Two More Victims Of The Retail Apocalypse: Family Dollar And Coldwater CreekMichael Snyder In the post-2008 era, dollar stores had generally been one of the few bright spots in the retail industry. As millions of Americans fell out of the middle class, they were looking to stretch their family budgets as far as possible, and dollar stores helped them do that. It would be great if we could say that the reason why Family Dollar is doing so poorly is because average Americans have more money now and have resumed shopping at retailers that target the middle class, but that is not happening. Rather, as you will see later in this article, things just continue to get even worse for Americans at the low end of the income scale. I was also surprised to learn that Coldwater Creek is closing all of their stores Of course the fact that a couple of major retailers are closing stores is nothing new. This kind of thing happens year after year. But what we are witnessing right now is really quite startling. So many retailers are closing so many stores that it is being called a retail apocalypse. In a previous article entitled This Is What Employment In America Really Looks Like, I detailed how major U.S. retailers have already announced the closing of thousands of stores so far this year. If the economy really was getting better, this should not be happening. So why are so many stores closing? Well, the truth is that it is because the middle class is dying. With each passing day, more Americans lose their place in the middle class and fall into poverty. The following is an excerpt from the story of one man that this has happened to. His recent piece in the Huffington Post was entitled Next Friday, Ill Be Living In My Car There are millions upon millions of Americans that can identify with what that man is going through. Once upon a time, they were living comfortable middle-class lifestyles, but now they will take any jobs that they can get. Just today I came across a statistic that shows the massive shift that is happening in this country. A decade ago, the number of women working outnumbered the number of women on food stamps by more than a 2 to 1 margin. But now the number of women on food stamps actually exceeds the number of women that have jobs. Wow. How could things have changed so rapidly over the course of just one decade? And sadly, things continue to go downhill. Every day in America, more good jobs are being sent out of the country or are being replaced by technology. I really like how James Altucher described this trend the other day There is so little loyalty in corporate America these days. If you work for a major corporation, you could literally lose your job at any moment. And you can be sure that there is someone above you that is trying to figure out a way to accomplish the tasks that you currently perform much more cheaply and much more efficiently. Most big corporations dont care if you are personally successful or if you are able to take care of your family. What they want is to get as much out of you as possible for as little money as possible. This is a big reason why 62 percent of all Americans make $20 or less an hour at this point. The quality of our jobs is going down, but the cost of living just keeps going up. Just look at what is happening to food prices. For a detailed examination of this, please see my previous article entitled Why Meat Prices Are Going To Continue Soaring For The Foreseeable Future. As the middle class slowly dies, less people are able to afford to buy homes. Mortgage originations at major U.S. banks have fallen to a record low, and the percentage of Americans that live in high-poverty neighborhoods is rising rapidly If nothing is done about the long-term trends that are slowly strangling the middle class to death, all of this will just be the beginning. We will see millions more Americans lose their jobs, millions more Americans lose their homes and millions more Americans living in poverty. The United States is being fundamentally transformed, and very few people are doing much of anything to stand in the way of this transformation. Decades of incredibly foolish decisions are starting to catch up with us, and unless something dramatic is done right away, all of these problems will soon get much, much worse. This article first appeared here at the Economic Collapse Blog. Michael Snyder is a writer, speaker and activist who writes and edits his own blogs The American Dream and Economic Collapse Blog. Follow him on Twitter here. 