Disposable Products, Disposable Workers: Understanding How Dollar Stores Profit from Poverty

• In Event: Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): 3. Inequality and the Labor Market

Abstract

This chapter examines how dollar stores profit from poverty by embedding low-wage labor and consumer dependency into their business model. Drawing on six months of covert ethnographic fieldwork as a Dollar General sales associate and seventy in-depth interviews with employees nationwide, I analyze how these retail spaces operate through what I call a dependency and extraction model. Dollar stores strategically locate in economically distressed communities, often receiving public subsidies while capturing revenue from government assistance programs such as SNAP and TANF. This creates a closed circuit in which public funds sustain both low-income consumers and the corporations that exploit them.

Through ethnographic vignettes and worker narratives, the chapter explores how territorial stigmatization, racialized spatial inequality, and corporate cost-cutting shape everyday life inside the store. Managers and employees internalize narratives that frame poor neighborhoods as dangerous and their residents as morally suspect, reinforcing the devaluation of both customers and workers. Within this environment, employees face unstable scheduling, low pay, and chronic understaffing that demand constant emotional labor and boundary management. The result is a cycle of exhaustion and dependence that mirrors the economic precarity of the customers they serve.

Finally, the study documents widespread infrastructural neglect—broken heating and cooling systems, unsafe conditions, and corporate indifference—that expose workers to physical and emotional harm. These conditions are not incidental but central to a profit strategy that minimizes costs while externalizing risks onto labor. Taken together, the findings reveal how dollar stores reproduce inequality by extracting value from poverty itself, positioning both employees and communities as disposable. Rather than functioning as budget-friendly conveniences, dollar stores operate as mechanisms of economic extraction and social control within the landscape of U.S. retail capitalism.

Author

• Tracy Lynn Vargas, University of North Carolina-Pembroke