There are nearly 30,000 dollar stores nationwide, more than Starbucks and Walmart combined, and up from 20,000 in 2011. Dollar General and Dollar Tree are planning 20,000 more. Dollar General is opening four stores a day, a rate the company is expected to maintain through 2019.
Their customers are made up of three demographics: poor people, black people and rural people. The ILSR documented, with Tulsa, Oklahoma, as its test case, how the presence of dollar store chains can correlate even more strongly with race than income, with locations opening in food deserts historically neglected by supermarket chains.
‘Essentially what the dollar stores are betting on in a large way is that we are going to have a permanent underclass in America,’ real estate analyst Garrick Brown told Bloomberg in 2017.
Dollar General CEO Todd Vasos agreed, telling The Wall Street Journal, 'The economy is continuing to create more of our core customers.’ In other words, the more lower-income Americans struggle, the better dollar stores do.