One of many signs of rising inequality. These big "dollar store" corporations are willing to bet that tens of thousands of more stores will be necessary to provide the most basic goods to people.
Dollar General’s chief rival, Dollar Tree Inc., which also owns Family Dollar, has a plan that’s almost as ambitious. In a recent Securities and Exchange Commission filing, Dollar Tree indicated that it believes the U.S. market can support 10,000 Dollar Trees and 15,000 Family Dollars. That’s almost 11,000 more stores than its current 14,500, though it isn’t putting a timeline on the expansion. In August, Randy Guiler, vice president for investor relations at Dollar Tree, told me it would “determine each year what our pace of growth will be.”
“It reminds me of a craps table,” Brown, the commercial real estate analyst, says. “Essentially what the dollar stores are betting on in a large way is that we are going to have a permanent underclass in America. It’s based on the concept that the jobs went away, and the jobs are never coming back, and that things aren’t going to get better in any of these places.”