Less than a mile and a half from our house in the hollow, there’s a new Dollar General.
All the jokes aside, I actually like the DG stores, both the businesses and the business model. I prefer locally owned and operated multi-generational community stores, but like the independent grocery stores, those are sadly disappearing as fast as people who are proud that they voted for the current president. The DG stores are usually easy to get in and out of, even when the aisles are full of unpacked merchandise. One can usually find something to fill the place of what one needed, and often it’s actually what you needed in the first case.
The DG stores have their problems, but so does every business, especially in a world where people don’t want to work. But overall, I think they might be a good thing.
Unlike the monolithic small business killers that loom on the edges of towns like economic Death Stars, Dollar General stores aren’t opened with the idea of monopolizing their local markets. The one in our community will never replace Pierce and Co., the 125-year-old landmark on the corner, but it will fill a niche for those who can’t get to town as easily as some folks.
In some ways, the ubiquitous dollar stores have become the country store of the 21st century, albeit without old men sitting around a rickety table drinking coffee and solving the world’s problems. It’s rare that I walk into one of the DG or Family Dollar stores I frequent without running into someone I know. I’ve made friends with many of the cashiers. We exchange family news about pets and livestock and kids and church and sick folks and the world in general. We pray together in the parking lot and argue politics in the pet food aisle.
It wasn’t very long ago that people needing to meet me at a halfway point somewhere would be told to look for the Kelly General Store or a similar establishment, a lonely oasis in a desert of pavement and pine trees. In the country, weeds or rain or darkness might hide house numbers or even your house, but by cracky, you could find a store, even if it was closed. Up until a decade or so ago, there might even be a dimly-lit payphone outside shining like a tired lighthouse in the night.
Within walking distance of our home, there were three country stores in decades past. Two were “Gas and Groc” stores, as they were known, since spelling out “Groceries” often took up too much space on a front wall, and passersby didn’t need to be able to see the whole word to know where they could find a loaf of bread, a pack or two of Nabs, some tobacco or other basic needs. As the road improved and local towns grew, those stores faded away, now mostly forgotten except for peeling paint covered in grape vines, with the occasional visit from an ambitious metal detectorist or someone whose love of the past overrides their respect for fading No Trespassing signs.
The dollar stores won’t ever completely replace the country stores I have known and loved – I don’t foresee any of them setting up a coffeepot, gas pumps or livestock and hardware section in the future – but they fill a need. You’ll never be able to get a bottle of ginger ale and crackers on credit for a sick child at a DG, get help finding the right type of fitting to fix a leaking pipe, or an emergency box of ammunition during deer season, but the Dollar General stores that I have seen have actually helped their communities in different ways.
Folks who might not have many opportunities to see their neighbors often can do so at even the most rural of the yellow-themed boxes springing up every six miles. The choice between groceries for a couple meals or gasoline to go buy food isn’t quite as hard. Forgetting something on your shopping list doesn’t necessarily mean a return all the way to town, so there’s a little more time with one’s family of an evening. If a DG store does well at a particular rural crossroads, then there’s a chance something else might open up nearby as well: a gas station or convenience store to fill other needs.
I still firmly believe that the old stores will survive; some of the ones that are still with us will, anyway. I know of a few that have revamped and reopened, changed hands, rechanged hands, and likely will do so again, producing just enough income to pay the electric bill and keep the ice cream cooler stocked. Those are the ones run by folks who have a love of their communities, and can make at least a livin’, but never a killin’, who want life to be a little easier for their neighbors.
Those are the places I cherish, where there are still sometimes chairs or at least concrete block-and-board benches outside, flanked by rusted cans used for ashtrays or spittoons, where close scrutiny will find the rusted remains of an antique bottle cap pressed into the crusher run of the parking lot by decades of tires, the places where a completely disoriented stranger can find directions and possibly even kinfolk, where a woodstove hisses reassurance in winter, and every big fish, buck deer, or new vehicle gathers admirers in the parking lot like paparazzi at an awards show.
If the day ever comes when there are absolutely no more “gas and groc” stores with basic hardware, livestock feed, and good advice, then we will have greater problems than could ever be solved by a bright yellow discount department store every six miles.
Neon lights aren’t the same as the single bulb in the gooseneck fixture over the door that came on when you rolled up out of gas and hope, long past decent people’s bedtimes. Two-dollar candy bars have long since replaced ten-cent hard candy. You’ll never walk out of a DG store with a bag of horse feed, a cold drink, three half-inch PVC elbows and a pickled pig’s foot, plus an invitation to church. But the dollar stores fill a gap, and make life easier for some folks.
The dollar stores will never have the spirit of the old country mercantile, but they can and do fill a need that was forgotten when the roads got paved.
