Lower-income American households are running out of money at the end of every month, the discount retailer Dollar General said as it released dismal results that drove its shares down more than 30 per cent for their sharpest one-day drop on record.

When the American economy is too rough for Dollar General

83 points

Dollar general contributes to this by only having like 3 jobs per store and they don’t pay shit.

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75 points

i think the future of most stores is just to close the inside, turn it into a mini-warehouse that you use an app to preorder or place an order at a window

no joke i work in a retail sector and a former co-worker asked a C-suite guy what the company’s “vision” was for the future and he basically said that

so won’t even be 3 jobs eventually. 1 maybe.

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Honestly in store retail is a fucking nightmare of work that only exists because customers are careless and lazy. Customers will upend an entire table of folded clothes like pigs rooting through the brush for forage and SOMEONE has to fix it. It can take hours to fold and reorganize a section of clothing only for some shithead to come fuck it up again in 2 minutes.

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28 points

I got fired from Walmart for looking too sad. Working in apparel was Sisyphean for this exact reason and I was expected to just be happy about it.

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16 points
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my first girlfriend was like that… when we were first dating we used to go ShopKo because there was nowhere really to go and it was air conditioned, but she pulled clothes off the rack, held them up to herself, then threw them on the floor one after the other to my horror. I immediately picked all the clothes up and started putting them back on the rack, while she laughed at me. Then she saw how disgusted I was and she never did that again.

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11 points

We should RETVRN to storefronts where you can see 1 (1) of every item so you know what is available and then you put in your order. Or you just put your order in in advance. The supermarket experience of poring over rows of identical packaging is a marketing hellscape that harms both customers and workers.

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39 points

The whole point of the reail shop was to make the shoppers do the labor of walking the storehouse, finding the items, picking them, colating them, and transporting them. Converting every store into a mini warehouse will increase labor costs. It will require consolidation to achieve the vision you have put forth.

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A store like Walmart has a back storage/staging area. Employees have to move product to the salesfloor anyways. They get interrupted by customers asking for stuff. They also have to worry about cleanups and security and organizing for customers rather than quick picking.

Dollar general takes that and scales it down. They remove the storage/staging. But it works the same way. The story is designed for customers and employees must support customers. Removing the customer presence eliminates a lot of friction from a systems standpoint.

Either way employees must walk the floor. You can’t really offload the cost of that onto the customer. One employee picking 5 orders at once eliminates a lot of foot-traffic in the store.

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17 points
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ordering stuff for in store pick up is the best. Roll up, grab your shit, leave. No wasted time wandering the aisles

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25 points

But I like wandering the aisles…

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11 points

I had a couple of experiences with online grocery shopping, specially during the pandemic. One was in a fancy web store where I had to see every product to select what I needed, the other one a small minimarket where I sent my grocery list in a whatapp chat and was done, if there was something missing they just chat me back. From what brands, I just said wharever except Nestlé. When I moved to another part of the city that minimarket was a great loss from us.

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12 points

Lmao returning to tradition of the old-timey grocers’ then, but in a tech-broey way

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7 points

My building have a mini market with no employees, you just take what you need and pay with the app. I guess they still have at least one employee supplying a couple of different buildings, but that makes its less that one employee for store.

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16 points

Seems like there’s some kind of crisis of production going on here.

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70 points

all the grocery stores where I live are like almost 2x the price of when I was living in a bigger city. the demographics of the town are such that like half or more are on disability, SSI, foodstamps etc.

grocery stores are gouging food stamp customers because they know they have no choice.

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grocery stores are gouging food stamp customers because they know they have no choice

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27 points

I live in a similar place, so the lines at Dollar General and Tree are like 20-45min every time I walk in there since they hire like 1 person to do the work of 10 (all the stores declining in that report do that) reminding me of Kmart before its demise and at least 2/3 of the town shops there. Sometimes I have to make do without since I can’t wait and will just have to spend more at the grocery when I can combine it with another trip to justify the gas.

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20 points

you don’t have to wait in line when you just steal shit and walk right out.

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5 points

In the city absolutely, this rural not happening unless you look like the locals, they already eye me half the time like I’m stealing.

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67 points

If the extraction class was looking for a canary in the coal mine, this is it. You’ve officially squeezed too hard and are in danger of being eaten.

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17 points

You’ve officially squeezed too hard and are in danger of being eaten.

eh, at this point the average American is much more likely to support fascist shit-heels than spontaneously turn to socialism.

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66 points

Remember, the coolzone will not happen without organising.

Americans will not spontaneously rise up. They will just get poorer, more miserable, more criminal, more fucked.

There are places everywhere all over the world that are more desperately poor. And without organising they too do not spontaneously rise up. They simply die.

The work needs doing.

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36 points

i think ppl who say things like “once conditions are bad enough, we’ll start party rockin’” is unaware of things like hierarchy of needs or how bad things used to be historically (in the us)

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we need to post harder

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49 points

Dollar General? No I answer to Won General

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