Ebony Martin and I were speaking on the phone on a recent Saturday afternoon as she drove past the Family Dollar at the intersection at Campbellton and County Line Roads.
“It is filled with trash,” said Martin who had emailed me with concerns about the dollar stores in her neighborhood. “Family Dollar came about a decade (ago) and it has been the blight of the neighborhood since then.”
When Martin moved to Ben Hill in southwest Atlanta 12 years ago, there was already a Dollar General at the intersection. That wasn’t a problem, she said. But Family Dollar showed up during the Great Recession when the dollar chains were proliferating across the country as if they were the panacea for economic distress.
In recent years, that saturation strategy has backfired as residents in communities across the metro area (and nationwide) have compelled local leaders to limit the number of discount stores that can open in their neighborhoods.
At least a half-dozen cities in metro Atlanta, including Atlanta, East Point, Forest Park, Riverdale, South Fulton and Stockbridge, have passed dispersal ordinances that limit the number of discount retail chains within distances ranging from one to five miles, according to data compiled by the Institute for Local Self Reliance (ILSR).
Commissioners in counties stretching from Dougherty to DeKalb are also considering restrictions on dollar stores. The city of Stonecrest placed an outright ban on them.
Georgia has more chain dollar stores per person than all but 10 states, with nearly 1,500 Dollar General, Dollar Tree and Family Dollar combined stores across the state as of 2017, according to ILSR. (Dollar Tree has owned Family Dollar since 2015.)
The stores follow a pattern, said Jerry Shannon, associate professor of geography at the University of Georgia. Family Dollar stores are mostly located around the city of Atlanta. Dollar General is in moderate to lower income suburbs and Dollar Tree is in the more affluent north suburbs.
Study after study has noted the drawbacks (and, in a few cases, the merits) of locating dollar stores in the poor, rural and Black communities where most of them are found. Residents in those areas have been crying foul for a long time.
The stores are magnets for crime and grime, are poorly run, and have horrible customer service, according to some residents. Dollar store representatives and supporters say the stores serve low-income communities by providing lower priced foods and convenience items in areas with limited resources.
“For a long time the narrative was that dollar stores locate in food deserts, but we have found that dollar stores actually create food deserts,” said Kennedy Smith, senior researcher for ILSR. A 2018 report from ILSR found that when these retailers cluster in neighborhoods it is harder to attract full-service grocery stores or any other retail, resulting in a reduction in local jobs and limited access to fresh foods and quality goods.
There is some truth in all of this, and Martin said she can see the many sides of the issue.
But we already know adding another dollar store will not address the systemic issues that continue to impact low-income and rural communities. The debate should focus on empowering residents to make decisions about their neighborhoods and financially supporting resources that will make neighborhoods stronger and more resilient.
In January, more than 400 Family Dollar stores in six states closed temporarily after a Food and Drug Administration investigation revealed that products ranging from medications to pet food had been stored and shipped from a distribution center in West Memphis, Arkansas where thousands of dead rodents were found.
The facility had been a hotbed of rodent activity for six months in 2021— all while items were being sent to stores in Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Missouri, Mississippi and Tennessee. Georgia stores are serviced by the same distribution center according to the company website but were not included in this round of recalls.
“No one should be subjected to products stored in the kind of unacceptable conditions that we found in this Family Dollar distribution facility,” said Associate Commissioner for Regulatory Affairs Judith McMeekin in a Feb. 18 statement.
Since 2016, the U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration has conducted 55 inspections at Dollar General locations nationwide, including one this summer at a store in Dalton. OSHA has proposed fees of more than $3.6 million in penalties for workplace hazards such as obstructed exit routes, unstable stacking and blocked working space around electrical panels.
“Dollar General’s long and extensive history of workplace safety violations and repeated failures to protect its workers shows willful recklessness,” said OSHA Atlanta Regional Administrator Kurt Petermeyer. “Their blatant and continued disregard for the safety of their employees must come to an end.”
Martin wasn’t aware of all of this when I shared it with her but she certainly wasn’t surprised. When corporations demonstrate such limited regard for their employees, customer care is also unlikely to be a priority.
She said when residents have tried to contact the corporation via phone, email, city officials or online petitions, they have received no answer and certainly no long-term solutions.
Dollar stores are responding in small ways to public pressure, such as adding produce sections to some stores, but not because they are good public citizens, Smith said.
I’m encouraged to see more communities taking a stand against what they consider to be ills in their neighborhoods. If dollar stores want to be embraced by communities, they need to clean up their act and return to the philosophy that Leon Levine, founder of Family Dollar, set for himself and his team: “The customers are the boss, and you need to keep them happy.”
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