In the segment, Oliver plays cell phone footage from various Dollar Trees and Generals around the United States, showing scene after scene of chaos. At some stores,
boxes are piled everywhere, and there’s only one worker to unpack them all. At others, the
air conditioning doesn’t work, leaving the staff in danger of
heat exhaustion.
Rats run around the storage areas, with no pest control in sight. “At every turn, dollar stores seem to treat their workers with either stunning indifference or outright contempt,” Oliver says, and he’s not wrong. I should know.
So what is it actually
like to work in a dollar store? Well, unsurprisingly, it’s rough. Even Macon Brock Jr., the cofounder of Dollar Tree, admits as much in his
memoir,
One Buck at a Time:
[W]orking for Dollar Tree is one of the hardest jobs in American retail, second only to managing a Dollar Tree. Just the physical aspects of the job are demanding. Anywhere from twenty-two hundred to three thousand cartons of merchandise show up at a store per week and have to be carried to the right aisle, unpacked, and displayed. The pace is relentless. The press of customers is constant.
All true—although, of course, Brock could have made the work less “relentless” any time he wanted. To his account, I’d add that dollar stores essentially expect you to work severaljobs at once. Usually, there are only two workers running the entire store, and sometimes you’re
stuck there by yourself. So you have to run around the building, dealing with problems as they come up. Just when the line of customers is longest, you’ll hear the
crash! of a shattering pickle jar ten aisles away. You’re a cashier
and a janitor, and a security guard, and a stocker of shelves, and an unloader of trucks—and you’re the complaints department when any of that goes wrong. At a Walmart or a Target, in contrast, there’s a full staff, and everyone has clearly-defined roles. At Dollar General, you do everything, all for one low, low price.
The pay really is low, too. Retail companies often
discourage their workers from talking about wages, so I think it’s important to be very explicit here. When I started working for Dollar General in 2019, I made $8.50 an hour. You can do the math: that’s $68 for a standard eight-hour shift, or $340 for a 40-hour week. Not much in a country where the
average rent is estimated at $1,372 a month. And with a few rare exceptions, nobody actually
got 40 hours. Every employee except the manager was part-time, and schedules were wildly
unpredictable. Some weeks you’d work 39.5 hours, just enough to keep you below the full-time threshold (and thus without healthcare benefits), and other weeks it would be more like 15 or 20 hours. The constantly-fluctuating income made budgeting interesting, to say the least. By the winter of 2022, though, things were looking up: my pay had increased to a whopping $11 an hour! (Before tax, mind you.) According to
data from the Economic Policy Institute, this was pretty much typical. In 2021,
92 percent of Dollar General workers made less than $15 an hour. In other words, starvation wages. I was lucky enough to live in a relatively cheap part of the country, but there are dollar stores in the most expensive cities in the U.S., like New York and Seattle. I have
no idea how the workers there survive, unless they each have six roommates or something.
