The Dollar General store in Waldo has recently completed a remodel of its store at 107 N. Olive St.
According to a Monday media statement from the company’s Goodlettsville, Tenn., headquarters, the store’s layout and design was updated and now contains a better selection of selection of produce and expanded frozen and refrigerated foods, as well as the chain’s traditional branded household items.
“Through our ongoing commitment to provide a pleasant shopping experience to our customers, we are excited to welcome the community to see our recently remodeled located in Waldo,” said Dan Nieser, Dollar General’s senior vice president of real estate and store development. “We hope our customers enjoy the fresh layout and design, as well as the new product assortment including produce and expanded food assortments.”
When visiting the remodeled Waldo store on Monday, the “produce” offerings were not made up of leafy or fresh vegetables and fruits but instead only saw a wider variety of refrigerated juices, eggs, and milk, than the store has traditionally stocked.
The layout was nearly identical to the newly opened Dollar General on Main Street in Magnolia.
The Waldo and Magnolia stores are not the only recently opened or remodeled locations in Columbia County. Over the past few years, new spots have popped up in the small towns such as Taylor and even the regional community of Walker.
The company’s recent trends locally hold true with the same seen in rural areas all across America.
In a Monday report by the U.K.-based Guardian news publication, Dollar General “now has more outlets across the [United States] than McDonald’s has restaurants, and its profits have surged past some of the grand old names of American retail.”
The report goes on to state that an estimated 75 percent of the American population resides within five miles of a Dollar General store.
Many of the business’s new-found success is rooted in its choosing of a new location. By any measure, most fortune 500 companies, of which Dollar General is presently, according to Yahoo News, would not construct a brick-and-mortar store in such areas that, on the surface, seem to be a barren retail landscape.
But, according to the same Guardian report, the Tennessee-based company has a simple business model: go where Walmart either won’t or can’t, due to a limited population.
“Dollar Generals are frequently found at the heart of ‘food deserts,’” the report stated, “defined by the department of agriculture as a rural community where one-third of residents live more than 10 miles from a grocery store selling fresh produce.”
The chain has, the new outlet reported, has also had a devastating affect on many “mom and pop” style food and general product stores in the small communities Dollar General now targets.
One local grocery owner in Buhler, Kansas, a small town of just under 1,500, according to the report, even saw his food mart shutter, due to the wholesale buying power of the chain.
“We lasted three years and three days after Dollar General opened,” he said. “Sales dropped and just kept dropping. We averaged 225 customers a day before and immediately dropped to about 175. A year ago we were down to 125 a day. Basically we lost 35 to 40 percent of our sales. I lost a thousand dollars a day in sales in three years.”
Dollar General also knows how to build a new location, and build it fast. When the new 803 E. Main Street location was being prepped in Magnolia in early April, on-site workers from Clarksville, Mississippi, stated the project was only expected to last approximately 100 days, start to finish, for the build, even with the additional dirt work required for such a large lot. The crews were mostly based out of Louisiana and Mississippi and were stated to specialize in nothing but Dollar General construction.