A new study by researchers has found that dollar stores are now the fastest-growing food retailers in the contiguous United States, and have doubled their share in rural areas.
The study, from Tufts University, which is believed to be the first to look at this trend over the past 10 years, was published in the American Journal of Public Health.
Households with more purchases at dollar stores also tend to be lower-income and headed by people of color. The study could have meaningful implications for nutrition policy. Food and beverages stocked by dollar stores are typically lower in nutrients and higher in calories, while only a small percentage of such shops carry fresh produce and meats. Their growing footprint, especially in the remote South, is also important: These regions already have higher baseline levels of obesity and food insecurity.
“Dollar stores play an increasingly important role in household food purchases, yet research on them is lacking,” said Wenhui Feng, first author on the paper and Tufts Health Plan Professor of Health Care Policy and assistant professor of public health and community medicine at Tufts University School of Medicine. “Our study is one of the first to use nationally representative data to see the role of dollar stores at the household level.”
The researchers analyzed food-purchase data from the IRI Consumer Network, a nationally representative panel of about 50,000 households. The data captured purchases from 2008 until 2020. It painted a provocative picture of nutritional divides, with households headed by people of color, households in rural areas, and households with lower incomes increasingly reliant on dollar stores.
“When you start to look at race and ethnicity, there are some implications about equity in terms of people’s access to healthy food,” Feng said.
While dollar stores don’t tend to specialize in fresh foods and produce, they do fill a void that can’t be ignored, especially for people who live in remote areas. In some ways, their rising popularity in rural areas reflects the broader challenges of food access and affordability for low-income Americans.