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Originally Posted by Private Dick
I don't care who shops there or who doesn't. . . . This is to say nothing about my feelings on dollar stores from an urban planning/design and revitalization perspective.
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Well, that's the precise point we have been addressing so far. Since it turns out that dollar stores have a mixed-income customer base, and that in recent years they have specifically targeted with success higher-income customers, from a development perspective there is really no reason to be concerned about one being located in a mixed-income neighborhood which is adding some apartments and such targeted at higher-income customers. But I understand you are now raising different concerns.
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Bulk purchasing surplus/outdated inventory from low quality manufacturers is not the business model of convenience/drug stores -- CVS, Rite-Aid, Walgreens, and others do not do that.
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I don't see how that addresses your concerns. The drug stores, convenience stores, Target, Walmart, and so on are actually buying wholesale and reselling many of the same products from the same manufacturers. As noted in the articles I linked, these days dollar stores are also carrying the exact same brands as well. But even when the brands are different, you will often find the manufacturers are the same. Meanwhile, Target, for example, actually created a dollar-store-type section within the store--the "Dollar Spot"--with a rotating product lineup to compete back with dollar stores. In the East Liberty store, it is right behind the shopping carts.
Now it is is true dollar stores are sometimes buying surplus lots--but surplus from whom? It is often surplus from these other stores. And from the perspective of the concerns you cited, I don't see why it matters whether a store was the first buyer or the surplus buyer if the goods ultimately were part of the same original order.
So while these concerns are valid, I really don't understand the case for singling out just dollar stores as a target for those concerns.
Incidentally, all this has become enough of a concern for consumers that various major retailers have been adopting "sustainability" initiatives to address those concerns--including as it turns out, Dollar Tree:
http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/D...EA7-B3BC-D90A537CFC2F/Sustainability.pdf
I certainly would not discourage people from looking at those policies as they evolve over time, and potentially favoring those chains which they think have better policies at a given time. But I don't think it is going to be a useful heuristic to assume that Dollar Tree has a worse policy on a given issue than any given drug stores, convenience store, discount department store, or so on--I think you will need to look at and compare the policies in detail, because in one way or another they are all responding to both these "sustainability" pressures on the one hand, but also many other competitive and financial pressures on the other.
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