Donald Stevens is 85 years old and lives in Wilson, New York. He does not have a car. What he has is a lawnmower with a trailer attached, which he uses to drive down the street to the Dollar General on Lake Street. That store was his grocery store. It was the only place he could conveniently reach for food. In February 2025, the Dollar General closed indefinitely. Stevens had nowhere to go. “I’m totally trapped,” he told WKBW News in April 2026. “If it weren’t for other people helping me, I wouldn’t be able to do anything.”
Wilson’s mayor, Greg Martin, did not soften the assessment. “Right now,” Martin said, “we are a food desert.”
The Dollar General on Lake Street has been closed for months. The only other option in town burned down in January 2025. What the mayor described as a food desert is not a neighborhood that never had food access. It is a neighborhood that organized its food access around a Dollar General, because that was what was available, and then found out what happens when the only option closes.
The Largest Retail Footprint in America
Dollar General had 20,662 stores in the United States as of February 2025. That number is not a typo. There are more Dollar General locations in this country than any other retail chain. The company has more than doubled its store count since 2007, when it operated 8,194 locations, and it plans to open approximately 575 more in fiscal year 2025 alone.
Together, Dollar General and Dollar Tree, which owns Family Dollar, operated more than 34,000 stores across the United States by early 2022, a number that exceeds the combined US locations of McDonald’s, Starbucks, Target, and Walmart, according to research by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. The math matters because it captures something that does not feel possible until you look at it directly. The most physically dominant retail presence in the United States is not a grocery chain, not a pharmacy, not a fast food company. It is two discount chains that stock mostly processed food, cleaning supplies, and household items, and which have systematically expanded into the communities least equipped to survive their arrival.
Roughly 75 percent of the US population lives within five miles of a Dollar General. In many small towns and low-income urban neighborhoods, Dollar General is not one of several options. It is the option. The average store is 7,400 square feet, roughly one-tenth the size of a Walmart Supercenter, cheap enough to open in communities that no larger retailer would consider entering.
The Study That Confirmed the Fear
For years, communities passed ordinances restricting new dollar stores without scientific evidence proving the harm. Atlanta, Tulsa, Fort Worth, and dozens of cities enacted zoning limits based on the intuition that dollar stores were squeezing out grocery stores, without peer-reviewed data to back them up.
In December 2025, Conner Mullally, an associate professor of food and resource economics at the University of Florida, published the study that finally answered the question. Mullally and his colleagues analyzed retail location and food access data from 2006 through 2020, applying machine learning to identify what happened to grocery stores when a dollar store opened nearby. The results were specific enough to be genuinely useful and damaging enough that several news organizations immediately ran the findings.
The University of Florida study, published in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics, found that in urban neighborhoods with only one grocery store at baseline, the entry of a dollar store was associated with a measurable decline in food access. The effect was not evenly distributed. Urban areas with larger Black populations, limited vehicle access, high reliance on public transportation, and higher poverty rates were significantly more likely to lose food access after a dollar store arrived. And critically, the impact grew with each additional dollar store that opened in the same neighborhood.
“The concerns motivating the limit of dollar stores are real in certain circumstances,” Mullally said in the University of Florida press release accompanying the study. “In fact, the impact grows with every dollar store that opens in a given neighborhood.”
The mechanism Mullally documented is not complicated. A dollar store opens near a small independent grocery store. The grocery operates on razor-thin margins. The dollar store siphons off enough of the grocery’s revenue, particularly in shelf-stable goods and packaged food, that the grocery can no longer sustain its margins. The grocery closes. The dollar store remains. The neighborhood, which briefly had two options, now has one. That one option sells almost no fresh produce.
What Dollar Stores Sell and What They Do Not
The food available in a typical Dollar General is predominantly packaged, processed, and shelf-stable. Chips, cookies, canned goods, boxed mac and cheese, frozen meals where refrigeration exists. The produce section, where it exists at all, is sparse compared to any conventional grocery. Dollar General expanded its fresh food offerings to more than 7,000 stores by late 2025, a genuine operational shift that the company has marketed aggressively. But 7,000 stores represent roughly one-third of its total footprint, and the selection even in those locations does not replicate what a full-service grocery provides.
The Tufts University Food Policy Review documented that dollar stores have been the fastest-growing food retailers by household expenditure share for more than a decade, with an increase of nearly 90 percent from 2008 to 2020. That growth is not happening because dollar stores are improving the quality of food available to the communities they enter. It is happening because those communities have fewer and fewer alternatives. The same corporate pricing logic that shrinks products while maintaining prices operates in dollar stores, too. A product that looks cheaper is often packaged in a smaller quantity at a higher per-unit cost than the same product at a conventional grocery store.
One example documented by researchers: Old Spice deodorant at Dollar Tree costs $1.25 for 0.8 ounces. The per-unit price is significantly higher than the same product at a full-size grocery store. The nominal price is lower. The value is not.
The Grocery Store That Lasted Three Years and Three Days
The owner of the Foodliner grocery store in Haven, Kansas, told The Guardian something that has been quoted in research papers ever since. “We lasted three years and three days after Dollar General opened,” the owner said. “Sales dropped and just kept dropping. I lost a thousand dollars a day in sales in three years.”
That is the economics of dollar store entry in a community with one grocery store. The grocery does not close immediately. It closes slowly, as the dollar store takes enough margin to make the math no longer work. The process takes years. By the time the grocery closes, the dollar store has become the established option. The community has already reorganized its food access around it. When Donald Stevens attached a trailer to his lawnmower to get groceries, he was not making an unusual choice. He was doing what the community had learned to do when the dollar store was the only store available.
UCLA Anderson Review’s analysis of retail data from 2010 to 2019 found that dollar stores’ expansion drove out independent grocery stores across the United States during a period in which the chains added more than 14,000 new outlets. The effect was concentrated in independent grocers, which operate on narrower margins and serve smaller geographic areas than chain supermarkets. The independent grocer that could survive competition with a Walmart often cannot survive competition with a dollar store that targets the same shelf-stable categories at a slightly lower nominal price.
The Steelman: What Dollar General Says It Is Doing
The strongest defense of dollar stores is also the most honest description of their expansion strategy: they go where no one else will.
Dollar General’s stated mission is to serve rural and underserved communities that larger retailers have abandoned or ignored. In towns where the nearest Walmart is 30 miles away, and the local grocery closed when the local economy contracted, a Dollar General provides access to food, cleaning supplies, and household goods that would otherwise require significant travel. Todd Vasos, Dollar General’s CEO, has repeatedly described the company as an essential partner to rural America. In Albion, Indiana, when the local grocery Albion Village Foods closed in January 2025, and the food pantry saw a 25 percent increase in demand, it was a Dollar General Market that announced it would open in the same building.
The research supports the nuance here. Mullally’s study found that effects were significant in urban neighborhoods with one grocery store, but small or indistinguishable from zero in most other contexts, including many rural areas. Dollar stores do not cause food deserts everywhere. They cause them in specific, identifiable circumstances, and the communities most affected share a particular profile: low income, majority Black or Brown, limited transportation, and already fragile grocery access.
That profile is not incidental to the dollar store expansion strategy. It is the target demographic. The company enters communities where the population is too small or too poor to attract conventional retailers, where real estate is cheap, and where residents have no alternative. The defense that dollar stores serve the underserved collapses when you examine what they do to the fragile food access those communities already have. They do not supplement it. They replace it with a narrower selection at a higher per-unit cost.
The Ordinances and the Gap
At least 39 cities and towns in the United States have adopted permanent ordinances restricting new dollar stores, either requiring a minimum distance from existing dollar stores or capping total locations per community, according to ILSR research. Atlanta, Tulsa, Fort Worth, and Apopka, Florida, are among those that have acted. Only Stonecrest, Georgia, has imposed a total ban. Communities that want to stop a dollar store from opening frequently find that local zoning law provides limited tools and that the dollar store chains have legal teams experienced in defeating them.
The same absence of federal worker protection that leaves employees vulnerable to arbitrary firing characterizes the regulatory gap around dollar store expansion. There is no federal standard for what constitutes acceptable retail density in a food-fragile neighborhood. There is no requirement that a company entering a market with existing grocery stores demonstrate that its presence will not eliminate those stores. The harm Mullally documented over 14 years of data does not trigger any federal response because no federal standard exists to be triggered.
The same structural forces that route investment away from communities that need it most operate domestically in the dollar store dynamic. The communities with the most fragile food access are the communities with the least political power to resist a well-capitalized retailer with experienced zoning lawyers and a business model that generates returns precisely because it extracts from low-margin environments.
Wilson, New York, Is Not an Outlier
Donald Stevens got his groceries from Dollar General because the dollar store was what Wilson had. When it closed, the mayor said the village had become a food desert. He was right. But Wilson did not become a food desert because the Dollar General closed. It became a food desert the moment Dollar General became the only food access point in the village, because at that moment the entire community’s food security was dependent on the continued operation of a corporation whose store closure decisions are made based on quarterly earnings performance.
That corporation had 20,662 stores as of February 2025. It opened 575 more in fiscal 2025. Somewhere in that expansion, more communities that once had a grocery store will end up with a dollar store instead. And somewhere in that footprint, more dollar stores will close for the same reason the Lake Street location closed in Wilson: because the numbers stopped working for the company, and the community that reorganized its food access around the store has no other option.
Mullally’s study confirmed that the concerns motivating dollar store restrictions are real in certain circumstances. Donald Stevens’s lawnmower trailer is what those circumstances look like in practice.
