Dollar stores are the miner’s canary of contemporary society. What happens to them will happen to us all.
They came into existence, in the first place, to provide an increasingly impoverished U.S. populace a pathetic semblance of the American Dream, as tawdrily manifested in cheap, Chinese plastic.
Poor shoppers who couldn’t afford better items at pricier retailers could still find somewhat the same functionality along aisles crammed with the saddest examples of “generic equivalents” that existed on planet Earth.
It’s where those too penurious to even enter Walmart congregated, dressed in mismatched Salvation Army hand-me-downs, and trailing a bunch of noisy, oddly excited kids.
They’re kin to the hardscrabble young men you overhear talking on city buses, telling how they just got out of jail and are off to apply for a telemarketing job.
Tragically, they’re rapidly becoming the everyday people of broken capitalism on the skids to apparent oblivion.
Oblivion presaged by the spreading demise of dollar stores themselves.
It occurs when they can no longer realize the small profit that comes from charging only a buck for their merchandise.
Soon shoppers see a shelf devoted to things that cost over a dollar. Maybe two dollars, or five.
Before long, more products get priced out of low-income customers’ affordability range, and business declines.
A few weeks later, a going out of business sale is held, attended by crowds of desperate souls scrambling for the last few pieces of this and that available at a 50% reduction.
Shortly thereafter, the lights are turned off, the doors are locked for the last time, and unfriendly winds begin to blow litter across a barren parking lot.
The next place those bottom-tier folks will gather—with their number swollen by individuals or whole families who never thought they’d one day have to join such wretched ranks—are soup kitchens and food shelves, run by charities increasingly unable to meet growing demand.
If you took the time and trouble to look, you’d then discover that some of them spent their cold nights shivering under thin blankets beneath freeways seeing less traffic due to exorbitant gas prices.
Meanwhile, Wall Street prospers (at least for now), infused with the parasitically derived lifeblood of those left victimized by Scott Walker-style union busting, by living wages that selfish Republicans and Tea Partiers constantly thwart, and by the fatally endemic “free market” inability to put public welfare and the common good above obscenely escalating private gain.
Yes, the greedy rich are unwittingly killing their own Golden Goose.
How can capitalism continue to function, or survive, when everyone becomes so poor that nobody can buy back what society produces?
I had a caged bird when I was a little boy. It brought me great happiness and I loved it dearly. Then, quite suddenly, it became mysteriously ill, fell from its perch, and lay helpless below.
From my own heartbreaking experience, I know exactly what a dying bird does in its last moment alive.
There is no movement or sound.
Just the deeply affecting departure of life’s glint from small eyes that become abruptly dull.
How many dollar stores are still making a safely viable go of it in your town?
Dennis Rahkonen of Superior, Wisconsin, has been writing progressive commentary with a Heartland perspective for various outlets since the ’60s.
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