How A Texas Dollar Tree Could Have Easily Avoided Massive Safety Fine

Sometimes navigating a store aisle, especially in discount stores, can be daunting if not downright dangerous. How many times have you been in a store with "Dollar" in the name and nearly tripped over a box, or had a huge pallet blocking the one thing for which you even entered the store? Not only is it annoying, but it's also unsafe. For customers and especially for staff.

A Mount Pleasant, Texas Dollar Tree was recently fined $254,478 for this issue, according to FOX 4 News, as "the store had merchandise blocking exits and walkways and piles of boxes 'high enough to fall on workers.'" The agency found "clear disregard" for safety and has done so over the course of years.

Additionally, and you guessed it, plenty of other places in the store were not kept clear and clean.

How could Dollar Tree have avoided this? The answer is so obnoxiously easy it hurts my brain. Hire more people. One or two people attempting to do everything- from checking people out to cleaning restrooms and putting away stock- is simply not enough labor to meet the amount of work it takes to run a store.

Let's do the math, shall we? We know Dollar Tree is being fined $254,478. Let's suppose they could hire some full-time folks at $15 an hour. That's $31,200 a year. Let's give them benefits, too, which on average costs businesses about $11.50 an hour. That's $55,120 a year for an extra full-time employee. For the cost of this fine, they could have had 4.6 full-time employees and easily avoided this mess altogether. They could have even kept the .6 of an employee's worth of money on the books (or had plenty to spend on part-time labor).

I am so sick of seeing so many "penny rich, dollar poor" tactics in the business world. It seems endemic to retail, but it's everywhere else too. Invest in your people, invest in your stores and you will invest in your reputation and image- two things that are absolutely priceless.