To Save a Neighborhood, Ban a Dollar Store?
This type of thinking is obviously silly.<p>People with opportunities to eat healthy food keep choosing to eat unhealthy food. This isn&#x27;t a secret. I have personally annoyed all my friends and my girlfriend with my constant hypochondriac nudging about nutrition.<p>If you want to change eating habits you have to <i>communicate</i> with the consumers. You can&#x27;t pull strings at the city-planning level and hope that the marionettes will march in tune. Even if dollar stores were prevented by magical aliens from selling produce (they&#x27;re not), they still have freezers. They could still sell frozen vegetables. They could sell oats, beans or unsalted nuts in bulk. They could sell canned produce, high-fiber noodles, refrigerated tempeh...<p>They are <i>not</i> selling these things because <i>people aren&#x27;t buying them</i>. Dollar General is not intentionally trying to kill people. That&#x27;s not a good business model.<p>People are generally woefully uninformed about nutrition. People have been confused by the raging public debate about dietary theories that are almost never really practiced -- I had a friend tell me he didn&#x27;t want to eat <i>a mango</i> because of the sugar content. The same friend had no trouble ordering soda at a drive-thru. <i>That</i> is how the average American thinks about food.<p>If you want change, put the Doritos behind the counter. That&#x27;s how you get change.