Cheap groceries from dollar stores come with a hidden cost for the working class. New research from the University of California, Riverside has linked greater reliance on dollar-store food with higher rates of obesity, high blood pressure, high cholesterol and type 2 diabetes.
The study, published in BMC Public Health, found the opposite pattern in areas with better access to traditional grocery stores. The association remained even after researchers accounted for income, unemployment and other measures of social vulnerability.
This isn’t simply a story about individual “consumer choices”. Under capitalism, the choices available to workers are shaped by wages, working hours, transport and the businesses operating nearby. When food prices rise faster than pay, millions are pushed towards whatever is cheap, close and capable of lasting until the next payday.
“I want to raise awareness that higher grocery costs are pushing people to buy highly processed, lower quality food at dollar stores, and it is negatively impacting their health in a similar way to fast food,” said study author Ryan Bruellman, a doctoral student in genetics, genomics and bioinformatics at UC Riverside.
Bruellman examined data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s 500 Cities Project, covering major cities and metropolitan areas across the continental United States. Using mapping software, he measured the number of dollar stores and traditional grocery stores within a ten-minute drive of residential areas.
The study covered Dollar General, Dollar Tree, 99 Cents Only and Family Dollar, representing around 34,000 locations in the dataset.
“Across the U.S. there are more dollar stores than traditional grocery stores,” Bruellman said.
Yet the US Census Bureau classifies dollar stores as general merchandise outlets rather than grocery stores. This means they’re frequently left out of research into food access, even though they’ve become an important source of groceries for poorer households.
The official category hides the class reality. To the state, a Dollar General may not count as a grocery store. To a worker trying to feed a family with little money, limited time and no nearby supermarket, it plainly does.
The strongest associations appeared in the South and Midwest, where dollar stores were present in roughly equal numbers to traditional grocery stores. Results differed between cities. In Philadelphia, for example, the available data didn’t fully capture bodegas and small independent grocery shops, whose presence may reduce reliance on dollar-store food.
The study doesn’t show that entering a dollar store automatically makes somebody ill. It shows how the food environment created around working-class communities is associated with worse health. Nor is the problem that the food is inexpensive in itself. It’s that workers are being pushed towards highly processed products of poorer nutritional quality, because healthier alternatives are often less affordable or less accessible.
Marx explained that workers’ wages have to cover the reproduction of their labour-power: the food, shelter and other necessities required to keep them alive and able to return to work. Capitalists constantly try to hold this cost down. When wages don’t cover decent food, capital doesn’t stop exploiting workers. Another section of capital simply develops a profitable market in the resulting poverty.
Dollar-store chains fill that role. Highly processed products can be stored for long periods and sold through thousands of small outlets. The low sticker price draws in households whose budgets have already been squeezed by employers, landlords, banks and rising grocery prices. The chains collect the revenue, while workers and their families bear the long-term cost through illness.
The wider capitalist class benefits twice. Employers obtain labour at wages too low to support a healthy life, while retailers make money selling cheap food to the same underpaid workers. The medical consequences are then passed back onto households and overstretched public services.
This is taking place in the United States, the centre of world imperialism and one of the richest countries ever to exist. There’s no shortage of productive capacity, agricultural knowledge or food. The contradiction is between the abundance society can produce and what workers are permitted to access through the market.
Bruellman suggested stocking healthier products in dollar stores through partnerships with local farmers, as well as placing farmers’ markets and food banks closer to existing stores. Such measures could give some communities better options. But they don’t explain why basic nutrition has been turned into a charitable project while huge retail and food corporations remain governed by profit.
Dollar stores are one expression of a system that has made poverty itself into a market. Low wages and rising grocery prices push workers towards the cheapest food available, while retailers profit from selling products that meet an immediate need but damage health over time. Capital sells workers the bare minimum needed to survive today, then leaves them to pay the rest of the bill through illness tomorrow.
