Sounds like a problem with lack of competition. Would you have been happier if it was a publicly traded company that did it? Amazon health or some such?

What matters is if paramount can pony up enough money to buy. Stores don't reject your cash even if you are debt.

It seems to amount to a similar principle, that their business model depends on repeat customers, and would fail if they lost trust.

I much prefer this to stores that are happy to burn customers, never expecting to see them again.

>It seems to amount to a similar principle, that their business model depends on repeat customers, and would fail if they lost trust.

You think dollar general is making $37.9B (in 2023) of annual revenue from one-off customers? Unless you're operating a tourist trap, or some sort of business that people only need a few times in their lifetimes (eg. real estate agents), most businesses rely on repeat customers.

Dollar stores around here pop up in small towns, killing off any locally-owned competition, and are far enough away from the big chains to mean they can charge quite a bit more while offering terrible service.

Note how they tend to have captive customers.

No, I think they have other advantages that are less attractive to me.

I have money to buy in bulk, care about quality, and am willing to make longer trips to stock up. The membership is trivial relative to annual groceries.

I think think the target market for dollar stores is the opposite

Yellowstone is also caused by hotspot volcanism. The friendly eruption is a property of location, not hotspot origin.

Your initial post read the other way, which the parent post is addressing.

That is not a standard definition of profitability, and basically a version of the sunk cost fallacy. you dont go bankrupt from sunk costs.

If people with 20/20 vision are having trouble, I'm sure that people with diminished eyesight but above the legal limit have it worse.

I'm also uncomfortable with the idea that we should ban more people from driving just so others can have excessively bright and sometimes illegal headlights.

There is clearly a tipping point where you either get filthy restaurants, fewer restaurants, or take out only.

Anyways, there is no shortage of necessary low skill labor that can be done unrelated to food or money.

Is that really your position? to you ascribe all bad behavior globally to US cultural exports?

not all bad behavior. why this generalizing frenzy?? lmao

Just seems wild to blame USA for exporting cart culture? What's the mechanism with Hollywood? I missed the marvel extended shopping cart universe.

Where did the USA import cart culture from? Mexico?

It seems likely to me that many countries are capable of domestically manufacturing selfish assholes.

For some reason, these savings never cascade down to the consumer. Solar energy is typically a surcharge, not a cost savings.

When I log into my utility account, I can opt into solar generated power for X $/kwh more, not less.

Solar is also the most democratic, as long as you can tolerate it not working at night. I encourage you to experiment with a small portable system. I did - a 30W panel, 9Ax12V SLA battery, off-the-shelf car inverter, packet of crimp connectors, spool of wire, crimp tool, the cheapest over-voltage shutoff controller I could find (just search for solar charge controller - although lead-acid chemistries are moderately tolerant to charging out of bounds, unlike lithium, which is why I suggest lead-acid).

I really think home battery power is going to be a standard feature in the near future. Like indoor plumbing and central HVAC.

My utility just adopted time of use billing and by my napkin math a battery system with one day of capacity will pay for itself in 5 years. And that’s without solar at all. The additional solar panel cost would pay off in under 3 years. And I have cheap electricity.

About 450 billion of the national debt is held in the Cayman Islands, or a little more than 1% of the 38 trillion total. About the same as Belgium and Luxenberg, but significantly less than Japan, UK, and China.

https://ticdata.treasury.gov/resource-center/data-chart-cent...