Dollar stores very often aren’t cheaper than other sources for similar products especially for grocery items (which they tend to have very limited selections of.)

People that shop for groceries at dollar stores do it because:

1. They shop for other things at dollar stores (either for price, or for reason #2, or because its the only place close by that carries the type of thing involved) and getting groceries there saves a trip,

2. Reputation for price without actual comparison,

3. Lack of actual grocery stores conveniently located,

Your own second article notes the relatively high prices (as well as quality issues) of dollar store groceries.

Despite their limited ability, they ARE able to look at price tags in different stores and go "hey, wait a minute!"

If you're dollar store level poor, it's expensive and stressful, and you're constantly weighing spending money now versus keeping what little remains for whatever awful thing is going to leave you destitute. There's a fair amount of conflicting and complex psychology going on in that shopping decision beyond not just knowing that they should comparison shop.

I’ve been dirt poor; I’ve never been in a situation where “dollar store as regular grocery source” made sense (though I’ve shopped in dollar stores, and occasionally when I did found deals on grocery items that were worthwhile), and I am very much aware of why that was never the case for me and why it is and was sometimes for other people.

Also, not all people who shop at dollar stores are dirt poor.

> It may be tough to believe, but y'know what'd surprise literally none of the poors if you told them? That they pay more money for less product at the dollar store than elsewhere.

Actually, it would probably suprise some of them. Believe it or not, poorly informed poor people do exist. The idea that they don't is as misguided as the idea that all poor people are poorly informed.

> Despite their limited ability, they ARE able to look at price tags in different stores

Not really, when reason #3 (“Lack of actual grocery stores conveniently located”) applies. Comparison shopping takes time and effort that is something of a luxury in the best of cases, but it also takes having alternatives in the first place.

> If you're dollar store level poor, it's expensive and stressful, and you're constantly weighing spending money now versus keeping what little remains for whatever awful thing is going to leave you destitute.

That's true, but it doesn't contradict anything I said. It's like you have a canned rant about poor people that you arr trotting out independent of its actual relevance to the discussion.

> There's a fair amount of conflicting and complex psychology going on in that shopping decision beyond not just knowing that they should comparison shop.

Which would perhaps be an insightful counterargument if I had said something even approximately like “poor people who shop at dollar stores do it because they don't realize they should comparison shop”. Of the three reasons I gave for people shopping at dollar stores, only one relates to a failure to understand the price realities, and I never suggested that one was particularly common among the poor.

> Despite their limited ability, they ARE able to look at price tags in different stores and go "hey, wait a minute!"

Not really. Dollar stores have become so ubiquitous precisely because of their market dominance in areas without options--retail deserts, if you will. If you've really been dirt poor--and dirt poor outside the major cities and suburbs--you would know that driving 20-30 miles to the Wal-Mart two towns over, presuming they even have lower prices, can be cost prohibitive (especially when considering wear-and-tear and the risk of breaking down) when you're living day-to-day, even though in the long-term you end up paying more at the dollar store. Drive across the vast areas of rural and poor America and you'll see dollar stores in the most random and remotest of places; places that 10, 20, or 30 years ago had more options--you may even see their long shuttered remains somewhere nearby.

This is the classic dilemma the impoverished face, and have always faced--it takes money to make (or save) money. Yes, increases in prices at dollar stores will negatively impact alot of people. But when decrying the state of the nation you have to understand why that is and what it means. For example, before someone blames inflation, maybe they should look at profit margins. AFAICT, they've rose relatively sharply since COVID-19: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/DG/dollar-general/... Indeed, the "narrowing" of Dollar Tree's earnings forecast mentioned in the article, from $5.40-$5.60 to $5.48-$5.58, is maybe better described as an upward adjustment. I suspect the price increase will help margins even further.

Kind of, but only because of the brief interregnum of the ~1970s-1990s height of suburban shopping malls. Dollar stores are a revival of the general variety discount stores — “five-and-dime” or “dime stores” — that largely either fell to suburbanization and shopping malls or morphed out of the model into mega-retailers (Walton’s Five-and-Dime, for instance, is now known as WalMart) or did the latter but still ended up doing the fomer (e..g, Kmart); the new dollar stores were rising just as many of the earlier giants of the same model were taking their last breaths in the late 1990s and 2000s; at least one of the early dollar store chains (Dollar Zone) was a rebranding of a classic general variety discount store chain that had started as a literal dime store chain (McCrory’s).

The rise of dollar stores tracks pretty well with the decline of the malls that had marginalized the original variety discount stores. They weren’t so much a new phenomenon as something that went through about a generation of marginalization.

What am I missing? Oh right, I earn more than the average person in my country and I'm so busy I don't even have time to spend the money.

HA! I'm picturing the kid that owned the football and would threaten to take it home if he didn't get to be quarterback :)

And many other poor people I knew _blew_ tons of money on McDonald's because "they couldn't afford to cook"

It's not so cut and dry.

Because apparently all poor people all the same in your mind.

Yep. They're usually not competitive on unit price. In areas that aren't shopping deserts, they cater to folks who can't afford to fill their car's gas tank on a whim -- they need X, they need it today, so they'll get what they can today. "It's expensive to be poor."

What I've found them good for is stuff I use super sparingly, and odd items. For example, envelopes. A box of 20 for $1 isn't great per unit, but it takes me FIVE YEARS to go through that box that takes up less space than a larger one, so still a win. Toothbrush for $1 is hard to argue. Gift bags and greeting cards are a fraction of where you easily find them elsewhere. If I'm out and really need a drink, if it's the closest option I may get a diet soda or a bottle of water.

I rarely go to one, but I'll go through one periodically to observe what's there and make a mental note of the few things that are the obvious deal given my situation.

This is a talking point I wish more people on HN understood.

Can't afford a dental cavity filling? It becomes a root canal next year. Maybe you'll settle on just a simple extraction, and now you're down a tooth with no hope of ever affording a dental bridge, let alone an implant.

Can't afford to get a lump checked out? Three years later, you're unable to afford the stage 3 cancer treatment.

Buying the massive 30-roll pack of toilet paper from Costco for $15 is cheaper than buying 6-packs for $5, but you only have $20 to last the week, and you gotta buy food, too.

4. They only have a dollar.

Yes, it's cheaper by the fluid ounce to buy a barrel of Pine-sol at Costco. But if you have $100 for groceries and household expenses this week, you'll pay more per ounce to minimize the cash-flow problem.

Their cash-flow constraints and cost of credit both prevent them from economizing. That is how most Americans shop.

Its frequently cheaper to buy the same size package of a grocery item at a traditional grocery store than a dollar store; I've seen cases as extreme as things that regularly go 4/$1 (and occasionally go on sale at 10/$1) at regular grocery stores going for 1/$1 at a dollar store.

But if you don't have a regular grocery store in convenient distance (walking/biking distance if you don't have working car!), that doesn't matter. (Costco and similar stores present another level of problem; they tend to both be more distant for most people than even standard grocery stores and to bias toward larger package sizes—aside from whether you can afford to tie up money in the larger item even with a smaller unit cost, storage space becomes a problem.)

Then, in the suburbs, it seems grocery stores are trying to go up the chain by focusing on prepared foods. The cheap cafe has been replaced by bar covered in shiplap and the fruit trays run $25 after labor.

You can take $30 to a grocery store and walk out with a decent quantity of rice and beans, at good prices per ounce.

You're also aside the fact that rice and beans takes a good amount of time to prepare, which is a problem if you're working 16 hours a day - making rice takes 30 minutes and that is coming out of your sleep.

But most importantly, only having $4 at a time is how a lot of poor people have to shop. They have $4 today. Maybe they have $4 every work day as a day laborer. But they don't necessarily have $100 at the start of the week to plan everything out.

"Geez"

It's especially bad with all the fake/bullshit nutritional science that has to be debunked which created a whole weight loss industry.

Shitty refined carbs and sugar/corn syrup might save you money over the short term but over the long term you're going to pay the price with massive health issues. Considering most poor people's greatest asset is their own body that's false economics.

Btw, I find the term "souldcrushing" to be an insult to the millions of individuals who rely on such food staples for their daily nutritional intake. Go do a quick search for levels of diabetes and obesity among nations which rely on plant based diets and then come back and talk to me about soulcrushing.

And again, comparing subsisting on "$30 of rice and beans" is a completely different proposition to "nations which rely on plant based diets": people in these nations are not eating unflavored rice and beans every day.

Yeah and people only enjoy the loudest music because they have to turn the volume down which makes everything else sound worse...

Sugar is like that, as you get used to the sugar rush, everything else tastes worse but only relatively worse, not absolutely worse.

>username

And none of them rely on just rice and beans. They use spices and herb to make things taste better. You keep reading "rice and beans are soulcrushing" as "vegan food bad". When it's really a) repetitive and b) requires a lot of labor to make tasty. Most Asian saucy dishes are around making rice tastier.

Don’t go “Four Yorkshiremen” on the price of the pressure cooker. You can get it for less used, and it’s a perfect present from anyone who knows money is an issue for you. Maybe free at dumpsters when college students are clearing out their dorm rooms.

Re: the “boring and soul rushing” bit…I recommend bringing that up with anyone in Mexico or Latin America. Or are those type of people just…different (or more creative)?

With $100 perhaps I could walk into Costco and get huge quantities of maybe 1/4 of what I need in a given week, and because I bought it at Costco instead of Dollar Tree those items will last me two months instead of a week. But now I have to go to Dollar Tree anyway and that's hard because I work 6 days a week and Costco is really far away because I live in a rural town where even a Walmart is at least 20 minutes away.

It's of course smarter to take the 20 minute drive to Walmart and save even there, but if I'm rural and uneducated I probably don't know that and assume that the per unit price at Dollar Tree is roughly the same as Walmart.

But the economic incentives to leave it all behind for the big city are strong. The internet makes it better, in theory, but there’s an online political divide, too.

I did notice that some of the products (like deodorant) typically "the sell by" date was much faster, but that wasn't a deterrent to me at the time.

I bought from the Dollar Store exclusively for 3 years for two reasons : 1) It was cheaper 2) the closest competitive store was 20 miles away

Some products are. Especially the unhealthy-- candy and soda is cheaper. I used to get bread there, they'd have the same bread as nicer stores just closer to the 'best by' date. But it tasted fine to me. I would get dishes and cups, silverware, and socks. Are ended up being cheaper than even Walmart. It can be cost effective even if you have other options

1$ socks 4 times/year << 20$ socks 1 time/year even if the socks double in price. And that's with the assumption that 1$ socks are 4 times more likely to break, which is incredibly pessimistic.

Not the case for bread! 1$ bread twice a week for a year starts to look bleak if it increases in price.

The cheapest things being the most cost effective uncommon for goods that are consumable due to long term wear and tear. You need to actually run the analysis for any given class of product.

There are also plenty of items that will be treated as disposable no matter the “quality” in real life. A $20 toilet plunger that sits unused for a couple of years will have dry rot on the rubber and break on the first or second use the same as a $1 plunger.

This isn't true for many of the core staple items sold by traditional retail and dollar channels. There are many identical or equivalent products that are sold at significantly lower price points.

I know this because I've literally read product cannibalization reports the retailers produce to quantify the margin loss associated with sales via the dollar channel.

Dollar Tree, on the other hand, every item is a dollar and it's possible to get cheap cereal and other groceries but many small things like candy are more expensive.

At least your own source notes this: "And despite their names, many dollar chains, including Family Dollar and Dollar General, sell items that cost $10 or more. Dollar Tree remains the only major retailer that continues to price its entire inventory for $1."

I shopped at a couple Dollar Generals on a road trip this past summer (it was interesting to see how many towns we passed through had one, as opposed to some other brand) and it seemed to me like a scaled down Fred Meyer, or a super scaled down Walmart. Maybe a scaled up gas station? And that's fine for most people, as evidenced by their market success. They tend to stock the same popular stuff as a bigger grocery store would. But you're not magically going to pay $1 for your full sized frozen pizza just because of the name. Indeed I can see an ad advertising two-for-$8 Tombstone pizzas, which is about the same as routine sales at my local Safeway in the rich Seattle area.

(And an edit for your edit, you're vaguely complaining that something is wrong for the subset of people where such stores are the only option, as if shipping and delivery don't exist, but whatever, you want them to have no options? I know you probably don't but it'd be more constructive to articulate what you actually want.)

I do not think it means half of Americans buy groceries from dollar general. I do not think it means of all those who shop groceries, half of them buy it from dollar general. I think it means, half of the people who buy stuff at dollar store also buy some groceries there. It does not mean much when put it that way.

I am familiar with poor people's shopping habits. The biggest advantage that Dollar stores have over others is not the price but rather their convenient location. A lot of Indians/Chinese students who come on shoestring budget would often buy lot of junk food from dollar store because they did not own car. For other items such as rice etc. they would request me to buy a large bag for them and then divide it among themselves. Similarly, trip to walmart etc. were rationed mostly because they did not own cars. People who owned cars on other hand could stretch their budgets even more. It was not uncommon for 5 of the folks to share one car, share a costco membership and buy in bulk and save lot of money in the process.

Pasta, rice, beans, and potatoes are good for calories but time consuming to prepare. They're also difficult to prepare if you've got a shitty stove, a lot of cheap apartments have ridiculously terrible electric stoves. The above food are also bland without some seasoning which is another thing to buy. A microwave a one or two good microwave safe containers is usually much cheaper, faster, and more consistent.

If you're on $5 a day to eat you'll get more variety and options just getting canned food. While dollar stores lack fresh produce they usually have a fair amount of canned produce. While obviously not as good it's better than pasta and rice every day.

Philosophically, man, humans weren't meant to have fresh produce of all kinds from all over the world year-round. That a lot of us do can be a nice luxury for some, but I think it'd be really hard to justify such a state as a necessary component of a healthy diet.

I agree with you that budgeting sucks and is harder the less you have, though.

Buying a whole chicken is far less expensive that buying cuts and is a cheap source of meat. You can make good stock from the bones. Vegetables at the end of their shelf life are often substantially marked down and you can often freeze what you cook with them (sauce and curry for exemple). Rice is very cheap, polenta too. Fresh pasta are easy to make and delicious as are homemade tortillas. Eggs are only 16c a piece. Fresh garlic and ginger are not too expensive and with a small selection of spices and soy sauce they will go a long way in making things better. Then, you can somewhat easily grow basil, parsley, thymes and cilantro on a window sill.

Olive oil and butter were the only expensive product I used to buy but a little goes a long way.

What? One person can easily get by on $40/week for food.

I'm not saying it is impossible, far from it, but you do have to be conscious of every single purchase. That head of broccoli is $2 this week? Maybe not in the budget. Apples are up to $1/each again, those are right out. These aren't crazy organic prices either, this is regular produce and store brands. This goes double if you're trying to eat a healthy balanced diet and not going for a college kid ramen diet.

Even worse with a budget so small it is hard to take advantage of buying in bulk to save money. Buy a 50lb sack of potatoes and you can't afford to each much of anything else for the week. Buying flour to make bread is a great cost saver when you are buying in 40lb bags, but not so great in the 5lb bags with the markup.

I think you are misreading the (ambiguous) mashed.com text, "More than half of shoppers now visit dollar stores to buy groceries, eMarketer reports, up from 21 percent just a few years ago.". It does not mean that more than half of all grocery shoppers buy their groceries at dollar stores, but that more than half of dollar store shoppers are shopping at the dollar store to buy groceries.

Actual market share of dollar stores in the grocery business is 2.9%, but this is expected to increase to 3.2%

https://www.supermarketnews.com/issues-trends/will-supermark...

Afford is an elusive concept. Dollar stores are often more expensive per-unit, but cheaper per-package. If the shoppers had better access to financing, some might choose to take a longer trip to, say, Costco, and buy things at a cheaper per-unit price in a more expensive package.

They're poor, not stupid.

> Even though Dollar General has the word “dollar” in its name, everything in the store doesn’t go for a buck; their merchandise is just low priced.

https://www.rd.com/article/dollar-tree-vs-dollar-general/

This thread comes across as incredibly out of touch. It’s like a bunch of upper middle class who imagine themselves lower middle class and anyone who shops at Walmart (yuck!) or Dollar Store must be destitute. Despite those stores being pretty average places to shop for most Americans.

You can get killer deals there. They tend to sell two different things:1) excess stock they got cheap and sell cheap and 2) normally high margin items for less.

Their health section is amazing compared to say CVS or Walgreens. We’re talking 80% cheaper for the same thing.

Not everything is cheaper but a lot of it is.

Dollar General, on the other hand, has notoriously positioned itself in underserved areas. While it's true that many of these areas are underserved because they are low-income areas, that's not necessarily the case. In semi-rural areas, Dollar General is often the closest general goods store, and people of all income levels will go there.

This thing Wikipedia describes as a V8 powered “full-size luxury car”?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrysler_300

Sample size of 1, but my roommate in college (I was in college, he was not) went through 3 cars in the amount of time I had just 1 because he only ever had enough money to buy a crappy car and had terrible credit. They all broke down pretty quickly so he ended up spending more in the long-run, but in the end he had to get to work, so he did what he had to do.

Your average Chrysler 300 is likely to have far more wear on the bump stops and in the back seats and trunk and far fewer scheduled maintenance items done than a 4Runner or some other car that has high class first owners.

If you really want to take a gamble though, buy a Porsche Cayenne from 2002-2009, there’s like 3 or more for sale in every medium sized city for $8k max. If you drive it for 2 years and the transmission explodes, hey $333 / month Porsche SUV minus scrap! If it dies in 6 months, not such a great deal.

I had to repair a thermostat and condenser in those 8 years, but I found it was much easier to work on then my brother in law’s Ford - the thermostat was impossible to get to without destroying your hand on that one.

[0] https://www.autotrader.com/cars-for-sale/vehicledetails.xhtm...

For example, a similar year Toyota, Subaru, or pre-CVT Nissans will hold higher values than equivalent American brand vehicles, with some exceptions.

Cars move down the economic ladder as they age. A similiar year Camry, Accord, or other InternetApproved(TM) cheap to run commuter car, is going to be in much nicer shape because it started a few dozen rungs higher than that '04 Impala, Sebring or whatever domestic we're comparing to. The price will reflect that niceness.

The Camry that's the same price as the average '04 Impala is going to be in equivalently rough shape and will be an older model year because it took it longer to get to that point because it started in nicer hands.

Seriously, punch in a $3000 price limit into your preferred classified section and see what it gets you.

These people are poor, not stupid. They're buying Big3/Korean/VW/Nissan sedans because that's what's available in the best condition and lowest miles at that price point because nobody wants them because they're not as practical as crossovers and people making white collar money don't fetishize them as ideal beater cars the way they do Toyotas and Hondas of that era.

It's entirely reasonable that poor people have older model luxury cars, either purchased 3rd hand or from when they were better off financially. After all, how much do you think you'd pocket selling your old 2006 [any non-collectable car] if you had to buy something new to drive around.

....which is why they're so stigmatized by the white collar well to do crowd.

- 06, $500

- 06, $4k

- 06, $12k

- 07, $5.9k

- 08, $2k

- 08, $6.2k

- 11, $17k

- 12, $12k

- 13, $7.5k

- 13, $7.9k

There's an obvious problem with cost per unit tricks like this. You have to be able to front the money to buy the big bag of rice. If your food budget is $40/wk, how are you going to spend $88 on a bag of rice? With your non-existent savings account? By eating plain rice and literally nothing else for > two weeks?

Incidentally, the median US household is said by the BLS to be capable of saving $1k/mo after all ordinary expenses. For those who actually save, a savings account typically isn't the mechanism to do it. This leads to "funny" statistics pushed by news outlets on how a huge percentage of people, even HNers who have thousands or even millions saved up in mostly liquid assets, have no savings, because they're sampling either non-existent or non-useful-and-thus-empty savings accounts.

A credit card + bank account

A stable address and room to store bulk stuff

A place to get packages where they won't be stolen

$88

Whenever someone says “the poor can do this” someone comes along to give an example of poor people who can’t. We get it, but there are plenty of poor who can do those things.

The answer is that they can’t get those same discounts buying larger scale items.

I agree there are still some cases where people may spend irresponsibly, but it’s a different problem than “cheaper calories exist in large enough quantities”

There’s nothing in my town of 2,000 of course, though I believe there’s a Dollar-Something in another local town.

For what it’s worth I don’t shop there. The one time I did I was unimpressed - that was the first time I’ve ever seen fruit flies in a grocery store. I also needed to go to my regular grocery store after and it was a huge timesuck.

I found Aldi to be perfectly fine, although you had to want whatever random stuff you got outside of a few fresh fruits. No flies at the ones I've been to, but that could just be because it's closer to a distribution hub? MN is the extreme ccorner of the area they serve.

> Dollar General

Dollar General has never been a "dollar store" in the way you're thinking.

You never drove an old hooptie, like I did in my early years!

You can get a loaf of whole wheat bread for $1, or you can buy a TV dinner for $1.

Efficiency Is Everything website has researched this.

This is a low information problem, not a capitalism problem.

And if someone needs an occasional quart of oil for their car, it's likely got some miles on it. It's not some pricey luxury automobile anymore. It's just an old Chrysler.

[0] https://www.autotrader.com/cars-for-sale/vehicledetails.xhtm...

It's easier now than it has been to learn how to keep cars running.