There's a Dollar General roughly every 12 feet in this country, and somehow we keep building more of them.
The chain now operates over 20,000 locations, which means at any given moment, you are within crying distance of a shelf full of off-brand Pop-Tarts and a single sad bag of frozen shrimp.
But here's the part that's been quietly brewing in rural America for years: those stores aren't just selling cheap toothpaste.
They're replacing the actual grocery stores, pharmacies, and hardware shops that used to anchor small towns, and then understocking the shelves once the competition is dead.
A 2022 study out of Purdue found that dollar store expansion correlates with reduced access to fresh food in the communities that get them.
Translation: the town gets a Dollar General, the local grocer folds, and suddenly "fresh produce" means a wilting bag of carrots that's been there since the Biden administration's first State of the Union.
The business model is genuinely clever if you're a shareholder and genuinely bleak if you live there.
Dollar General targets towns of 20,000 people or fewer, often opening multiple stores within a few miles of each other.
One town in Ohio reportedly got so many locations that residents started a Facebook group just to track them like they were stray cats.
Then there's the staffing situation, which is its own genre of internet content.
Employees have gone viral for posting videos of understaffed shifts where one person is running the register, stocking the freezer, and apparently also fighting a raccoon in aisle four.
The company's response has mostly been "thoughts and prayers" plus a reminder that you can apply for a management position.
Let's be fair for a second, because the comment section will be brutal otherwise.
Dollar General does employ hundreds of thousands of people and does sell affordable goods to folks who can't drive 40 minutes to a Walmart.
For a lot of families, it's the difference between dinner and no dinner.
But "it could be worse" is not a business strategy, and it's certainly not a food policy.
The company has added fresh produce to thousands of stores, which sounds great until you realize half of it is canned or shelf-stable, and the actual fresh section is roughly the size of a card table.
The real kicker is that these stores keep getting approved by local zoning boards because they promise jobs and tax revenue.
Then a few years later, the town has three Dollar Generals, no pharmacy, no grocery store, and a weird number of empty buildings that used to be something else.
So yeah, the next time you pull into a Dollar General parking lot for a phone charger and a Gatorade, take a look around.
The honest take here is that Dollar General isn't evil — it's just a symptom of a country that stopped investing in small towns decades ago and let a discount chain fill the void.
Final Thoughts
If your town's biggest economic development news is another DG, that's not a win.