Patio Pondering: When Survival Gets Mistaken for Success

This morning dawned with two weeks of holiday havoc finally behind us. The first workday of 2026 arrived quietly. Sunlight skimmed across the backyard, keeping the ice at bay in the water feature, as I took the first sips of a strong, black coffee and let the day settle in.

I recently saw a post from the manager of our local Dollar General promoting the sale of candy bars to support the Dollar General Literacy Foundation.

Literacy matters. Education matters. I have thought about this promotion several times over the holiday season, after seeing it promoted online several times. The more I considered who was being asked to participate, the more uncomfortable it became.

There are two problems here. First, a multibillion-dollar company is asking poor communities to fund programs meant to help them. Second, it is doing so by selling low-nutrition candy to people who are already forced, by price and access, to buy too much low-nutrition food in the first place.

That discomfort connects to something else I have been carrying for a long time.

I cringe when I see local residents praise Dollar General as a sign of community strength. I see comments about how great it is, how lucky we are, how “we have such a great team” at our local store.

To be clear, I do not doubt the team. Those jobs are hard. Managers and employees show up every day, serve their neighbors, and take pride in doing the best they can with what they are given. That work deserves respect.

But praising the people should not require celebrating the system.

When a community begins treating the presence of a Dollar General as progress, it often signals something else entirely. It suggests that wages are thin, options are limited, and that convenience has replaced investment. It is not an indictment of the people who shop or work there. It is a reflection of how little margin the community has left.

Seen through that lens, selling candy to fund literacy is not generosity. It is a transaction that shifts responsibility away from corporate scale and back onto the people already carrying the weight. Literacy is a long-term investment. Candy-bar charity is a short-term gesture that makes the problem feel addressed without actually confronting it.

We should be able to hold two truths at once: respect for good people doing honest work locally, and skepticism of corporate models that profit from scarcity. Both things can be true. And pretending otherwise only makes it easier to confuse survival with success.