AP PHOTO/TOBY TALBOT
JOIN THE BOOMING
DOLLAR-STORE ECONOMY!
ant places to shop and to work.
“When you shopped those
stores before, you really felt poor,”
Storms said. “Over the last few
years they’ve really upgraded
the shopping experience and the
working experience by reformatting stores, cleaning them up and
adding better merchandise.”
Retail is one of the lowestpaying jobs in the economy, with
a median annual salary of about
$25,000, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s
well below what a family needs
to support itself in most parts of
the country. Retail workers are
also unlikely to have employer
health insurance, either because
it isn’t offered or it’s prohibitively
expensive. (As full-time employees, most dollar-store managers
do have health care coverage and
other basic benefits.)
This low compensation — driven in large part by the cheap prices consumers demand — has been
an essential ingredient in retail
growth, including dollar stores.
In the case of Dollar General, the
company’s success has helped
make it a poster child for the private equity industry. As private
equity was assailed as “vulture
capitalism” during last year’s
HUFFINGTON
10.06.13
presidential election, a trade
group for the industry boasted
that Dollar General had added
more than 20,000 jobs since the
firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts acquired it in 2007. (The company
went public again in 2009.)
But the growth of dollar stores
has come with a boom in litigation from employees on the lower
rungs of the economic ladder.
Since just 2010, more than 30
federal wage-and-hour lawsuits
Dollar Tree
stores, such
as this one
in Barre, Vt.,
offer cheap
prices at the
cost of low
compensation
for workers.