Abstract

"Dollar Stores That Serve: In Search of New Markets and New Missions"

Frankie Barrett, Yale University (frankie.barrett@yale.edu)

Today, dollar stores blend into the scenery of rural highways and city blocks. The proliferation of dollar stores across the U.S. has attracted media attention in recent years for the seemingly sudden emergence of “a dollar store economy.” In reality, the retail sector has grown steadily since the mid-twentieth century. Almost since their inception, each of the three leading corporate dollar store firms–Family Dollar, Dollar General, and Dollar Tree–utilized a model of strategic expansion. While consistently targeting low-income communities, these corporate retailers employed changing rhetorics of public interest to justify opening stores in new markets.

In this paper, I examine the history of these three corporate retailers’ geographic expansion across the U.S. from their hometowns in Scottsville, Kentucky; Norfolk, Virginia; and Charlotte, North Carolina. I trace the geographic expansion of the corporate retailers into first rural, then urban, and finally suburban markets alongside the changing justifications the firms used to situate new stores as a public good. At different moments, the firms professed that stores acted as an essential resource for rural communities, a way out of poverty for low-income urban community members, or a convenient option for suburban neighborhoods. After identifying the changing strategies used to justify the corporate retailers’ expansion, this paper begins to outline the ways that dollar stores have fulfilled or failed to accomplish the promises firms made to the communities the stores allegedly serve.