I agree 100% on this. If a Dollar General opens a store in your area, it's over. Crime is already going up, the Walmart three towns over is a dirty, filthy disaster, all the strip malls are either empty or full of liquor and tattoo stores, and local tax revenues are gone.
I've been to county planning meeting opposing these places. I'm probably known at "that guy" whenever I show up. I've asked county commissioners if there are any studies that giving retail establishments tax abatements increases revenue and job growth... only to be told don't worry.
If there is a Dollar General within two miles of a house you want to buy? Don't.
Dollar General is one of the stocks a lot of the gloom'n'doom guys recommend you buy. They are, after all, ruthless. Whereas the Dollar General profiled in the article was looking for a $68k tax abatement, Walmarts typically ask for millions. Don't have millions? Have a Dollar General. Their business model isn't dissimilar to those Halloween stores you see popping up in the abandoned whatever-it-is-that-nobody-went-to-anymore. The leases they sign are short-term. They pay much less than the going rate but they do their own TI (if you force them). Five percent of their sales are food stamps. They're a parasitic organization. blackbootz told me to read Matthew Desmond's Evicted. It's fuckin' grim. Throughout, however, it makes the point that slums are lucrative if you're gangsta enough to adopt "bitch better have my money" as your personal mantra. Dollar General will let you wash those dirty dolla bills through your 401(k).
I don't think I can get on the anti-DG train. Sure it cuts into Kroger's profits when I go buy my soap or catfood from Doller General, but it saves me 20 minutes worth of driving and is a faster shopping experience. I live in a semi-well populated area though, so my DG isn't the best example. Take the stores in <1000 person towns though.. We have a lot of those in the southeast. Name me anything else that can hang on there.. Like tacocat's video said, 90% of all Americans are within 10 miles to the nearest Walmart. It's not DG that put the local grocery out of business in BFE, Mississippi; it was the Walmart 10-20 minutes away. But 10 miles is a long ass way when you don't have much gas, or maybe don't have a car at all. Or maybe you do, but all you need is the soap or cat food that you forgot earlier. Therein lies a challenging but viable business opportunity, and Dollar General has been the only company streamlined and we'll organized enough to capitalize on it. They're like a fucking desert shrub, and one of the few business models able to exist in the wake of giants like Walmart and Kroger. I can't help but admire that a little.
I can't help but shop there because I'm poor as I also say fuck you, why do we need a Dollar General two blocks away from a Family Dollar. I can't make ethical shopping decisions because I'm strapped for cash. See also my Amazon account and my opinion that it's a dangerous monopoly. Whatcha gonna do? is my motto lately. Fucking nothing because I'm poor is the answerI can't help but admire that a little.
So long as we're being brutally frank, I took a long, hard look at the future of industry and economics in the United States and said "where's my top hat and pince nez, I'ma sell expensive hand-made luxury items to rich fuckers." You can't fight the tide, man. Sometimes your only recourse is to grab a surfboard and hang on for dear life.
You have just elaborated the tragedy of the commons. From a biomass standpoint, an algal bloom is a resounding success. From a health and diversity standpoint, it's a catastrophe.
Tax breaks of course represent a way to lure companies into certain geographies, and I think that there can be useful use cases. However, on the balance they're really destructive, and have set up a race to the bottom between states. The Amazon second headquarters is the most obvious right now (and the Foxxcon sweepstakes of a couple years ago), but it happens all the time with companies moving cities and states. The "Texas Miracle" was driven by Rick Perry essentially telling every single company he could that there are few taxes and no additional environmental regulations in his shithole of a state (not exactly sure what their marketing materials said, but I'm sure it was close to that if you read the euphemisms correctly). Detroit just about threw a party last week when Chemical Bank announced it was building a new 20 story building in downtown without asking for any local abatements (they're becoming the city's preferred banker though, so it's still a sweetheart deal). So many of these deal are zero sum in terms of job creation, but they are essentially stealing from the schools, the road commission, the water quality inspectors, etc. I have no idea how you tackle this problem, but it's spiraling to a very shitty place.
On the face of it, the Interstate Highway System was a big-government giveaway that aimed to decentralize the United States through military applications. A similar infrastructure program designed to facilitate manufacturing or technology in small towns would turn everything around. Create an ecosystem whereby small entrepreneurs received federal funds for recolonizing failing small towns and those small towns would cease to fail. Of course, that would run afoul of states' rights and is therefore communist and will therefore never happen.