{"id":748,"date":"2026-09-01T10:10:05","date_gmt":"2026-09-01T10:10:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/frontierhousingreport.com\/?p=748"},"modified":"2026-09-01T10:10:05","modified_gmt":"2026-09-01T10:10:05","slug":"trumps-golden-age-well-yes-for-dollar-stores","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/frontierhousingreport.com\/?p=748","title":{"rendered":"Trump\u2019s \u2018Golden Age\u2019? Well, Yes\u2014for Dollar Stores"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Cozily nestled within his good-news-only Natalie Harp cocoon, President Trump effuses daily (if not hourly) about the American economy. In August, he took credit for the \u201c74 all-time highs\u201d that the S&P 500 had reached since his re-election, for the \u201cBOOMING\u201d manufacturing sector (which now employs 62,000 fewer workers than it did when he resumed the presidency), and for the \u201crecord number\u201d of working Americans (a consequence chiefly of population growth, though the net number of new jobs created monthly since he took office is about one-third of that created monthly in the last two years of Joe Biden\u2019s presidency).<\/p>\n

Read more Paramount, CBS, Trump, and the Ellisons: The Ultimate Corruption<\/a><\/p>\n

Lacking their own Natalie Harps, Americans are not experiencing the Trump Boom in quite the same way that Trump is. The University of Michigan monthly survey of consumer confidence hit a record low in late spring and has been on a downward trajectory since.<\/p>\n

More from Harold Meyerson<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

That said, there are positive metrics to be found, so long as they don\u2019t concern the experience of the American people as such. The share of national income going to corporate profits is the highest it\u2019s been in nearly a century (while the share going to wages and benefits is correspondingly down). The profits of oil and drug companies are notably up. And perhaps most revealingly, because this is a metric that does reflect the experience of the American people, business at dollar stores is up and rising.<\/p>\n

Second-quarter sales at Dollar General, which has 21,000 outlets, rose by 3.7 percent over the first quarter of the year, while sales at Dollar Tree, which has 9,000 outlets, were up by 3.5 percent. Items purchased at Dollar General\u2019s \u201cValue Valley\u201d\u2014aisles in which all products are on sale for a flat $1\u2014rose by 16 percent.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur core customers continue to be financially constrained,\u201d Dollar General CEO Todd Vasos told The New York Times<\/em>. \u201cHigher and more volatile fuel prices have forced customers to further prioritize purchases with a focus on value and affordability.\u201d To that end, Vasos continued, \u201cWe have got real plans to expand that $1 price point.\u201d<\/p>\n

The only cloud in the dollar stores\u2019 sunny skies is the move by Walmart and Target to keep lowering their own prices to stanch the flow of stressed consumers to the dollar outlets.<\/p>\n

America has a long history of low-price mass marketing, of course. At one point, it even played a key role in the creation of the country\u2019s broadly shared prosperity of the mid-20th century. By \u201cit,\u201d however, I don\u2019t mean the entire sector. I really mean just one company, the Filene\u2019s department store chain, and even more precisely, that company\u2019s president, Edward Filene.<\/p>\n

Read more How You\u2019re Paying for All These Flock Cameras<\/a><\/p>\n

In the early 20th century, when department stores weren\u2019t marketing to working-class consumers, Filene created his own Value Valley: Filene\u2019s Basement, where clothes were on sale at reduced prices. He established and promoted America\u2019s first credit unions, and founded the Twentieth Century Fund, whose studies consistently and persuasively argued that higher wages for workers would create a larger consumer market and thus spur more mass production. Those arguments prefigured and informed the key reforms of the New Deal, and Filene, not surprisingly, was among the handful of corporate leaders who backed Franklin Roosevelt\u2019s landmark legislation (Social Security and the National Labor Relations Act, which legalized collective bargaining and spurred mass unionization). As Princeton University historian Meg Jacobs wrote in her entry on Filene in the Prospect<\/em>\u2019s August issue on 50 American heroes,<\/p>\n

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With his support, and that of the Twentieth Century Fund \u2026 the drafters of the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 justified this key piece of New Deal legislation by explaining in its preamble that \u201cthe inequality of bargaining power\u201d between employers and employees results in \u201crecurrent business depressions by depressing wage rates and the purchasing power of wage earners in industry.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

When he died in 1937, Roosevelt hailed Filene as \u201can analyst who was able, by mathematical calculations, to make plain to us that our modern mechanism of abundance cannot be kept in operation unless the masses of our people are enabled to live abundantly.\u201d<\/p>\n

As Filene remains the early-20th-century American business leader most committed to creating mass prosperity, so another mass marketer, Sam Walton, was the late-20th-century American business leader most committed to curtailing mass prosperity. Under his leadership, Walmart rose to become America\u2019s leading retailer and largest private-sector employer by featuring everyday low prices and everyday even lower wages.<\/p>\n

As labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein has documented, he opposed minimum-wage laws, shuttered any Walmart where workers were trying to unionize, and used the chain\u2019s power as the nation\u2019s largest wholesale purchaser to reduce the wages of the American workers who made the products that Walmart sold, or, even more calamitously, put those workers on unemployment lines by shifting production to China. His adamant opposition to employing unionized American workers trickled down to such current-day oligarchs as Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. By the time the dollar stores began to take off, the laws protecting workers seeking to unionize had been so hollowed out that even the doomed-from-the-outset efforts to unionize that had confronted Sam Walton had effectively ceased to exist.<\/p>\n

Under any management, however, the dollar stores continue to occupy an important niche in the nation\u2019s political economy: They\u2019re the canary in the coal mine when the economy is going to hell. Only a Natalie Harp\u2013insulated Donald Trump would be able and willing to ignore that.<\/p>\n

Read more Trump Weaponizes the IRS Against Liberal Nonprofits<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n


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Sales are up at the modern-day bargain basements, as more financially stressed Americans are compelled to shop there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":747,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[366],"class_list":["post-748","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-economic-policy","tag-tagged-dollar-stores-donald-trump-economic-policy-inflation-labor-poverty-wealth-retail-target-walmart-working-class"],"yoast_head":"\nTrump\u2019s \u2018Golden Age\u2019? 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