Here's how one town managed to stop the opening of its 10th dollar store
To their detractors, dollar stores are like a plague of locusts. They arrive in vast numbers, consume everything in their path, and leave residents with no fresh food.
But local governments are increasingly trying to stop the swarm by blocking more stores in their community, and hundreds of stores are closing across the country.
Could this spell the end of the dollar store as we know it?
Tangipahoa, a suburban parish with stretches of Louisiana marsh, already had a lot of dollar stores clustered around the town of Hammond when a development company tried to build another Dollar General on a stretch of highway just outside.
Unhappy residents petitioned the local council to try to stop it.
“I’m okay with one dollar store. But when you have nine within nine miles, that’s a problem,” Kim Landry Coates, a Louisiana state representative who represented the parish council at the time, tells The Independent.
After years of exponential growth, more have rejected proposed dollar store developments, and more than 60 have implemented laws that limit their expansion.
