The 99 Cents Only chain is closing up shop. LA Times columnist Gustavo Arellano headed out to talk to a few customers about it:
“I blame [Gavin] Newsom,” said Rick Juarez, 53, referencing the California governor as he entered the store to stock up on batteries. He had shopped at this location for “at least” 20 years. “Too many taxes, too high the minimum wage. These companies just can’t compete, and so they have to close. And it’s poor people like us who end up suffering.”
I know, I know: this is just one random guy. Who cares? But it's hard to get so many things wrong in such a short comment:
- California's corporate tax rate is 8.84% and hasn't changed in 30 years. Newsom temporarily lowered corporate taxes in 2021 and swatted down a proposed tax hike last year.
- California's minimum wage is tied to inflation. Newsom has nothing to do with it.
- And anyway, 99 Cents Only operates all over the west, not just in California.
But sure, blame Newsom. Why not? Someone on the radio probably says everything is all his fault.
After a leveraged buyout in in end of 2011, the new owners, "Ares Management" and (I kid you not) the "Canadian Pension Plan Investment Board", loaded the company (which due to Founder Dave Gold's fear of loans, had zero debts) with over a billion dollars in debts.
Venture Capital for the win! Wooo living' the dream, baby!
Owners should be barred from taking more than minimum wage from a company with debts.
Qwners and Managers and the MBA's in finance should be required to work on the floor a few weeks a year.
And lose their ownership stake if the employees don't think they're doing their job.
Maybe a "99 Cents Only Adjusted For Inflation" store would have been a better business model?
Unhappy me! I would buy almost all my fresh produce at .99cent store....and I eat lots of it...true, the produce was probably from almost going bad from Ralph's or Pavillion's....but I was great with this because I'd go through bags of tomatoes or oranges or grapefruit or apples...celery, sweet bell peppers, onions, great bags of Bermuda onions...
I may have to switch Aldi...Costco has the best, prettiest produce, but I don't need pretty...I want cheap...lol...Best Wishes, Traveller
That doesn't sound like a Californian story, so why did you share it?
The story was well written, evocative, hopefully creating images in the reader's eye...and noted exactly why .99Cent Stores will be missed, what their value, and this specific business model, mean to the community.
Not everyone has access to a .99Cent Store, and this fills out the story of why they will be missed. I was adding broader information to the conversation. I write good....(grin). It should also be noted that the closing of 371 stores entails the loss of employment of 10,874 employees. Nice people all. Best Wishes, Traveller
From my very limited experience I would have thought closing 371 stores would cause a loss of employment for about 200 employees.
classic boomer move to think that 1) the OP is speaking exclusively to them and 2) that everyone not preemptively jumping in and personally addressing them to shut up is tantamount to actively encouraging them to launch into some barely-relevant tangent
1. This is the first time I've ever heard that Costco doesn't have cheap stuff. If it's not cheap, why do people keep renewing their memberships there to buy stuff at higher prices than available elsewhere?
2. It's not .99cent store. It's 99 cent store. I don't know that anything in an American store has ever been priced at .99 cents because the smallest coin ever minted was 1 (or 1.00) cent.
3. It's nice that you're concerned about the 10,874 employees losing their jobs at the 99 cent stores. Not sure what anybody is supposed to do about that though? The US generally doesn't order businesses to stay in business so that nobody will ever be made redundant when they go out of business. Capitalism means accepting some businesses will go under every day, even those that employ lots of people. (Let's assume 10,000 is a lot for CA, which has - checks notes - 19 million workers.)
Costco does have cheap stuff but generally this would be processed food bought in bulk, or big-ticket items like TVs, or gasoline. Not fresh food.
There is lots of fresh food at Costco. Much of it is sold in quantities higher than what you would normally purchase but often for less than you would pay for the smaller amount. They sell fresh fruit by the box for instance. Costco’s prices are cheaper but not THAT cheap. A place like a Dollar store likely sells culls which can taste as good and are just as healthy for you but not as pleasing to the eye.
None of the dollar stores near me sell fresh anything.
I never saw that either until I stopped in the "99 Cents Only" store near my sister's house in Van Nuys. I assumed it was a one-off, not a chain. It had even fresh vegetables and they were cheap along with a lot of other food items. Unlike typical stores of that type it had only a small random selection of kitchen stuff instead of a lot of it. The rest of the inventory was always pretty random too.
The store was surrounded by really low rent businesses and really (sorry) low rent people, with a number of homeless people camping on the sidewalk. I always referred to it as Dystopia Mart.
jeffrey, you clearly don't shop at Costco, since they have huge sections of bulk, fresh, foods.
"Someone on the radio probably says everything is all his fault."
I don't know if anyone on the radio says so, but on TV and the internet, Fox chews this bone daily.
Maybe it's this?
(viewable for the next hour at least)
There's a large contingent of people (ok Fox News viewers) who automatically assign anything bad or that raises costs/accessibility as either Newsom or Bidenomics. It rains, must be Newsom again. Sun is too hot, Bidenomics. It gets tiresome.
Mr Juarez quoted above is failing to realize that Corporate America is behind his loss of shopping options. Everything in the corporate world these days is about maximizing and extracting as much of profit as possible. Nobody cares about feeding poor people, they aren't very profitable. Nobody cares about housing poor people, either, for the same reason. We live in a time when every dime you have is a profit line on someone's chart.
All of which is great for business, but not so great if you're trying to take care of a population.
"Everything in the corporate world these days is about maximizing and extracting as much of profit as possible . . . We live in a time when every dime you have is a profit line on someone's chart."
I know it's fun to talk about how awful things are "these days" but this is how it's been for a century or so. It's not as if businesses in the 2000s or 1980s or 1960s or 1940s weren't also about maximizing profit.
My grandmother told me once that there used to be stores that sold everything for 5-10 cents. "Five and dimes" she called them. Whatever happened to those, and which politician(s) drove them out of business? Cause surely, it can't be that prices ever were allowed to rise in the past, given how freaked out everyone is now that they're rising in the present.
https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_and_dime
When I was a kid there were lots of, what we called, 5&10 cent stores. But there were very few things there that you could get at those prices. That was in the late 50’s and early 60’s. Even the TG&Y, which advertised 10 cents to a dollar on the sign had most items selling at more than that amount.
Yes, the "5 and 10" name back then was probably from about 1920. Woolworth's was the major chain version. Somewhat similar to today's dollar stores but with a far wider range of merchandise - everything, not just what they could get cheap.
If you live in a neighborhood with a lot of Asians like mine there may be the Asian version, more like the old 5 and 10.
My jeans used to come from G. C. Murphy's... as did many of the gifts I bought for my Mom's birthday/Mother's Day.
Stores with prices in their name have always been vulnerable to having the name rendered inaccurate by inflation. MANY years ago, there were 5 and 10 Cent Stores. More recently, there are dollar stores but much of their stock now costs more than a dollar. Inflation may prevent 99 Cents Only from remaining true to their name, but unless it affects them more than it affects their competitors it's not the reason they're failing.
Something tells me this guy blames Gavin Newsom for a lot of things. (Also it'll be highly entertaining when Newsom launches his well-funded 2028 campaign and then comes in 5th in Iowa).
Who finish 1 through 4? Asking for Ohtani's interpreter.
Dollar stores, including 99 Cents, are tanking generally due to years of mismanagement.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/11/business/family-dollar-99-cents-only-closing/index.html
The very first data in any report like this should be the percentage of people they approached who had anything to say about the issue they were investigating. If for example nine out of 10 offered variations on "don't know/don't care/haven't really thought about it", it's plain the story is an editor's beat-up for a slow news day.
"California's minimum wage is tied to inflation. Newsom has nothing to do with it." But he had everything to do with the $20 minimum wage for fast-food workers. Granted, though, that has no relevance to the 99 Cent stores, or Dollar Tree / Family Dollar for that matter (also going through changes).