Dollar General to open 6 new stores across Maine
Photo / Jim Neuger
A shopper outside a Dollar General store in South Portland. The national chain plans to open six more stores within the state, include three stores in northern Maine over the coming week.
Three branches of discount retail chain Dollar General Corp. (NYSE: DG) will open in northern Maine over the coming weeks, The County newspaper reported Thursday, and three more are slated to launch elsewhere in the state by early next year.
A Dollar General in Washburn recently began doing business and plans an opening celebration on Oct. 6, the newspaper reported. A store in Patten is scheduled for a soft opening in the next two weeks, with its official debut on Oct. 13. And a branch under construction in Limestone will open by mid-fall, a Dollar General spokeswoman told The County.
Dollar General is also building stores in Bingham, Monmouth and Old Orchard Beach, and expects to open them between late fall and the beginning of 2019, the spokeswoman said.
A Dollar General store in Kingfield also has opened.
The chain’s recent growth has included stores in Caribou, Damariscotta and Sullivan, which all opened late last year. As of January, Dollar General operated 43 stores in Maine, employing a total of about 300 people.
A national trend
Dollar General stores — and those of chief rivals Dollar Tree Inc. (Nasdaq: DLTR) and subsidiary Family Dollar — stock toiletries, packaged food, housewares, stationery and more, at prices often less than $1. The stores are typically smaller than 10,000 square feet and located in towns and rural areas overlooked by big-box retailers and supermarkets.
"The growth of this industry reflects another significant change in retail spending," Colby College economics professor David Findlay told Mainebiz in January.
Nationally, Dollar General has over 15,000 stores in 44 states, according to data it released in August, up from 14,000 in August 2017. Early this year, the company said it would introduce 900 new stores by February 2019, and this summer announced it had opened 510 of them.
Dollar Tree also operates about 15,000 stores, according to Forbes magazine.
Together, the two chains’ branches outnumber stores of the six largest U.S. retailers by revenue — Walmart, Kroger, Costco, Home Depot, CVS and Walgreens — combined.
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