Family Dollar and Dollar Tree are set to close nearly one thousand stores.

Many family dollar stores have been plagued by health and safety concerns.

This year, the struggling discount chain was hit with a record 41-and-a-half million dollar fine, for violating product safety standards.

Dollar Tree bought family dollar in 2015, in hopes of teaming up to fend off bigger retailers like Dollar General and Walmart. John Rossi, director of the Professional Sales Center at YSU's Williamson College of Business says, the impact of these losses will fall on families who live in rural communities or food deserts.

Inflation also plays in role in why some of their stores are closing.

"Dollar tree and Family Dollar serve two different markets based on their merchandise," said Rossi. " A lot of what the difficulty was with Family Dollar was their merchandising and assortment selection was off from what the consumers are expecting to see. Their pricing model with inflation has to move to three to five dollars which had some impact on the demand," he said.

Rossi said Dollar General has survived because they've been in business longer and Family Dollar has been performing lower than Dollar Tree and their merger didn't help.

Rossi says inflation has been stubbornly holding on due to something called "purchase price index."

"If manufacturers and producers and service providers are having increases in their prices, typically they'll pass those along to their consumers and the consumer products that they sell," said Rossi.

Swedish company Ikea has actually been cutting prices across all its markets, saying they've seen an increase in customers and items sold. Rossi said it would help a lot of consumers out if other companies would adopt this idea.