I live in a rural area with a Dollar General about a half mile from my neighborhood. For staples, it’s honestly fine. You want a 6 pack and some hot dog buns because you missed it in the Wal-Mart run the other day (15 miles away), it’s great!
You’re not getting fleeced and if you are, the gas savings alone more than make up for it (0.65 per mile per the IRS.)
For folks who depend on the local DG for, idk, clothes and household goods it might be much worse, I don’t shop for those there ever, but on staples it’ll do, especially given the density of stores compared to major chains.
Being in a shopping rich area, I have some luxury of choosing what I get where. DG is a good option for a small list of items, about ½% of my shopping.
But it'd be awful if my best shopping option was 15mi away.
Having moved from a shopping rich environment of some 30 years to a very rural setting, I was innately trained to hate on Dollar General by my 15 years on HN. In reality, it’s a trade off. Nothing more, nothing less. Whereas before you might have fallen back on a country-store with a small kitchen and minor staples (eggs, cheese, milk) next to the RedBull most folks now have a wider variety of options at a price point comparable to or better than that filling station. All the better, DG has rolled out their “Market” concept with fresh options as well.
At this point I’d love to see a conversation about price points and convenience of a Japanese conbini as compared to a Japanese supermarket on HN. Far less politicized and denigrated I would hope.
> But it'd be awful if my best shopping option was 15mi away.
In much of the rural US, 15mi away is having your good shopping close by. A lot of areas make due with their "best shopping option" being well more than 15mi away.
Yes 15 miles for good shopping sounds pretty nice. I'd say I've got it fairly good for being rural - only 23 miles to the nearest Walmart. That town isn't really great shopping though.
The concept of "small convenience store near me" isn't the problem. The problem is that these stores are actively engaging in outright fraud. People who shop there are absolutely getting fleeced regardless of how much gas they burn getting to the store that's regularly ripping them off.
Having a small nearby connivance store and not getting scammed is an option. If the ability to get beer and hot dogs buns without having to drive to a larger more distant store is really worth the higher prices customers are getting fraudulently charged at the register, then these stores can just stop lying to customers and post the accurate prices.
If the laws were meaningfully enforced this is exactly what would happen. These stores would either comply with the law and stop committing fraud or they would be shut down, their CEOs would be sent to prison, and competitors willing to follow the law would step in to fill the need the market has for a small shop that sells beer and buns to rake in that profit for themselves.
Your article lists a few instances of target in an area failing at rates like 9% or 2.67%. The Guardian article shows dollar stores all over the place caught thousands of times and getting error rates like 76% 68% and 58%. One dollar store in Utah was caught cheating their customers in 28 inspections in a row! Maybe the News & Observer could have dug deeper into the Targets in your area and found violations of a similar scale, but they didn't, so from the information we have these are extremely different circumstances.
If Target (or whatever the hell a Sheetz is) were ripping off their customers to the same extent that these dollar stores have been doing it then they should also face meaningful consequences for that.
But many of the nazis in power in 36 did their first experimentations in the colonies. And by the way, in 33, one of the first act of Nazi germany was the sterilization of black and multiracial children.
Any time someone mention "fascism" or "communism" you can be sure people instantly lose 50 IQ point and come up with the most convoluted definitions of these terms
The US army have their own government owned supermarkets. And there are plenty of US states and other countries with public stores which are definitely not communist. Is the US army communist ?
The US army isn't communist by that definition, no. Any more than any employer who provides food to their employees isn't communist.
In Berlin you didn't realise that population increase is what enriches landlords and screws regular people, but you still vote for a lot of immigration. Population increase in a finite, well-settled country is what gives rise to landlords.
I would agree that government run stores falls into the communist playbook. Despite the communism boogie man, though, I don’t think supporting a couple of communist policies strictly makes a person a communist.
Trump sent a bunch of government checks to people during Covid and no one called him communist for this.
If everyone costs the system $10, and the five people pay $8, $9, $10, $11, and $12, respectively, I think it’s a mistake to say only the last two net-positive taxpayers are paying for the system.
For me, it’s not a matter of interruption. I’m largely free to dictate my own remote asynchronous schedule and have been for many years.
For me, it’s a nebulous poorly managed product shop with an “everyone owns everything” mentality which in reality means no one owns anything. With 10 engineers and 60 microservrices and GitHub repositories, this makes for an unmanageable, unknowable project.
For me, at least, the lack of the ability to compartmentalize decisions across a knowable domain is the crippling factor in concentration and productivity.
I would think the closest comparison to my eye is the Calvin and Hobbes commercialization? As a child of the 90s, I almost exclusively knew of Calvin stickers pissing on Ford and Chevy logos growing up. The great comic was a pleasant surprise for my teenage self.
It's not like stickers are particularly difficult to make, or Watterson had an army of auditors combing every gas station or car meet looking for sticker makers.
They have (as I understand it) challenged and stopped some folks from doing things, but something like the Calvin sticker was pretty ubiquitous. Even then, some later ones were particularly bad Calvins.
I had a vinyl sticker of Spaceman Spiff on the back of my motorcycle helmet. I bought it at a motorcycle race back in the 90s.
Throughout my 20s that was about the only factor that led me to McDs - a cheap, fast meal. The 2/$3 McChicken for a lazy dinner or a McMuffin for a hangover fix was always too cheap to pass up.
Nowadays McDonald’s feels like a Seinfeld bit: _Whats the deal with fast-food, it’s not fast, and it’s not food._
I’m pretty much guaranteed to spend so much on a biscuit and coffee that I could go to the local coffee shops in town and get a coffee and breakfast sandwich for the same money and oftentimes faster, somehow.
You don’t have to sit side-by-side rubbing shoulders and squabbling with rabble for 12 years in order to understand and deal with it, just like you don’t have to wrestle with gators for 12 years to learn respect for nature.
I don’t think it’s serious in any platform of any scale. I remember having some pedo on AOL try to groom me as a 7(?) year old, except I was aware enough to punch out of the situation very quickly. The kind of thing basic keyword filters could have flagged and caught.
Similarly, I remember my families account being banned because I dared to say “Santa isn’t real” in a chat around the same timeframe.
Very serious administration for a billions dollar firm…
It’s all relative to your locale. When I lived in the city it was a scourge no matter the time of day, didn’t matter which part of town I would go to, some entitled persons would leave their shopping carts in random parking spaces, or in the plant beds, grass medians, etc. with an empty cart return rack mere steps away.
Living in small town rural America today, it’s just not a problem, folks simply don’t do it. The only exception to that statement is you will occasionally see a very elderly and infirm customer leaving their cart in the non-parking portions of the handicap parking. Of course you’ll also see just as many folks taking those carts with them inside. It’s a nice little balance. Perhaps coincidentally this area is very calm and very low crime.
I live in a rural area with a Dollar General about a half mile from my neighborhood. For staples, it’s honestly fine. You want a 6 pack and some hot dog buns because you missed it in the Wal-Mart run the other day (15 miles away), it’s great!
You’re not getting fleeced and if you are, the gas savings alone more than make up for it (0.65 per mile per the IRS.)
For folks who depend on the local DG for, idk, clothes and household goods it might be much worse, I don’t shop for those there ever, but on staples it’ll do, especially given the density of stores compared to major chains.
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