“While dollar stores sometimes fill a need in cash-strapped communities, growing evidence suggests these stores are not merely a byproduct of economic distress. They’re a cause of it,” a nonprofit that advocates for small businesses reported in 2018.
Photograph by Andres Gonzalez for The New YorkerWhen Jolanda Woods was growing up in North St. Louis, in the nineteen-seventies and early eighties, she and her friends would take the bus to the stores downtown, on Fourteenth Street, or on Cherokee Street, on the south side, or out to the River Roads Mall, in the inner suburb of Jennings. “This was a very merchant city,” Woods, who is fifty-four, told me. There were plenty of places to shop in her neighborhood, too, even as North St.
Three years ago, Jolanda Woods’s husband, Robert Woods, who was forty-two, began working at a Dollar General on Grand Boulevard, across from an abandoned grocery store. He and Jolanda had separated, but they stayed in touch over the years as Robert overcame a crack-cocaine addiction, got a job at the Salvation Army, was ordained as a minister, and became an informal counsellor to other men battling addiction.
The number of incidents can be explained in part by the stores’ ubiquity: there are now more than sixteen thousand Dollar James Luther Turner left school in 1902, when he was eleven. His father had died in a wrestling accident, and Turner had to run his family’s farm, in Macon County, Tennessee. He was successful and entrepreneurial, and when he was twenty-four other farmers asked him to manage the local co-op; he started a bridle shop behind the store. Eventually, he took a job working for a Nashville drygoods wholesaler, hawking samples across southern Kentucky and middle Tennessee.
slow, it got by with just one at a time. When a bookkeeper invited two colleagues to lunch with a union organizer, Cal, Sr., had her fired. After the Teamsters tried to organize the company’s truck drivers, the company outsourced its transportation to a contractor and hired a slew of armed guards to escort the new drivers past picketers.
This correlation is not a coincidence, according to a 2018 research brief by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, which advocates for small businesses. The stores undercut traditional grocery stores by having few employees, often only three per store, and paying them little. “While dollar stores sometimes fill a need in cash-strapped communities, growing evidence suggests these stores are not merely a byproduct of economic distress,” the brief reported. “They’re a cause of it.
stores. In 2017, the year he was held up, there were thirty-two armed robberies at eighteen Dollar Generals and Family Dollars in Dayton. Last year, there were two dozen. The violence has included more than robberies, too. Last July, a man and a woman were killed outside a west-side Family Dollar in a murder-suicide; in September, a man was shot during a drug deal outside the Dollar General where I had run into Donald and his mother.
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 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.
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.” 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.
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.
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