The Dollar General phenomenon

A post at the Lawyers Guns and Money blog caught my eye and prompted this post regarding the blight of Dollar General and Dollar Tree stores in small towns across the NCR.   Since these two companies have over 20,000 stores across the country with plans for thousands more, I know this is not a local disease.  It is however a symptom of our economic malaise.  These vultures prey on the people without access to even the Walmart which killed the little Main St. stores which kept local economies vital.  Selling toilet paper and other necessities to cash strapped customers should be a soul deadening business, but Wall St. seems to love it.   Even relatively well off towns like Plattsburgh and Oneonta which host SUNY colleges and hospitals, bastions of well paying jobs are increasingly targets for these dollar stores.   As a kid, I remember the original Woolworth 5&10 store in the nearest town.  It was the Dollar General of its time.  My mother allowed me to roam the aisles looking at the cheap toys and candy while she bought a few necessities from the offerings.  That original store morphed into a larger emporium at the first strip mall in town and gradually took on a more middle class vibe as consumers in the area became more middle class.  Perhaps the same thing will occur this time.  However, where the children of the 50s and 60s expected to do better economically than their parents, many of today's younger generation, especially in small towns, see Dollar General and its imitators as their first and last choice for shopping.