Ordinary World: Christmas Hangover
[OW1] On Christmas Eve, Trump tweets grievances
[OW2] Merry Christm….opps, never mind: “A Swiss man won a million and then lost it on Saturday, when a televised Swiss lotto draw went chaotically wrong.”
[OW3] What Was Steve Mnuchin Thinking? Three Possibilities
[OW4] The Dollar Store Backlash Has Begun: The U.S. has added 10,000 of these budget retail outlets since 2001. But some towns and cities are trying to push back.
[OW5] Japan Reportedly Will Leave International Whaling Group To Resume Commercial Hunts
[OW6] Illusion of control: Why the world is full of buttons that don’t work
[OW7] Every government shutdown — and how long they lasted
[OW8] Inside Bernie-world’s war on Beto O’Rourke
[OW9] GoFundMe refunds money after police say fundraiser for homeless man was a scam
Born and raised in West Virginia, Andrew has since lived and traveled around the world several times over. Though frequently writing about politics out of a sense of duty and love of country, most of the time he would prefer discussions on history, culture, occasionally nerding on aviation, and his amateur foodie tendencies. He can usually be found misspelling/misusing words on Twitter @four4thefire.
OW4: I feel like I need to read that piece again, while at the same time I’m not sure it is worth the effort. It seems to be arguing that Dollar stores in some way cause economic distress in a region, but if it explains how this works, I missed it. The only thing I see is that they produce fewer jobs than do supermarkets, but the discussion usually is between a Dollar store and nothing. The one paragraph that seems to be arguing that they drive supermarkets away with their low prices is immediately preceded by a paragraph that claims that their prices aren’t actually low. The logic here seems underdeveloped.
On a personal note, I and the family went out to a Christmas tree farm last weekend. It was out in the boonies, about fifteen miles from home. Once we were on the road back, we determined that the tree was insufficiently secured to the roof of the car. The wife and I were holding onto it through the sunroof. This clearly was a suboptimal solution. The farm was just outside a small town. It is economically viable because it has a large cement plant that isn’t going anywhere, but its business sector has seen better days. It used to have a real supermarket, but that went away and a Dollar General took about two thirds of its space. This prompted the question “I wonder if a Dollar General sells rope?” Hence my very first visit. It turns out that yes, it does. The store really is intended to serve the “general store” niche. It essentially is a small version of WalMart, about one to two notches down the luxury scale. If we lived there, it would fill most of the day-to-day shopping needs, supplemented by once or twice monthly shopping trips, and lots of farm stands during the season. Which is to say, not great, but far better than nothing.
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