Yes, people, it’s very simple. At a “dollar store,” everything costs $1. At Dollar General, nothing costs $1.
For chrissake, try paying attention.
I’ve worked as a cashier for the local discount store for over two years.
We buy things at auction and closeouts and sell them for the lowest price we can. We count on volume business, and we get it. We don’t do business on-line or have sales (except after the December holidays on that stuff).
QFT. Dollar General is where I stop to restock my classroom tissue supply, for example. You’d be amazed at the amount of tissue 150 high school seniors can go through during cold/flu season. They’re worse than toddlers.
We sell single aluminum tins with no bar code jut three or four digit codes we put into the computer for the cheapest prices anywhere. I must have counted and rung up a million of them.
My first year there, I though Thanksgiving was bad. Then we hit the December holidays, and I thought “Nothing could be worse than this.”
Then Passover came…Nothing that has touched any non-Passover food can be used during the eight days of Passover.
I was ringing up orders of two or three hundred tins.
Someone’s probably mentioned this, but Dollar General is easy in easy out. No need to tromp two miles to the back of the store for a gallon of milk at a decent price. Run out of laundry detergent, need batteries, little things like that. Cheaper than Walgreens and no frequent flyer card. Very convenient.
You can get more at the poor people’s store, the poor people’s store where you can get it
some knock off jeans with irregular seams
chairs made of beans and some beauty creams
Christine Auguilera black mascara
corn tortillas and some brown alovera
Poor People Store - Shinyribs.
Yeah, that came out wrong…but the point remains. Paying less for an inferior product isn’t really a value.
They don’t seem to have made it to my new corner of the U.S. (and it is a corner), but back in the Midwest their store positioning was incredibly savvy. They have a marketing department that really pays attention.
In the small town I lived in, they opened a location right beside a large trailer park that was two miles away from any other retail outlet. Plenty of people who lived there didn’t have cars, so they were happy to do all their shopping there.
Then a year or two later, in the small town where my husband worked, they opened a store right on the highway that goes through town. Now, the town had a mom & pop grocery store–but it was about three blocks off the main road, down in the dinky-streets “historical” district. I predict that local grocery will be kaput sooner rather than later.
But “dollar store” is the accepted and recognized generic descriptive name for Dollar General and Family Dollar (neither of which stick to $1 items), as well as Dollar Tree (which does sell everything for $1). These three are the largest names in the dollar store industry, and are all growing fairly rapidly. The term “dollar store” isn’t restricted just to stores that sell everything for $1.
Dollar stores are pretty much replacements/successors for the old neighborhood five-and-dime stores. They fill a niche between convenience stores and big discount stores like Walmart, in terms of store size, product item selection and pricing. Buying stuff at a convenience store is very expensive. Buying stuff at Walmart is cheap, but you have to park 50 yards away and walk through a 100,000-150,000 square foot store. And Walmarts tend to be a lot more spread out than dollar stores. Dollar stores locate in small towns or even crossroad locations, and are doing very well. As with c-stores, they are getting larger and larger, and carry more and more products. Many dollar stores are adding more and more food items, and now compete with supermarkets as a quick-stop alternative for certain food and cleaning items.
Contrary to the OP’s hypothesis, dollar stores are doing very well now, and are adding locations all across the country.
I consider “dollar stores” to be stores that sell all items for $1. (Dollar Tree, Everything’s A Dollar).
You are free to make up your own terminology for anything, but it tends to make discussions confusing. In the retail and real estate worlds, as well as (from my experience) in general conversation, the term “dollar store” is not as limiting as you suggest. What is your general term for Dollar General and Family Dollar type stores?
Dollar Store Sector Cashes In | National Real Estate Investor Real estate industry article about dollar stores, specifically naming Dollar General and Family Dollar.
Corporate Innovation Programs | Babson College Retail industry article about dollar stores, not limited to stores that only sell for $1.
When $1 can be much more: The dollar-store divide Business news article about dollar stores, specifically naming Dollar General and Family Dollar.
Readers Sound Off On Dollar Store Merger's Impact On Walmart, Retail Sector Business news article about dollar stores, not limited to stores that only sell for $1.
Deconstructing Dollar Demographics Demographics news article about dollar stores, not limited to stores that only sell for $1.
I don’t really call them anything in particular besides “store” or use the actual name of the store. It seems more confusing to me to refer to something as a “dollar store” when it isn’t a store that sells all items for $1.
It’s not something that really concerns me. Sorry you spent all that time looking up those links.
I tend to call DG/FD types “discount stores”; they are also called “variety stores” or “general merchandisers.”
Dollar Tree and clones tend to sell a lot of overstock and clearance, with a changing inventory of whatever can be had cheaply, but a huge chunk of Dollar General’s inventory is goods made specifically for Dollar General. They have their own brands (e.g., Clover Valley for foodstuffs), as well as distribution agreements with major manufacturers. It’s not really the same business model as the sell-everything-for-$1 model.
This. I only call places that just sell things for a buck a “dollar store.” The rest, I call by name or otherwise it does confuse people who don’t know the differences. And I get why, since they all have dollar in their names, I’m sure that anyone who has never been to one, assumes they’re all similar.
A dollar is the new nickle or dime, I suppose. Five-and-dime stores didn’t sell everything for 5 or 10 cents, either.
This should answer all your financial questions re their viability.
Speaking of genuine dollar stores, I don’t know of any besides Dollar Tree that are still around. (Just recently, the local Deal$ store seems to have been replaced by another Dollar Tree.) In the dollar stores’ heyday (the 90s?), there were a whole bunch of different dollar stores that came and went, sometimes in malls, that had their own different inventory. I miss those days.
I LOVE Dollar General. Love it.
It’s the only place I can find regular-size rolls of Bounty paper towels.
They have great seasonal bargains like notebooks with actual good-quality paper for $1.50 or really great Christmas ornaments for $1.00.
And I got some of my favorite clothes from there. Yes, really.
I won’t set foot in Walmart, but Dollar General rocks.
It was around the early 2000s I think that I noticed that more and more items in dollar stores had been manufactured specifically for the dollar store industry instead of being overstock/clearance from regular manufacturing. With the latter, you could find some real bargains, but you had to be careful because some of the items were worth far less than a buck. At places like Dollar Tree, where most of the stuff seems to be made specifically for the store, EVERYTHING is worth far less than a buck. No bargains there. Real dollar stores are few and far between these days.
There used to be one in the local mall called (I think) Everything’s A Dollar, but the only ones around here now are Dollar Tree.
They have an equivalent in Japan called “100 yen stores”. I checked one out when I visited Japan in the late 90’s.
No one is making up their own terminology. People in the business just extended the “dollar store” definition in ways that the general public did not. It’s like how certain businesses tried to extend the “dollar menu” concept.
I don’t know anyone who uses “dollar store” to mean anything other than a store that sells things for a dollar. There’s otherwise no connection in the name.