Date of Award

Fall 1-1-2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

American Studies

First Advisor

Denning, Michael

Abstract

In Valuing Cheap, Barrett traces the histories of Dollar General, Family Dollar, and Dollar Tree from the firms’ twentieth century origins in three distinct southern locales into corporate behemoths with more stores than McDonald’s or Walmart. Valuing Cheap provides an important chapter of the late twentieth century history of racial capitalism, detailing how dollar stores at once “served” local communities while capitalizing on existing spatialized, racialized, classed, and gendered inequalities. This history illuminates the interwovenness of business, consumer, and labor histories, emphasizing the fundamental entanglements of power, material and cultural production, and consumption. The dollar store industry’s cheap goods, low-wage jobs, and poorly constructed store sites reproduce existing class, spatial, racial, and gendered inequalities. The dollar store industry forms a case study of how “cheapening” goods and shopping experiences for more widely accessible consumption relates to spatialized impoverishment across rural, urban, and suburban locales. While some communities of every size have welcomed corporate dollar store retailers with open arms, others have mobilized to prevent new stores from opening in their neighborhoods. Valuing Cheap captures the contested history of the corporate dollar store industry’s expansion across the U.S., grappling with the stores’ wide-ranging impacts on communities, consumers’ heterogeneous attitudes toward stores, and the distinct tools anti-dollar store activists have utilized to resist the unchecked expansion of corporate retail into their communities.

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