Relying on dollar stores for the bulk of grocery purchases might not be harming American diets, despite the comparative lack of healthy products, a new study has found.
As families look to free up funds on costly shopping lists, they are increasingly turning to their locals dollar stores to buy staple food items, according to the study, published on Monday in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics.
“People go to different types of stores for different reasons and the dollar store is one that people choose because of the price advantage,” lead author Wenhui Feng, a professor of health care policy of research at Tufts University, said in a statement.
“There are a lot of concerns that foods on dollar store shelves are less healthy, but what’s on the shelf does not equal what each household takes home,” added Feng, who is also an assistant professor at the Tufts School of Medicine.
What’s on the shelf at the dollar stores also does not equal what each household puts on the table, as families are balancing their increased purchases there with more nutritious items elsewhere, the authors found.
To understand the impacts of the dollar store proliferation and the convenient, calorie-rich snacks that these outlets offer, Feng and her colleagues assessed food purchases made by 180,000 nationally representative U.S. families between 2008 and 2020.
They then combined the data with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service’s Purchase to Plate Crosswalk tool — allowing them to estimate the quality of these purchases.
Ultimately, the scientists determined that calories obtained from dollar store items have nearly doubled, surging from 3.4 percent to 6.5 percent of a household’s purchases, particularly in those with lower incomes and those headed by people of color.
Meanwhile, in rural areas, where the nearest grocery stores tended to be much further than dollar stores, families were particularly reliant on the latter for their food supplies. Although these retailers provide discounts for lower-quality items, people who frequented these outlets were getting more than 90 percent of their calories on average from them.
Dollar stores are now the fastest growing food retailers in the U.S., having transformed the shopping landscape with at least 37,000 storefronts nationwide, according to the authors.
These outlets — which have a particularly strong footprint in the South — usually sell packaged foods and beverages that are high in calories and low in nutrients, with just a small share carrying produce or meats, the researchers noted.
“Some people seem to be going to dollar stores strategically to buy sweets and snacks, along with other packaged foods,” senior author Sean Cash, a global nutrition professor at the Tufts Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy, said in a statement.
Cash noted, however, that those households that buy more prepackaged foods at dollar stores seem to be buying less of these items elsewhere.
“The results further suggest that many of those same households that are buying less-healthy foods from dollar stores are, at the same time, buying healthier foods from other types of retail outlets,” the authors added.
And if dollar stores were not available, the researchers stressed that it remains unclear whether families would still opt for these same healthy mixes, due to higher cost burdens.
As such, they concluded that recent legislative calls for restrictions on dollar store openings might not be beneficial if they are not accompanied by proposals for acquiring healthier foods at affordable prices.
“We need more data on the real effects of dollar stores on healthy eating as some communities may be putting the policy cart before the horse,” Cash added.
