Comment by gaiagraphia

Yes. Your spending is a far more powerful vote than any democratic process. Your society is what it spends on. A society addicted to cheap trash is going to be precisely that.

These 'dollar stores' are wealth extraction centres, which don't really provide anything to society other than enriching a dropshipping middle class and foreign exploitative factory owner class. There's very little value being created.

I'd far rather support places where purchases have numerous positive externalities, whether it be from labour conditions to promoting curiosity, or from environmental impacts, to building local communities.

Society was doing quite ok until the greedy middleman classes decided to render the domestic working classes irrelevant for a little short-term profit, just so we can buy new LED lights, or change our t-shirt collection every week.