Social critic criticism...Dollar stores of Cicero, illinois

Jerry Palmer
   

Cicero, Illiois is an old town that preserves many old buildings resisting the urge for redevelopment and the installation and surge of strip malls. for this the town needs to be celebrated but for another the town needs to be disparaged. The number of small Mexican grocers is encouraging as this mainly Spanish-speaking town has brought up their tradition of patronizing small grocers instead of the huge ass chains of much of the western world. While these large chains have infiltrated many parts of Latin America it is still encouraging to see the small size grocers predominate in this town and much of Latin America. However the cheap Chinese imported dollar store is also ubiquitous  in Cicero and other parts of Hispanic communities in Wisconsin and Illinois. There seems to be a Dollar buster store everywhere and these old buildings can use a better tenant or business than cheap plastic shit shipped thousands of miles away. As woman's day points out

When it comes to safety, dollar-store deals might not be a bargain after all. Recent testing of their products found that 81% contained one or more hazardous chemicals. The tests, conducted by the consumer testing group Healthy Stuff, found chemicals associated with cancer, obesity, diabetes, asthma, thyroid and kidney diseases, learning problems, lower IQ, birth defects and early puberty Dollar buster is a appropriate term as these businesses want to bust all the surrounding business with their cheaper alternative selling to people who don't realize you get what you pay for and this junk doesn't help the local economy. Cicero is not alone having its share of too many cheap dollar stores and clearly these businesses target cheap rent areas and in the process locate to these areas guaranteeing these areas to always be cheap and land-value poor. You don't see dollar stores in downtown areas such as Boston and Chicago as the owners of these dollar stores likely reside in areas devoid of bad dollar stores. The awful dangerous toxic stuff sold by many of these stores is another issue that needs to be spread about. Dollar stores are the scourge of society offering nothing except perpetuating an area as poor and keeping it poor and if these people in these neighborhoods realized this they might have actually fight against these businesses popping up and not seeing them as a benefit in anyway. When rich wealthier areas get their share of gas stations and dollar stores then these stores can be seen in a more positive light but until this happens these stores need to be seen what they really are and can signal about a community.