While these communities are snubbing Dollar General and Family Dollar -- most of rural America welcomes them with open arms, because they stock roughly the same

While these communities are snubbing Dollar General and Family Dollar -- most of rural America welcomes them with open arms, because they stock roughly the same sorts of things as a CVS or Walgreens, but actually build out in a county of a few thousand, and the one next over. A few decades prior, Walmart built up a retail empire through its willingness to build on the outskirts of rural, far-from-everything-else towns that only had gas stations, ailing downtowns, and maybe a small grocery store, but definitely not a supermarket. But even Walmart's best-in-class coverage leaves large tracts out, and these gaps are filled in by the sorts of Dollar General, for when you don't need to go to the Walmart another twenty, or forty minutes away. In more populated, more urban areas, grocery stores have shed locations in neighborhoods that were faltering, further contributing to these locales' decline. These are interrelated. It's easy to claim that variety stores don't do enough about food deserts or that they even contribute to the problem (by not stocking enough fresh, perishable foods), but at least they're trying, while other national chain stores have pursued a pragmatic strategy that has largely removed them from this issue. I once expressed, in a comment on a Strong Towns post [1], that when you consider settlement patterns, urban form, structural poverty, and food insecurity, perhaps you'll find that it's more sensible to subsidize fresh food delivery to people who could least afford it, but such a solution might find itself at odds with the solutions that (new) urbanists would prefer. It might not alter the structural status quo, but it could improve real outcomes in real people's lives. And as for nonperishables and non-food, bulk packaging is a discount accessible to those with access (e.g. warehouse club), transportation, storage, and able to cover a higher upfront cost for a lower per-unit cost. These are all harder on low or unpredictable incomes, which is one of the many ways poverty is quite expensive. But is this the fault of variety stores? Of course not. The real fix is much harder. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17525029#17531109 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17525029#17531109