City Council members — and Chicago residents, too — have every right to be outraged when stores have garbage dumpsters overflowing with trash, parking lots strewn with litter and shopping carts, and broken fences and light fixtures on their premises.
Alderpersons shouldn’t have to spend time repeatedly calling the stores’ owners to prod them to clean up the mess. Owners who fail to do so deserve to be slapped, quickly, with hefty fines. If they don’t respond, tougher measures are warranted, including heftier fines for failing to ensure customers have a safe, decent shopping experience.
So we’re mostly in step with a council committee that on Monday approved a proposal that would sharply rein in dollar stores — also known as “small-box stores” — that have become nuisances in some communities, as the Sun-Times’ Fran Spielman reported Tuesday.
But the proposed ordinance would bar these new stores from locating within a mile of another existing store that is owned or managed by the same controlling entity. That goes a step too far, in our view.
Dollar stores at least provide a low-cost alternative for shoppers, especially since big-box retailers like Walmart and Target have closed some stores in working-class and lower-income neighborhoods of color.
Do Black and Brown communities still need full-service grocers? Definitely. City officials must keep exploring options to eliminate food deserts and make fresh foods available in every neighborhood.
But until then, some Chicagoans do depend on dollar stores — the city now has 150 Dollar Tree, Family Dollar, Dollar General and other dollar stores — for quick-trip, affordable purchases of items like diapers and baby wipes. Solving the problem of food deserts and better access to high-quality, fresh foods on the South and West sides will take more than tough restrictions on opening new dollar stores.
Ald. Matt O’Shea (19th), who’s championing the proposal, says dollar stores act as a deterrent to bringing in full-service grocers and retailers because they can offer extremely low prices to attract customers.
We think the problem goes deeper than that. After all, higher-end grocers and retailers had balked for years at opening up in Black and Brown neighborhoods, long before dollar stores showed up.
As for those existing dollar stores that are rundown, sell damaged goods or present other problems that managers and the parent company refuse to fix — hit them with stiff fines or even shut them down, which the proposal would give the city more authority to do.
Fine by us. The goal is to make stores clean up their act, not prevent them from opening altogether.
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