Epidemiology and Public Health Discussion

Epidemiology and Public Health Discussion

Epidemiology and Public Health Discussion

The Food Sections in the Dollar Stores

The stores are beautiful, and I have realized that the price tags of items are cheap. Every item costs less than a dollar and others one dollar. The stores have several supplies, and the food section has chunky foods. The other store has food supplies that are imported from overseas. In the first store I visited, I learned that it has some benefits and demerits in the community. The food was cheap, and most of them contained sugars thus, the families with lower incomes dominated the store because it had a lot of people, especially women. This store feels the requirement because it provides the American Dream to low-income customers for a dollar a day. The store also establishes a sense of profusion by filling its store with several products set on the shelves with cheap price tags (Chenarides et al., 2021). Consumers also make more intelligent decisions by shopping in the store. I also found out that the customers find shopping in the store rewarding.

However, the store has a disadvantage to the community because it complicates it. The price tags on the shelves are low, meaning that it targets the neighborhoods with the low-income community, especially the society of Black individuals, thus discouraging the healthy eating options, especially the groceries. This also contributes to the economic anguish because it eliminates the local jobs. The location of these stores is not in the city but the rural town. In my view, the stores develop faster because it has a lot of consumers, and their unchecked development harms the community. The groceries and the local retail in the area did not have the buyers meaning that the store is the most significant competitor to these groceries even though it does not offer any.

The other store had other items apart from household items, toys, and fast-food products. In the food section, it provided frozen meat and fresh produces. It had several choices. The store had a lesser quantity of food desert, and several individuals from the local community were employed in the store. I also observed that the consumers were free to bargain from the store. This offered the store a higher rating. I learned that the store engages positively with the local community, and it has a community support concept that caters to charitable contributions.

Despite the great offers in the store, it has some disadvantages. I learned that the store was not good for the society it was located in. Society was already struggling to inspire the development of grocery store which offers healthy and fresh produce. Accessing fresh items leads to better outcomes for societies (Laska et al., 2018). Even though the store had fewer items of chips and Twinkies, it was a competitor of the grocery. It sells the fresh produce offered in the groceries; thus, the groceries lack a market for the products thus having a minor incentive to develop in the community.

Other products on the store shelves were expired, and other merchandises were defective. The store also increases segregation, and the products offered are of low quality. The store employs individuals in the local community, and it does not pay them well. In my view, the store’s growth is due to poor economic circumstances. The store has an unjust advantage over the local groceries, thus eliminating going to the grocery store. This initiates the competition in the community. The community also becomes less appealing because property values drop because the people with greater incomes leave the society.

References

Chenarides, L., Cho, C., Nayga Jr, R. M., & Thomsen, M. R. (2021). Dollar stores and food deserts. Applied Geography, 134, 102497.  https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apgeog.2021.102497

Laska, M. N., Sindberg, L. S., Ayala, G. X., D’Angelo, H., Horton, L. A., Ribisl, K. M., … & Gittelsohn, J. (2018). Agreements between small food store retailers and their suppliers: Incentivizing unhealthy foods and beverages in four urban settings. Food Policy, 79, 324-330.  http://dx.doi.org/10.101