I recently posted about a new Dollar General store encroaching on the local Family Dollar here in Albany. It turns out there’s more to the story.
Sometime during the Great Recession, Family Dollar and Dollar General each made opposite decisions about how to survive in a financial downturn. Family Dollar (and its parent company Dollar Tree) opted to stay with the everything-costs-a-dollar (or so) model, while Dollar General decided to cast itself as a mini Walmart Super Center, dollar limits be damned. This left Family Dollar selling cheap seasonal crap and odd-sized and odd-provenanced packaged food items—two serving breakfast cereals and marshmallows from India, for example.
It appears that Dollar General chose the better option; Family Dollar is planning to close some 400 of its stores, and rebrand some as Dollar Trees. What will happen with our little store, I wonder? We’ll see. In the meantime, I’m going to check out that fancy Dollar General to see if it could replace at least some trips all the way into town and the dastardly Kroger.