Dollar store locations in the US

It appears that Americans have collectively decided that the optimal way to honour the opening of a new dollar store is to walk into traffic with the kind of absent-minded confidence usually reserved for people checking their phones. Between 2005 and 2022, as dollar stores multiplied across the nation like a particularly aggressive fungus, pedestrians seemed to take this as a cue to step into the path of oncoming vehicles with almost ceremonial precision. One might reasonably expect these two things to have nothing whatsoever to do with each other, yet here they are, moving together as if choreographed by someone with a very specific grudge against both commerce and basic road safety.

The obvious culprit is probably population density and economic distress working in tandem. Dollar stores tend to cluster in economically struggling areas with higher foot traffic, and those same areas often have older infrastructure, worse lighting, fewer traffic controls, and drivers in a hurry. Since 2005, the US population grew by about 60 million people, and pedestrian deaths tripled from roughly 4,900 to over 7,500 annually, while dollar store locations exploded from about 6,000 to 38,000—all three trends riding the same wave of suburban and exurban sprawl. Add in increased distraction, aging drivers, and the fact that poorer neighbourhoods are genuinely more dangerous to walk in, and you've got a confound so thick you could wallpaper a dollar store with it.

What we're really looking at is a pair of statistical mirrors reflecting the same underlying American condition: geographic inequality and the creeping motorisation of everywhere. The dollar store and the traffic fatality aren't causing each other any more than a thermometer causes fever, but they're both symptoms of something larger and stranger. We've built a country where the cheapest things and the most dangerous things tend to live in the same postcodes, which is either a cosmic joke or a data analysis waiting to happen.