The True Cost of Dollar Stores (2024)

Recently, Dayton has cited the crime and violence that the stores attract as a reason to challenge their requests to sell alcohol. Several years ago, Dollar General obtained alcohol licenses for many of its Dayton-area stores. In 2017, the city’s law department began seeking to block requests by Family Dollar to obtain licenses for seven of its stores, including three on the west side. The city had an easier time enlisting community testimony against alcohol-license applications for stores on the north and east sides of town, which are less heavily African-American. City officials attributed this imbalance in part to a general sense of resignation and powerlessness on the west side.

When the state’s Division of Liquor Control approved all but one Family Dollar request, Martin Gehres, the assistant city attorney, drove a fifteen-passenger van full of north- and east-side residents to appeals hearings in Columbus. The residents, who included the owner of a bakery across from a Family Dollar and the manager of an adjacent library branch, won reversals of the approval for that store and for another on the north side. But the alcohol sales went ahead on the west side, where crime is worse. “The stores they got them at were the ones I was most concerned about,” Gehres said.

When I met with Gehres and Hall, they told me they were aware that the stores filled a retail void for many residents of Dayton, which has lost nearly half its residents since 1960. But they also cited research suggesting that, in some places, the dollar stores have exacerbated the problem. “They are filling a food desert,” Gehres said. “And they are helping cause a food desert.”

Even the most image-conscious public corporations tend to acknowledge, in their required disclosures to investors and in their quarterly calls with market analysts, the challenges facing them. So it was startling to find no mention of the prevalence of crime and violence in recent filings for either Dollar General or Family Dollar and Dollar Tree. Company executives make occasional reference to “shrink,” the industry euphemism for stock lost mainly to shoplifting or employee theft. But the steady stream of violence at the stores, much of it directed against employees, was omitted.

Dollar General emphasized its efforts to keep costs down. In its disclosures for the third quarter of 2019, Dollar General lamented the rise in nationwide hourly wages, and said that it was aiming to shift to self-checkout in many stores. The company hopes not to have to increase security at stores, since its “financial condition could be affected adversely” by doing so. “Our ability to pass along labor costs to our customers is constrained by our everyday low price model,” Dollar General concluded, “and we may not be able to offset such increased costs elsewhere in our business.” Similarly, Dollar Tree executives told analysts in a quarterly call in March that they were pushing “productivity initiatives” in stores, which would help get more from fewer workers. “We are well positioned in the most attractive sector of retail to deliver continued growth and increase value for our shareholders,” Gary Philbin, the company’s C.E.O., said.

In the past five years, the share price of Dollar General has nearly tripled, outpacing the broader stock market by some eighty per cent and vastly outperforming traditional grocery stores and retailers such as Kroger and Macy’s. In 2018, Vasos, Dollar General’s C.E.O., received more than ten million dollars in total compensation, nearly eight hundred times the median pay for workers at the company. Philbin, at Dollar Tree, was paid about the same amount.

Asked about the hundreds of incidents of violent crime at their stores, the companies said that they took security concerns seriously, but they did not elaborate on preventive measures at the stores. Both companies declined to say how many had armed security. Randy Guiler, a Family Dollar spokesman, said, in written responses to questions, “To ensure the integrity of our security systems and procedures, we do not publicly share specific details.” None of the ten dollar stores that I visited in Dayton had a security guard present. In liquor-board testimony, the Family Dollar manager for the region stretching across Interstate 70 from Dayton to St. Louis said that the company deployed security guards at only a couple of stores in his region, in St. Louis and Cincinnati.

Guiler said that the stores coöperated fully with local police departments, and had in some places opened tip lines with rewards for information leading to arrests. He told me that the company recently hired the security firm ADT to upgrade the stores’ camera systems. Asked about the stores’ low staffing levels, Guiler said, “We are a small-box retailer. Staffing levels can, and do, vary by day, by hour and based on store sales volumes.”

A spokesperson for Dollar General said, “In keeping with our mission of Serving Others, we are proud to provide a convenient, affordable retail option to customers and communities that other retailers choose not to serve.”

When Jolanda Woods heard about Robert’s murder, she returned to St. Louis from Philadelphia, where she had been working at a nonprofit, to organize his funeral. In an interview with KMOV, the local CBS affiliate, she faulted Dollar General for leaving stores understaffed and for allowing stock to pile up near the door, making it harder for workers and customers to escape robberies. “That’s not enough staff to secure your store with no security,” she said. “You can’t expect them to watch the aisles, work the cash registers, watch the thieves and stop the thieves.”

In February, I went to St. Louis and visited the Dollar General where Robert was killed. Inside the entrance was just the sort of barrier that Jolanda had described: a double-wide column of several dozen “totes,” or large plastic crates, holding a jumble of goods on clearance. There were cable protectors and scented oils and chicken-jerky curls and baby pacifiers and “Frozen”-themed Ziploc bags and party napkins and elastic wrist supports and charcoal foot scrub and romance novels. In the shampoo aisle, a manager was telling an employee to mark down certain goods with a price gun. “I want to sell this because this is what creates totes in the back room, and I hate totes in the back room,” he said. “So get your gun.”

The next morning, I went to see Jolanda at her new house, in an inner suburb just north of the city. She called up her friend Winter and put her on speakerphone. Winter knew a lot about crime that had occurred at that Dollar General in the years when Jolanda had been living in Philadelphia. There was the time some men loaded up a large trash can with stolen goods at the store’s back door and then just hauled it out. There was the time a manager she knew became so frustrated by the crime that he asked a friend from East St. Louis to serve as de-facto security. After the friend got in an altercation with a suspected thief, the company reprimanded them, which led both to quit. “When they quit, it was all on again,” Winter said.

The police say that Robert Woods’s killing remains unsolved. Jolanda had received a workers’-compensation payment on Robert’s behalf, but she was contemplating organizing a class-action lawsuit on behalf of family members of other victims of violence at Dollar Generals. “You have a service and a product that’s needed in a community,” she said. “Well, you have to be part of the community to make that work. And being part of it means ‘I’m going to secure you while you’re here. I’m going to have somebody on my lot to make sure you get to your cars. I’m going to secure it.’ These stores are throughout our community, but they have no interest in the community. They’re not giving nothing back. They give nothing back.”

Last October, Jimmy Donald was in line with a friend at a Dollar General on the west side of Dayton, at 2228 North Gettysburg, a short drive from the one where he took his mother to shop and the one where he had been robbed. He was startled to see that the cashier was carrying a pistol on his hip. The cashier, Dave Dukes, said that he had been held up recently and wanted to be ready in case it happened again.

Frustration was rising at City Hall, too. When Mayor Whaley entered city government, in 2005, she viewed the dollar chains as serving a useful purpose, but over time she saw how the chains’ stores in urban neighborhoods contrasted with the ones in rural areas. Residents often sent her photos of dangerously cluttered aisles, and she asked fire marshals to issue warnings. “The more and more ubiquitous they’ve gotten, they’ve gotten less and less caring,” she said. “I came to see them as glorified check-cashing and payday lenders, for the way they prey off the poor but don’t really care about the poor.”

In January, 2019, John Cranley, the mayor of Cincinnati, wrote a letter about his city’s struggles with the stores to the C.E.O. of Dollar Tree, which led to a meeting at Cincinnati’s City Hall with Cranley, Whaley, the cities’ police chiefs, and some company executives. The executives started giving a PowerPoint presentation about Dollar Tree, but the mayors cut them off, and threatened to file lawsuits against the company. The executives promised to work on “good neighbor” agreements with the cities instead, laying out terms for better coöperation. (Asked for an update this spring, Gehres, Dayton’s assistant city attorney, wrote in an e-mail, “Family Dollar and the City are ironing out the terms. Some language concerns a litter abatement program and environmental improvements to mitigate some of our concerns.”)

Some cities have started to take more dramatic measures. In 2018 and 2019, Tulsa, New Orleans, and Birmingham, believing that the stores’ concentration dissuaded traditional grocers from moving in, were among the cities that passed legislation requiring new chain dollar stores to be at least a mile apart, unless they held a minimum square footage of fresh food. Whaley and Gehres told me that Dayton had considered taking this step but decided that it would be of little more than symbolic value, since the city’s immediate challenge was contending with problems at the stores it already had.

Eventually, I made it to the Dollar General on North Gettysburg, where Jimmy Donald had seen Dave Dukes, the cashier with the gun on his hip. But he was no longer there.

On October 9, 2019, Roosevelt Rappley, a twenty-three-year-old man who police said had been involved in several dollar-store robberies, came into the store carrying a gun. Dukes, who is twenty-eight, had been employed at the store for a year and a half, after years of working in construction. He had been promoted to assistant manager and, he said, had repeatedly asked his supervisors for a security guard at the store, to no avail. He had a concealed-carry permit for the gun, and, in any case, Ohio allowed open carry without a permit. The store manager knew about the gun and had not prevented him from carrying it.