Two or three employees per store can only do so much when they’re constantly running a register at the same time

They are well known for not treating their employees well. They don't have enough people and the people they do have are not treated well.

There's three "dollar" stores where I live: Family Dollar, Dollar General, and Dollar Tree. I kept getting them confused, until my wife just started calling them "Red Dollar, Yellow Dollar, and Green Dollar."

I feel like family dollar employees are used to getting robbed at gunpoint

Went to a family store once.. for shits and giggles bought a clearance pack of Pokemon cards, turns out it had a rare Charizard card .. made 100 bucks on eBay

Family Dollar is a great place to buy things like deodorant, dryer sheets and laundry soap.

why tf this popped up in my recommended and I actually watched it? this is dope lmao

A lot of us poor folk have bugs. They sell a lot of bug spray. It's not rocket science. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

i didn't watch til the end but i think something you don't bring up is that in small towns these stores thrive because you don't have anywhere else to go

Hi, I'm one of the employees being let go as part of the massive store closings. The issue with our store specifically was that an outside group owned the building and was overcharging the company for rent. The reason you're seeing those huge displays or bugspray and other items, and why the aisles are extremely cluttered is because corporate regularly oversends product. Eventually it would get to the point where we would have to pull items out from the back and just find an empty spot for them on the floor so that we had room for the next truck in the backroom. Couple this with the fact that our hours were so restrictive that we couldn't afford to have more than 2 people on shift per day, and we had very little time to bounce between helping out customers, tidying up shelves, running register, and all the while monitoring for thieves (A very big problem in this type of store, we'd find several empty packages of batteries or pens stuffed behind other products at least once a week). I loved the crew I worked with as well as the majority of regulars that would come in (Store was in a very small town just a little bit away from me, so it was very easy to remember folks), but I have never seen the levels of greed and incompetence like I did with those on the corporate level.

99 cent only is the best, I grew up on dollar general but that shit is just as expensive as Walmart basically

Working at Dollar General made me honestly hate humanity for some time.

Cleanest family dollar I’ve ever seen. Wow.

*sees title of the video* “...What IS going on with family dollar????”

I hate those “live love laugh” signs too I feel you! How corny

A local store here in Knoxville, TN had a sign up saying the store is closed due to lack of employees....tells you all you need to know about how employees are treated there.

Family Dollar in my area is the scummy store, and Dollar General is the nicer of the 2

Dollar Tree is both better AND CHEAPER than Family Dollar.

I use to work at family dollar and we only have one assistant manager and one cashier for every shift except restock days...

"Grandpa, what did you do when you were a young man? " "I was a retail store archeologist..." Ugh

I ain’t trusting that Jif next to the bug spray, but you do you.

As a former Dollar General Employee I can say. No matter how much you scrub the floors, the store always looks dingy. Too much product shoved into a little store, with no way to track dates on food products and an hour allotment that barely allowed for the required 2 employees it's not a great place to work. Besides one employee basically upkeeping the store while the other basically acts as a handler it's no wonder why the stores always look messy. Discount stores draw the worst kind of customer, the kind that genuinely doesn't care how the store is when they leave. That's not 100% of the customers, but when one or two comes through on a busy day, and you can leave the register it can be a pain. I have a personal distinct memory of being at the store until 2am one morning because the manager couldn't find any other way to clean the store up. Most discount stores are unsustainable and have a constant flow of workers in and out, unable to hold anybody because of the unreasonable expectations they have for new workers. I'm glad I got out of there, and I advise against shopping there if possible until they treat their employees and managers better, it's an honest shitshow.

In my experience, Wal Mart's prices are mostly equivalent with Dollar General, Family Dollar, Dollar Tree, etc. unless you buy premium goods. Discount stores don't really have a market space in large cities and are probably better-suited for rural areas that need grocery stores but are too sparsely populated or impoverished to be economically viable for a mass retailer.

What I've noticed where I live dollar general and family dollar are actually more expensive on certain products than places like Walmart

Just call it Family Store since nothing is $1.

I find family dollar to be a more “dirty” looking store than dollar general 🤷‍♂️

Nothing symbolizes a dying discount chain better than Mighty No. 9 on the Wii U.

People used to look down on Kmart. Now people look back on them fondly. It seems that the shopping experience keeps getting dirtier and nastier.

Family dollar always looks like black Friday happened or better yet a tornado

I worked at the dollar store in my teens, I was fork lift driver, stocked the shelves, ran the register, janitor, and had to deal with PALLETS of freight like at least 5 pallets a week. It was fun i gave my friends my discount and my apartment had all the finest dollar store goods imaginable.

The stench of Downy and detergent is so strong in the one near I live, I've gotten food products that have ended up tasting like I imagine laundry taste like.

If you are in a wheelchair it is hard to get through Isles

A lot of people in rural communities where Walmart will not go, depend on Family Dollar and Dollar Store and Dollar Trees.

Congrats on getting the comment section back dude!

I saw into the backroom of our local dollar general and it was a literal avalanche of boxes. Absolute OSHA violation right there

The Family Dollars around me have really gotten nice, I’m hoping to hear from them today for a job... 🙌🏽

Dollar General did something quite smart here in rural New York... They moved into communities that were more than 10 miles from a big box store...

Bro, that 'copper crisper' is legit. Use it with fries all the time, and it does amazing.

Honestly, Uncle Ray's is a decent brand of chips.

If you haven't had Uncle Rays chips, try them. They are honestly some of the BEST chips I've had.

At least everything at Dollar Tree really is one dollar. Places like Family Dollar and Dollar Tree are really just down market competitors to Walmart.

I think the overstocking is an effort to save on restocking manpower, which is usually carried out overnight.

As an European, I have no clue why I'm so fascinated about american grocery stores but here I am, absolutely loving this series.

In my area Dollar General's are getting a revamp across all kinds of counties. The Family Dollar's in my area are in a perpetual state of neglect.

Family dollars are only in the hood where I live a d are forever getting robbed because of how understaffed they are. It's sad Btw I just subscribed

Small store- you might think well it should be easier to keep up and clean. Buuuut it's less payroll for staffing.

I didn't know retail archaeology was a thing until 1:30 this morning. Thank you 💛

While watching your video, I feel like I’m in a first player mode video game navigating through the store.

I know your pain with those “life live love signs “ because my mom has a lot of those hanging on the walls around the house and I hate it because the saying are really stupid.

Just so you know. Dollar Tree regularly receives shipments of Shasta Cola. So you’re good

I love this channel. The footage is nice and smooth and the voice is really calming. Sadly though it seems retail and brick and mortar stores are a dying medium. So it is nice to see this channel bringing back some memories for many.

Lighter fluids/flamables by the emergency exit. Good plan.

I am glad to hear I am not the only one sick to death of “Live Laugh Love” and all those other cheesy idioms. Great video!

This is where we will be looting during the Zombie apocalypse

Dollar General makes me think that I’m gonna get stabbed if I browse for too long

A fellow man of good taste with that pineapple jarritos.

Where I live (Iowa), the comparison of Family Dollar vs. Dollar General tends to be the reverse of your observation in most cases. The Dollar Generals around here are usually cleaner and better organized than Family Dollars, even when comparing the older stores that have been around for many years (although admittedly you are more likely to find new DGs than new FDs around here). I imagine it varies from region to region. Also, regarding your statement that "discount stores don't have to be dingy and cluttered", I definitely agree. Case in point: Five Below, which has been expanding like crazy lately and has some very awesome stores that are brightly lit and actually fun to shop in...although granted most of the stuff they carry is much different than what Family Dollar and other such discount stores carry (i.e. mostly clothes & cosmetics, limited housewares, a lot of cheap electronics, and no groceries aside from candy & drinks).

one of the Family Dollar stores in my town has the BEST lawn and garden knick knacks.....great fairy houses, windchimes, bird feeders, planters, etc. And I always love their holiday stuff

I personally love Dollar Tree and has become a very useful resource when I truly need it. Also, as for the lack of employees....that's retail in a nutshell. These companies are cheap and don't want to pay employees so they have less of them run stores.

"They seem to have bug poison everywhere." People who live in cheap apartments tend to have roaches.

I've seen a Family Dollar and Dollar General on the same street

I love messy stores like that. Makes finding something youre looking for satisfying.

They should sell the condoms by the diapers

"no apologies" instead of "sorry" is a hoot!!! and PS I'm right there with you on those affirmation home decor signs! BARF!

I was a manager at one of these shitholes... so here's some info. Clearance racks These are basically what happens after the home location is taken over by something else, or a special endcap runs it's course. In the case here, it looks like "season change" and "schematic reset". They also get a lot of random shit in to make special endcap displays. So like "beach fun" will have beach stuff. Everything will sell out except say, the squirt guns. Now it's on clearance and you have nothing else in store to pair it with. Bug spray is a huge seller. We'd move cases of that every week. Family Dollars (and I'm sure DG) business model is to have stores maintain a certain daily/weekly income. So for example $4000 a night. If a store exceeds that level, they drive to split the market and open a new store in the region. There are several "reasons", but one of them is, company policy used to be, if you had a high volume store, the employees got paid better. In the area I worked, there was a store every mile for a long stretch, and going in multiple directions. Driving to my store, I could pass up to 3 other Family dollars. In another region, I worked a extreme high volume store, that had 4 other FD's within a mile (about 3/4 in each direction) and 8 within 4 miles. The high volume store was built in like the 60s and they wanted to close it, and rebuild... so they kept trying to siphon off the income. (but the recession hit, and everyone was shopping at FD and DG) A note on the display box: There's a fair chance it got damaged in transport. The trucks are loaded with 2-4 stores worth of delivery, and packed in Tight. Crushed and smashed boxes are common. So are pickle jars and cat food that got broken during the journey to the store, covering everything in smells that you will never forget... Bleach too... Having a case of Franks Red hot break and cover everything made for a fun truck day... The bread section: The Bread, and freezers were all outside vendors. I never had a problem with them, but some stores had issues with their vendors. So a lot of times the District Manager just removed shelf space if they can't keep it stocked. The "cluttered" vibe is because of The "door to Shelf" policy. The idea is, there is no stock room. Everything is out and for sale. We once got like 32 cases of Angel soft in preperation for a sale... we had shelf space for 6 cases max. We were reprimanded for keeping them in the stock room and refilling the shelves as they emptied. So most Managers will shove shit anywhere they can. Staffing and no customers: You were there during a down period. Mornings for example, there's normally only a manger or assistant manager on site for the first few hours. A Cashier comes in around lunch, and leaves 4 hours later, when another replaces them Some places schedule an hour in between cashiers. This is due to not getting the payroll to staff properly. But yes, these places would look so much better with even just $100 extra in payroll. If you see a clean store, it's either the "home" store or "show store", or the manager is putting in 70+ hours a week (and getting paid for 52)

"I should have bought those cookies." Liar you did buy them, Just becauses the didn't survive the car ride home...

I like buying my RAID where I also buy my peanut butter! ;) Great video!

This Family Dollar store is about as organized as the inside of my head.

I worked at a family dollar for two years. Other than the usual retail B.S. it was an ok job and the company seemed like a decent one.

Cleanliness, around here (MI), it's the exact opposite of what was said: Family Dollars are dirty, while Dollar Generals are cleaner. They're also cluttered and randomly arranged.

this explains why my family dollar got converted to dollar tree

7:58 that dude looks exactly like Gilderoy Lockhart, lol

$1 in 1959 is worth $8.62 in today's money. $1 today would be worth 12 cents in 1959.

I've always liked 99 cents Only stores since their products were of a higher quality with better organized stores.

There's both a Dollar General and Family Dollar within a few blocks of my house, and Dollar General is the better of the two. Cleaner, better lighting, better-staffed, and my DG has an expanded refrigerator section. It's Family Dollar that's a bit worse than DG. Yes, I've seen a few DGs that are not so good, but overall, DG seems better to me than FD. As for Dollar Tree, I'll admit that they're clean, well-lit, and well-staffed as well, but they do seem to have a greater portion of really cheap junk, which I assumed was from trying to keep everything at a dollar price tag.

If you wanna see the most ghetto 99 Cent Only store...go to the one on Country Club and Southern Ave in Mesa, AZ. There are always so many homeless panhandling out front no matter when you go.

Every Dollar Tree or otherwise actual dollar/99 cent store I've been to has been a mess. I really hate these so-called "discount" stores. When you get down to it, it really isn't discounted. They are usually selling the same or similar products you'd find at a Meijer, Target, or Wal-Mart but in a smaller quantity. So per ounce or whatever, you're probably paying more.

I have a dollar general a mile from my house, and my dollar general is clean And recently they repainted and repaved the lot

What’s going on with the Family Dollar in my city, is, lack of employees. When I go in there, there’s 2 people or even just one. Trying to run the cash register/check out, but also getting called to aisles, having to unload the delivery stuff, stock, and off and on they are in the back working and there’s no check out person for several min. Our Family Dollar isn’t dirty, really. But it’s cluttered and has no staff. It’s also located in an area of the city with huge theft problems, so having no staff just adds to the issue. By the way, until recently I thought Dollar General was an everything’s a dollar type place like dollar tree, I had no idea. Our Family Dollar And Dollar Tree are next to each other.

This is great, this is the first video I’ve seen of yours, and the quality and entertainment make it so that it won’t be the last.

I really like their slogan “Family Dollar, Where stuff is more than a dollar”

I was at the Dollar General by my house yesterday and I found an empty jug of Tropicana in one their refrigerators. 😳

That “No Apologies” game took me out 😂😂 what a SORRY name for a game

Ex Family Dollar Assistant Manager here. Great video first of all. I didn't realize people did like "review" videos on different retail chains. That's really cool! So a lot of the Family Dollar store deal with terrible payroll. We usually would only get enough to provide wages for a Store Manager, two Assistant Managers and two cashiers if you're lucky. My store was in a low income area so we skirted by with just one cashier. The company itself treats its employs really badly, paying most minimum wage (which is $7.25 in my state) and not much more for managers. I'd been with the company for nearly 5 years and as an Assistant Manager I was only being paid $8 an hour. Even with this little wage they expect employees to do the work of a full staff. Frequently managers have to open their stores and run registers completely alone until 4pm-5pm when evening shift would come in. Aside from running the register we were expected to put up stock from the backroom or our shipments if we had it, clean the store, help customers, stop people from shoplifting, etc. As I said there's frequently only ever one employee in the entire store at one time. They made us unload our own trucks as well and frequently only one person there to take sometimes over 1,000 boxes of merch off these trucks. Some of these employees having to do this were not young strapping lads or lasses either... Sometimes elders who would quite often get hurt in the process. The benefits are basically non existent and terrible and the workers compensation portion of it all literally takes over half a year or more to actually finalize and go through. I know my manager waiting nearly an entire year to get a surgery for her back when she was crushed by the truck rollers that fell over. In the meantime they still expected her to come to work! They very frequently wouldn't allow us to take breaks, or we couldn't anyway since we were the only ones in the store. I know that quite often I was scared to death of getting robbed. (We'd had gun scares before.) Employees don't get any holidays off either (not even Christmas Day) nor were we compensated for working on a holiday. So basically what all this was leading up to was just the fact that employees are simply not compensated enough or taken care of well enough to care about how the store looks or how it runs. It's a shame really because if the company just cared a little more for its employees, paid them better, gave them a few major holidays off... They would work really hard for the store! I really enjoyed working retail. I liked setting the store and coming up with fun displays to entice customers... but after years of working full-time as a manager and still not being able to afford the cost of living, I just couldn't stay there any longer.

I use to manage a Family Dollar until it closed but the payroll I had for the week was an average of 130 hours i had to work 52 so i had 78 left to work with. the store was open for 12 hours a day. Figure out how to run that store with that payroll, and many other stores I worked in were the same.

I don't understand your complaint about the clearance section. It looks like that everywhere I shop. Clearance stuff is "all" put together on one section.

I used to work at Save A Lot. Do a video if you find one in your travels.

I work at a Dollar General, so I can provide some insight as to why they’re sometimes just so nasty. We have a good looking store for what we can make it, but they only give us about 118 hours a week to split between 6 people. That’s not enough hours to have two people in the store at all times, which means that managers are often at the store until 1pm all alone. My manager works about 70 hours a week, hours get cut according to last years sales, and if the district manager maintains a certain hour deficit for every store, they get a very healthy $$ bonus. My store is riddled with spiders. Our store’s layout is a FTB, but we are missing about the equivalent of 6 aisles. We have to stuff all of our extra shit into end caps and onto our clearance aisle. Employee turnover is extremely high. Our AC has been broken and the temperature inside was 91.6 F, and it wasn’t until we told them that our candy was melting (aka they were losing product) that they sent someone out to fix it. We don’t have to give our clearance aisles any rhyme or reason. We are literally told to price the item and toss it over there. We have way too much and unlike Family Dollar, we don’t give ANY discount on our clearance aisle except a 50% off sale about every 3 months and it only lasts for one weekend. DG corporate is painfully greedy and it really is the worst discount store.

Honestly I just love watching your videos. I love watching them to go to bed at night. Not saying they’re boring at all. I just find that they are calming and I love it. Please do more walk arounds in grocery stores or discount stores

I repair computers at many different stores. Family Dollar and Dollar General are usually the dirtiest places that I work at.

Former FD Assistant manager/ manager here. The main problems I encountered when employed was that the district was HIGHLY understaffed, my District Manager had no idea how retail operated, Overtime to fix the main problems of the store was prohibited, and no one would listen to anyone. That's why I quit.

wow just stumbled upon this, this was really well made, great work on to next vid!

Over-saturation is correct. I have a Dollar General and Dollar Tree next to each other in the shopping center across from my house and a family dollar not even a quarter mile away.

Lol, dude sounds like he's Bob brother from Bob's burgers.

First video from you, will subscribe! Thankful that it moved along at a decent pace, was afraid video would drag.

The second location you filmed used to be a Dollar General my brother worked there and I remember going with him when he went to turn in his application back in late 2006. He worked there until mid 2007 but he had to quit due to having very bad anxiety attacks. He used to tell me that they would barely have any costumers and he would also have to throw away lots of good frozen and canned food because it wouldnt sell and was expired or close to being expired. So eventually they ended up closing down in the summer of 2007 and I actually remember buying a few things from their clearance sale. When they finally closed down the building stayed vacant for many years until the family dollar moved in and actually that family dollar used to be right next to the now vacant MS Supermarket. I used to go to that family dollar alot because I used to live in the apts across the street.

Family Dollar is always getting robbed in SC. It's sad 😐

My friend had a custom "Please don't snort coke" sign in really elaborate script made for her bathroom; it's majestic af 🤣

The exit through the doors at the end was the best part. That place is a mess. You’re a trooper for doing these types of videos.

I'm Canadian and would love if you covered a Dollarama. They are a VERY successful chain that is thriving in a market where other chain dollar stores failed.