The Local Small-ar Store

Written by Anonymous. Media by Tawnie Kozora.


Clothes section at Dollar General. Media by Tawnie Kozora.

Everyone who has ever needed a snack cake fix at 9:30 at night on a Friday is familiar with why the local dollar store needs to be bigger. You walk in, past the two small registers, through the crowded aisles, grab your snack cakes, and then proceed to wait for an unknown amount of time to get served because there’s just so many people and only so many cashiers. Eventually, you get to make your purchase.

And then, you go home for break and your local dollar store has aisles with enough room for carts to pass each other, three registers, and enough room on the shelves for the various items so that boxes aren’t being set on the floor and crowding everything. And even when displays are on the floor, there is enough room for them to not be detrimental to your shopping experience. After spring break, or Christmas, or summer, you return to Greenville and remember the tiny dollar store and nostalgically wish your local dollar store was five hours closer.

Small aisles in Dollar General. Media by Tawnie Kozora.

If you’ve ever been in our local dollar store, you’ve seen the small aisles. There are as many aisles as there can possibly be in that building, which unfortunately only leaves enough room for one cart to pass through comfortably. If one customer is in the aisle and has their cart, any other customer who needs an item from that aisle usually leaves their cart at the end of the aisle to retrieve their item. This parked cart creates problems for anyone wanting to walk down the perpendicular aisle, and it just becomes a complicated puzzle of how exactly to maneuver a cart through the maze of other carts, displays, and containers the employees are working from.We need a bigger dollar store so we can have wider, more usable aisles.

Boxes blocking the party supplies. Media by Tawnie Kozora.

As previously mentioned, there are as many aisles in that building as it can hold. As such, the displays and extra large products such as cat litter and soda are usually on the floor itself, causing more issues for customers trying to navigate. Additionally, items that are on clearance are usually removed from their homes to make room for new products. When this happens to clothing, a floor display of the clearance clothing is usually created, which takes up even more floor space and tends to block the shelves themselves. This makes it even more difficult for customers because now, not only are they having difficulties navigating, they’re having to move displays to get to the items they want to consider purchasing. We need a bigger dollar store so that extra items can be placed in areas that don’t block other items and customers can easily reach anything we want to purchase.

Small aisles in Dollar General. Media by Tawnie Kozora.

Now, the first things a customer sees when they walk into the store are the two cash registers. Let’s compare them to something like WalMart. The normal registers at WalMart have conveyor belts so that customer can place their items on the registers in one go and the cashiers don’t have to reach for the items, which wastes time. In our local dollar store, we have the same registers that WalMart has for their “20 items or less” registers, and the store is serving customers who bring cartloads of items at a time. Larger dollar stores have one register with a conveyor belt which is the main register, with two smaller registers as back-up if the main cashier has too many customers. The conveyor belt register allows for more efficiency when it comes to serving customers with many items, which means more customers can be served more quickly. We need a larger dollar store so that there can be more registers and more customers can be served quickly.

The local dollar store needs to be bigger because it will enhance the shopping experience of its customers as well as the working experience of its employees. The employees will have more room to put the containers they need to work from, which will keep from blocking customers from as much merchandise on truck days. This means that employees won’t have to deal with angry customers, and customers won’t have to deal with employee containers in their way, making the overall experience better for everyone. We need a bigger dollar store.

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