STUDY BUTTE — Last week, Terlingua firefighter Tony Drewry approached a survey crew working near the junction of Highway 118 and 170 to confirm a rumor: were they working for Dollar General? After they said yes, Drewry posted to Facebook. The post erupted with concerns about other local businesses, dark sky regulations and the creep of civilization toward Big Bend.
Drewry said the response was overwhelmingly negative, with some actively planning boycotts and protests against the store. Some even went so far as to suggest that Terlingua should incorporate. “There’s people who think this is not that big of a deal,” he conceded. “But nobody’s like, ‘Oh, great. We definitely need this.’ This town does not need a single damn thing they sell in that store.”
Terlingua is not the first community in the Big Bend to bring out the pitchforks against Dollar General. In October 2022, over a hundred people turned out to an Alpine City Council meeting to protest a planned location — the fourth dollar store in a city of 6,000 people.
Council members attempted to stall after the massive outcry by not approving a request from the company to consolidate lots for construction. The company threatened legal action, echoing then-City Attorney Rod Ponton’s insistence that the city could not discriminate against any particular company, so long as they were following the rules. (75 other cities in the United States have successfully imposed limits on dollar store development.)
Both the Alpine and Terlingua discontents had clearly done their homework. The chain has garnered significant bad press over the past few years, in part due to its sheer size: there are over 18,000 Dollar General locations in the United States, more than the number of McDonald’s and WalMart locations combined.
Some argue that the company’s more than $2.4 billion annual profit is extracted from the marginalized. Dollar Generals are especially prevalent in lower-income and minority communities, many of which are “food deserts,” or areas without a grocery store that provides fresh produce. In the words of one former executive, the ideal Dollar General customer is in “a permanent recession.”
While dollar stores are pitched as a way to fill the needs of poor and remote communities, there are risks for other businesses. In markets where dollar stores open up, the profits of traditional grocery stores — like Terlingua’s Cottonwood General Store that offer perishable goods — are slashed by an average of 30%.
Some Terlingua residents also wondered where store employees would come from in a community that fluctuates wildly in population between the seasons. The chain’s reputation may not help with its own recruitment: 92% of Dollar General’s employees make below $15 an hour, and the chain has been labeled a “severe labor violator” by the United States Department of Labor. Bloomberg Businessweek once speculated that it might be “the worst retail job in America.” (Reps for Dollar General did not respond to a request for comment by press time.)
Stephanie Neckar of Terlingua Real Estate is representing the seller in the potential deal. After six years of living in the community, she said she understands the concern — but was bound by her industry’s code of ethics to present all offers to the seller, not just the ones she personally approved of. “My heart’s there,” she said.
The Terlingua deal — which would be built on the site of the former EMS building — was not the community’s first tango with the chain. Neckar said that other landowners had gotten offers from Dollar General; she had personally counseled a previous local client about how the community might lash out if they accepted a bid from the black-and-yellow monolith.
The chain seemed to want property on Highway 118 near the entrance to the park — the building tucked away by the liquor store was likely not their first choice, based on Neckar’s observations. “I told [the other realtor], ‘Surely we don’t have the numbers for this,’” she said. But representation for Dollar General — which has opened stores in towns even smaller than Terlingua — told her that the area checked all of corporate’s boxes, no matter which dusty highway they built on.
Neckar stressed that the deal was far from done, and that the seller could still entertain offers from other buyers. She also was sure that — even if the community successfully fought off Dollar General this time — there would be more challenges in the future. “They’re not going away,” she said. “You can’t really stop it.”
Amid all the hubbub his post had caused, Drewry hoped that the community could fight development that he felt had flattened so many other unique small towns in the West. Dollar General would be the first major chain to operate in the area, apart from concessionaire Aramark (and its predecessor, Forever Resorts) that operates the Terlingua Motor Inn. “Any big corporation — that’s the first domino,” he said.
He acknowledged that life down south can be hard, and that he hoped that friends and neighbors tired of 80-mile trips to Alpine wouldn’t be swayed by a “false sense of convenience” the chain might offer. “If it was easy to live here out in the middle of f — ing nowhere, everybody would live here,” he said. “But that’s part of what makes it the coolest.”