Dollar General plans to add 635 stores and move 550 existing locations this year as part of its continuing expansion. Central Ohio is going to be part of that expansion.
The discount retailer is building two stores, whose locations weren’t available yesterday, and is studying three other sites, spokeswoman Crystal Ghassemi said yesterday.Each store will employ between six and 10 workers, she said.
Plans for central Ohio “obviously may change during 2013 as we currently evaluate how we meet our customers’ needs,” she said. With more than 10,000 stores in 40 states, Goodlettsville, Tenn.-based Dollar General already has more retail locations than any retailer in America. By the end of this year, the company will open its 11,000th store.
The surge in growth, given the shaky economy, makes sense to one local observer.“Overall, it doesn’t surprise me that they would expand in this market,” said retail consultant Chris Boring of Boulevard Strategies. “Dollar stores have been doing really well in general over the last couple of years. They’ve been taking market share from discount department stores like Walmart in particular.”< /p>
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Since 2000, 35 to 40 dollar and closeout stores have opened each year in Ohio, Boring said, whereas nine or 10 discount department stores have closed each year in the state.
Ohio has more than 1,100 dollar stores, third-most in the United States behind Texas and Florida.
“They compete with Walmart and Target, but they actually like to locate as close to those stores as possible. They feed off the traffic,” Boring said. “They go into older strip centers where there are low rents.
“If you’ve been in Walmart or Target, they lead with dollar deals. That’s to combat the dollar stores.”
The new stores will mean the creation of 6,000 new jobs, Dollar General officials said. With the addition of those jobs in 2013, Dollar General will have created approximately 30,000 jobs in the past six years, they said.
To support its growth, the retailer will open a distribution center in Pennsylvania by the first quarter of 2014. It will be the 12th in the retailer’s growing distribution network.
In its third quarter, which ended on Nov. 2, Dollar General reported sales of $3.96 billion and net income of $207.7 million.