the lower prices at the chain store may benefit the local neighborhood more than the profit retention.
I would love to see a definitive answer… my only guess is that it’s not as clear cut as “local good, chain bad”… or “chain good, local bad”. 
by Alec MacGillis
June 29, 2020
This story was co-published with The New Yorker
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It also depends on the existing composition of businesses in the area, I think. For example, there’s something called The Walmart Effect, where Walmart murders small towns. It goes like this:
- Walmart moves in, undercutting prices on all local businesses
- Local businesses all go under, so all their staff lose their jobs
- Those workers all go to work at Walmart, which is now the only job in the area
- Walmart does not pay enough to survive, even shopping in their own store, so people move away for better jobs
- The population drops to where the Walmart isn’t viable any more, so they close it
- There are now no businesses in town and everyone has moved away. The town is now dead and nobody ever comes back.
Walmart is effectively strip-mining these towns. Maximum one-time value is squeezed out, then they leave. This is a documented effect that has happened all over rural areas in the US. So a Walmart might fill a gap in, say, groceries in the area. But the area has other businesses that will get Walmarted and the town will probably ultimately be killed.
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Hey, now, ya young whippersnapper! Back in the day, we had the five and dime stores, and that’s how we liked it.
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