Concentration in the dollar store sector

Already, there are 14,000 one-story cinder block Dollar Generals in the U.S.—outnumbering by a few hundred the coffee chain’s domestic footprint. Fold in the second-biggest dollar chain, Dollar Tree, and the number of stores, 27,465, exceeds the 22,375 outlets of CVS, Rite Aid, and Walgreens combined.

Here is the full Bloomberg piece, by Mya Frazier.  One point here is that “retail concentration,” which we do observe in the data, is unlikely to lead to very high prices.  A subtler point is that the dollar store sector itself is somewhat concentrated.  But that is yet another way of seeing why concentration indices can be misleading: “They’ve taken over a big chunk of the nation’s dollar stores!” isn’t exactly a recipe for sustained high prices, if anything the contrary.  Yet another point is that we may be rather deliberately moving to an uglier but cheaper world.

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