Earlier this month, the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR), a nonprofit advocacy group with offices in Minneapolis, Maine, and Washington, D.C., that "challenges concentrated economic and political power, and instead champions an approach in which ownership is broadly distributed, institutions are humanly scaled, and decision-making is accountable to communities," released research meant to push back against the spread of dollar stores, which the group argues are "targeting struggling urban neighborhoods and small towns."

Generally, dollar stores are mid-sized retails stores that sell "a wide range of inexpensive household goods."

The ILSR research focuses largely on the sale of what it deems substandard groceries by dollar stores, criticizes their spread as the cause and effect of economic malaise, and urges cities and towns "to check the[] spread" of dollar stores through local legislation. Steps the ILSR urges cities and towns to take include setting limits on chains, creating buffer zones around existing stores (of the sort food trucks have often endured in many cities), increasing red tape, and subsidizing locally owned groceries.

The research makes several assumptions that don't stand up to scrutiny.

First, it argues that dollar stores are both the cause and effect of what ails grocery markets in many cities and towns. It argues dollar stores are "both a symptom of larger economic trends and a cause of additional economic despair." It's not by any means impossible for a phenomenon to serve as both cause and effect, but the respective cause and effect this research identifies—dollar stores put grocers out of business and "dollar stores concentrate in areas that already have few or no grocery stores"—seem at odds with one another.

Second, one of the main criticisms the research lobs at dollar stores is that dollar stores don't sell fresh meat or produce. They do, however, offer varying degrees of canned and/or frozen meats and produce. There's nothing innate to fresh foods that is superior to canned and frozen alternatives of the same foods. Consider, for example, that dollar stores sell frozen meats, canned vegetables, condiments, and other arguably health foods. They sell $1 steaks. Dollar Tree offers some great canned foods. One Florida State University student wrote about the "ridiculously good meals" she made during a week in which she only bought food only at the Dollar Store.

Third, it quotes Tulsa city councilor Vanessa Hall-Harper, who helped develop legislation to limit dollar stores, who says a Sav-A-Lot grocery in her district closed because of incompetence on the part of management and/or the licensee, rather than because of competition from dollar stores. That would seem to undermine the premise behind ILSR's research.

(Notably, Hall-Harper's North Tulsa district is not completely devoid of places where residents may buy fresh produce. According to a recent report on farmers markets in Tulsa, the northern part of the city is home to an urban farm and is served weekly by a roving truck that sells low-priced fresh produce.)

Fourth, it argues that a dollar store in Moville, Iowa, put a grocer there, Chet's Foods, out of business. Yet the report also notes that "residents were still buying most of their groceries from Chet's" and the store closed anyway. In an email to me this week, Stacy Mitchell, ILSR Co-Director and co-author of the research, explains that fixed costs likely doomed Chet's in the end. "As a large company, Dollar General can lose money at a new location for a much longer period (making it up elsewhere in the chain)," Mitchell also adds. That makes sense. "I think this is something libertarians don't really wrestle with. Big companies can 'win' competition not by virtue of being better or more popular, but by virtue of being larger. Is that the best outcome?"