Dollar General's California Dream Becoming Reality

Tennessee-based discount retailer Dollar General has been moving hard and fast in Northern California, particularly in the Central Valley, since we first revealed the discount retailer's big plans for the market region in this December 5, 2011 story: Dollar General Jump-Starts California Launch: Taking Over 5 Centro Mart Supermarkets For Early 2012 Openings.

In the mere four months since we published the report, Dollar General has hit the ground running, focusing on its Dollar General Market grocery stores and traditional dollar format stores in the region.

Below is what the mega-discount retailer, which operates 10,000 stores in 39 U.S. states, is up to:

>First store opened: Dollar General opened its first Dollar General Market grocery store in the region March 31, at 1729 West Highway 140, in Merced, California.

The grocery market was store number 10,000 for Dollar General, and it went all out for the grand opening, offering activities for shoppers including: a free make-up consultation from representatives of  L’Oreal and Maybelline; photographs for the kids with characters Sponge Bob, Bimbo Bear and the Energizer Bunny; and food sampling, offering numerous products sold at Dollar General. Additionally, the first 500 customers to arrive at the store for the 9 a.m. grand opening received a free ham and a reusable tote bag filled with product samples and coupons

>Store manager search: The retailer is currently advertising for store managers for its three Dollar General Markets in Stockton, California and the unit in the East Bay Area city of Brentwood. These are four of the five stores Dollar General is leasing from Stockton-based supermarket chain Centro Mart, as we detailed in our December 5, 2011 story. The fifth former Centro Mart unit, in Stockton, will be a Dollar General dollar format store. The four Dollar General Market grocery stores and the dollar store are set to open in the coming weeks.

>Regional director wanted: Dollar General is advertising for a regional director for its dollar stores and Dollar General Market stores for California and Nevada.

According to our sources, the retailer plans to open 150-200 units combined of both formats in California and Nevada over the next two-to-three years.

So far Dollar General has seven stores open in Nevada and six units in California. Dollar General CEO Rick Dreiling said in a March 22, 2012 conference call with financial analysts that the retailer plans to have 50 (grocery stores and dollar stores combined) units open and operating in California by the end of the year.

>More stores: In our December 5, 2011 story we reported Dollar General had plans to open numerous other Dollar General Market (which offer groceries along with perishables, fresh meat and produce) and dollar store units, which carry perishable and dry grocery consumables along with general merchandise items but not meat or produce, throughout Northern California, with a major focus on the Central Valley.

Above: The location of the Dollar General Market in the Gregory Gardens shopping center, Modesto, California.

Thus far we've discovered the following planned Dollar General Market grocery store units in the region: two units in the Fresno area, at Fruit and McKinley in Fresno and Bullard and Minnewawa in nearby Clovis (both are former Save Mart supermarkets which the Modesto-based chain had previously closed); a Dollar General Market in Modesto, in the Gregory Gardens shopping center at 2003 Tully Road, between Bowen and Briggsmore (the retailer has also signed a lease for a dollar format store at 510-560 North Main Street in Modesto); and a Dollar General Market in Winton, which is next door to Merced, where the first store in the region opened March 31.

Dollar General is currently advertising on a variety of online job sites for managers for the Modesto and Winton grocery markets, which are set to open in the coming weeks.

Distribution center

As we reported in our December 5, 2011 story, Dollar General has established a distribution center near Bakersfield, California to service its grocery and dollar format stores in California, Nevada, Arizona and New Mexico. The facility opened this month.

Major growth plans

Dollar General plans to open approximately 625 new stores this year, the majority of which will be its flagship dollar format stores, which average about 7,000 square feet, CEO Dreiling said in the March 22 conference call. Additionally, according to the CEO, the retailer plans to remodel and relocate about 550 stores in 2012.

The retailer opened 625 new stores in 2011, along with remodeling or relocating 575 units, for a net increase in square footage of 7%, Dreiling said.

Dreiling said in the March 22 conference call that Dollar General has about 40 new Dollar General Market grocery stores set to open this year, the majority of which will be in California, Nevada and Arizona.

Last year the retailer opened seven new Dollar General Market stores, seven of which were in Nevada (its first new market since 2006), and remodeled 25 existing grocery markets.

There are currently 70 Dollar General Market grocery stores in the U.S.

The grocery stores, which average 10,000-15,000 and offer a selection of grocery items, perishables, frozen foods, produce, meats and general merchandise, are a key element of Dollar General's strategy for California.

Part of that strategy is to focus on food deserts, regions and cities that are currently underserved by grocery markets offering fresh food and groceries at reasonable prices.

The Dollar General Market format is focused on everyday low prices. A number of industry surveys, for example, put the store's prices on par with Walmart for fresh food, groceries and general merchandise items. Dollar General also runs weekly ads for the grocery markets and sometimes offers store coupons, such as $5 off purchases of $25 or more.

Inside a new generation Dollar General Market. [Photo credit: Dollar General, 09/27/11.]

Good fiscal 2011

Dollar General had a good 2011 fiscal year on all metrics. Its full-year sales increased 13.6% to a record $14.8 billion. There was an extra week in the fiscal year. Excluding that 53rd week, full-year sales increased to 11.4%.

Sales-per-square-foot for fiscal 2011 increased to $209, compared to $201 a year ago. Average sales-per-store came in a bit over $1.5 million.

The 2011 fiscal year also marked the 22nd consecutive year of same-store-sales growth for Dollar General. Same-store-sales were up 6% for the year, with all regions reporting positive comps, according to CEO Dreiling. Dollar general is forecasting a same-store-sales increase of between 3%-5% for the current fiscal year.

Dollar General's adjusted operating profit grew 17% in 2011 over the previous year to a record $1.5 billion and a record 10.2% of sales.

The retailer posted a 31.7% gross margin rate for 2011, which was 31 basis points below the previous year but was 246 basis points higher than in 2008, the first full year of the "great recession."

On the bottom line, Dollar General's adjusted net income increased 26% over 2010, which is an impressive performance.

Dollar General also launched and e-commerce website in 2011, which will not only bring it added revenue but should prove to be a good source of data over time. For example, the retailer is currently in 39 states. Purchasing data from the site over time could prove valuable as Dollar General looks at which of those remaining states it wants to open stores in first.

A closer look inside the Dollar General Market. [Photo credit: Dollar General, 09/27/11.]

Dollar General's impact

It's difficult to forecast whether or not Dollar General will be a major player in the food and grocery retailing business in California in general and in the Northern California/Central Valley region specifically for a couple reasons.

First off, selling food and groceries isn't something the retailer has a solid track record of doing. In fact, a couple years ago Dollar General considered shuttering its Dollar General Market format and stores completely. However, it instead developed a new Dollar General Market prototype in Dallas, Texas, which is the model for the remodeled and new stores, and is going forward with the chain, including emphasising the grocery markets as part of its two-format strategy in California and Nevada, as previously noted.

Second, California has no shortage of seasoned grocery chains and independents, with more coming, like Walmart with its Neighborhood Market supermarkets (see the story link at bottom), for example. But Dollar General's focus on undeserved regions and cities in the Golden State, such as the locations in the Central Valley detailed earlier, could be a very smart move for the retailer with its Dollar General Market stores, which have a low everyday price focus.

For example, Tesco's Fresh & Easy Neighborhood Market, which continues to lose millions of dollars a week with its 10,000 square-foot grocery markets, isn't opening any new stores in California's Central Valley despite having numerous sites in cities like Bakersfield, Fresno, Modesto, Los Banos and Stockton, most of which its been sitting on for three to four years.

Fresh & Easy did finally open its first five stores in Sacramento (see story links at bottom), where Dollar General also plans to open a number of its grocery markets and dollar stores (the first unit we've discovered will be in the Grand Oaks shopping center at 7963 Auburn Boulevard in the Sacramento suburb of Citrus Heights), in March. Tesco now has 196 Fresh & Easy stores. There are 142 units in California, 24 stores in Arizona and 20 units in Arizona.

Dollar General's two-format - the grocery stores and dollar stores - strategy in California should be a powerful one though, allowing it to establish its brand in the Golden State (and in Nevada) much faster than if it was only going with a single-format approach. For example, the dollar format stores also offer a considerable selection of groceries and general merchandise items, along with some perishables and frozen foods (two categories Dollar General is expanding in the stores), which should allow the retailer to establish itself in the highly competitive Golden State faster than if it were doing a single-play strategy only.

We'll keep you updated like only Fresh & Easy Buzz can on Dollar General's march through California, which is just getting started.

Related Stories

December 5, 2011: Dollar General Jump-Starts California Launch: Taking Over 5 Centro Mart Supermarkets For Early 2012 Openings

April 3, 2012: Getting Real in the Golden State: First Group of 13 Walmart Neighborhood Market Stores Opening in California This Fall

March 9, 2012: Scoop Confirmed: Sprouts Announces Acquisition of Sunflower Farmers Market

February 9, 2012: Confirmed: First 2 Fresh & Easy Stores Open in Sacramento March 7; 3 in Metro-Area March 14

January 18, 2012: Fast-Growing The Fresh Market Chain On Track to Launch in California This Year

August 29, 2011: Meaningful Move or Too Little Too Late? Fresh & Easy Neighborhood Market Planning Early 2012 Metro Sacramento Market Launch

August 3, 2011: Fast-Growing Specialty Grocer The Fresh Market Targeting Mid-2012 For First California Store

August 31, 2011: Tesco Says Sayonara to Japan, Good Morning to Sacramento

A Tale of Two California's: Welcome to the Once Thriving Central Valley

Related story: December 15, 2010: Fresh & Easy Neighborhood Market's WIC Voucher Store Expansion Program Stalled.

[Fresh & Easy Buzz editor's note: Noted historian, classics scholar and writer Victor Davis Hanson, who's also a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, is a native of Selma, a small city near Fresno in California's Central Valley, where Tesco's Fresh & Easy Neighborhood market has 14 stores - seven each in the Fresno and Bakersfield metro areas.

Hanson currently lives in Selma, where he runs a family farm in addition to pursuing his scholarly work. Two of his most recent books are, 'Makers of Ancient Strategy: From the Persian Wars to the Fall of Rome,' which he edited, and 'The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern,' which he authored.

Victor Davis Hanson, who's also a contributing writer for the conservative publication National Review, spent the last three weeks touring the Fresno, California area and other parts of the valley, including its many rural cities and small towns, by bicycle and automobile. The Central Valley native son scholar- farmer wrote about the results of what he calls his "unscientific experiment" in an essay, "Two California's," published in today's edition of National Review Online.

People of differing political ideologies can disagree with Victor Davis Hanson's arguments as to why the Central Valley is where it is today in terms of its high poverty and high joblessness. But despite those reasonable disagreements, the writer paints a very real picture of a region - California's Central Valley - which just happens to produce more food and fiber than any other place in the world - that's in very real and serious economic trouble.

Below is the Central Valley native's essay, which we're pleased to share with our readers today, courtesy of National Review Online.

December 15, 2010
Two Californias
Abandoned farms, Third World living conditions, pervasive public assistance - welcome to the once-thriving Central Valley.

By: Victor Davis Hanson

The last three weeks I have traveled about, taking the pulse of the more forgotten areas of central California. I wanted to witness, even if superficially, what is happening to a state that has the highest sales and income taxes, the most lavish entitlements, the near-worst public schools (based on federal test scores), and the largest number of illegal aliens in the nation, along with an overregulated private sector, a stagnant and shrinking manufacturing base, and an elite environmental ethos that restricts commerce and productivity without curbing consumption.

During this unscientific experiment, three times a week I rode a bike on a 20-mile trip over various rural roads in southwestern Fresno County. I also drove my car over to the coast to work, on various routes through towns like San Joaquin, Mendota, and Firebaugh. And near my home I have been driving, shopping, and touring by intent the rather segregated and impoverished areas of Caruthers, Fowler, Laton, Orange Cove, Parlier, and Selma. My own farmhouse is now in an area of abject poverty and almost no ethnic diversity; the closest elementary school (my alma mater, two miles away) is 94 percent Hispanic and 1 percent white, and well below federal testing norms in math and English.

Here are some general observations about what I saw (other than that the rural roads of California are fast turning into rubble, poorly maintained and reverting to what I remember seeing long ago in the rural South). First, remember that these areas are the ground zero, so to speak, of 20 years of illegal immigration. There has been a general depression in farming — to such an extent that the 20- to-100-acre tree and vine farmer, the erstwhile backbone of the old rural California, for all practical purposes has ceased to exist.

On the western side of the Central Valley, the effects of arbitrary cutoffs in federal irrigation water have idled tens of thousands of acres of prime agricultural land, leaving thousands unemployed. Manufacturing plants in the towns in these areas — which used to make harvesters, hydraulic lifts, trailers, food-processing equipment — have largely shut down; their production has been shipped off overseas or south of the border. Agriculture itself — from almonds to raisins — has increasingly become corporatized and mechanized, cutting by half the number of farm workers needed. So unemployment runs somewhere between 15 and 20 percent.

Many of the rural trailer-house compounds I saw appear to the naked eye no different from what I have seen in the Third World. There is a Caribbean look to the junked cars, electric wires crisscrossing between various outbuildings, plastic tarps substituting for replacement shingles, lean-tos cobbled together as auxiliary housing, pit bulls unleashed, and geese, goats, and chickens roaming around the yards. The public hears about all sorts of tough California regulations that stymie business — rigid zoning laws, strict building codes, constant inspections — but apparently none of that applies out here.\

It is almost as if the more California regulates, the more it does not regulate. Its public employees prefer to go after misdemeanors in the upscale areas to justify our expensive oversight industry, while ignoring the felonies in the downtrodden areas, which are becoming feral and beyond the ability of any inspector to do anything but feel irrelevant. But in the regulators’ defense, where would one get the money to redo an ad hoc trailer park with a spider web of illegal bare wires?

Many of the rented-out rural shacks and stationary Winnebagos are on former small farms — the vineyards overgrown with weeds, or torn out with the ground lying fallow. I pass on the cultural consequences to communities from the loss of thousands of small farming families. I don’t think I can remember another time when so many acres in the eastern part of the valley have gone out of production, even though farm prices have recently rebounded. Apparently it is simply not worth the gamble of investing $7,000 to $10,000 an acre in a new orchard or vineyard. What an anomaly — with suddenly soaring farm prices, still we have thousands of acres in the world’s richest agricultural belt, with available water on the east side of the valley and plentiful labor, gone idle or in disuse. Is credit frozen? Are there simply no more farmers? Are the schools so bad as to scare away potential agricultural entrepreneurs? Or are we all terrified by the national debt and uncertain future.

California coastal elites may worry about the oxygen content of water available to a three-inch smelt in the Sacramento–San Joaquin River Delta, but they seem to have no interest in the epidemic dumping of trash, furniture, and often toxic substances throughout California’s rural hinterland. Yesterday, for example, I rode my bike by a stopped van just as the occupants tossed seven plastic bags of raw refuse onto the side of the road. I rode up near their bumper and said in my broken Spanish not to throw garbage onto the public road. But there were three of them, and one of me. So I was lucky to be sworn at only. I note in passing that I would not drive into Mexico and, as a guest, dare to pull over and throw seven bags of trash into the environment of my host.

In fact, trash piles are commonplace out here — composed of everything from half-empty paint cans and children’s plastic toys to diapers and moldy food. I have never seen a rural sheriff cite a litterer, or witnessed state EPA workers cleaning up these unauthorized wastelands. So I would suggest to Bay Area scientists that the environment is taking a much harder beating down here in central California than it is in the Delta. Perhaps before we cut off more irrigation water to the west side of the valley, we might invest some green dollars into cleaning up the unsightly and sometimes dangerous garbage that now litters the outskirts of our rural communities.

We hear about the tough small-business regulations that have driven residents out of the state, at the rate of 2,000 to 3,000 a week. But from my unscientific observations these past weeks, it seems rather easy to open a small business in California without any oversight at all, or at least what I might call a “counter business.” I counted eleven mobile hot-kitchen trucks that simply park by the side of the road, spread about some plastic chairs, pull down a tarp canopy, and, presto, become mini-restaurants. There are no “facilities” such as toilets or washrooms. But I do frequently see lard trails on the isolated roads I bike on, where trucks apparently have simply opened their draining tanks and sped on, leaving a slick of cooking fats and oils. Crows and ground squirrels love them; they can be seen from a distance mysteriously occupied in the middle of the road.

At crossroads, peddlers in a counter-California economy sell almost anything. Here is what I noticed at an intersection on the west side last week: shovels, rakes, hoes, gas pumps, lawnmowers, edgers, blowers, jackets, gloves, and caps. The merchandise was all new. I doubt whether in high-tax California sales taxes or income taxes were paid on any of these stop-and-go transactions.

In two supermarkets 50 miles apart, I was the only one in line who did not pay with a social-service plastic card (gone are the days when “food stamps” were embarrassing bulky coupons). But I did not see any relationship between the use of the card and poverty as we once knew it: The electrical appurtenances owned by the user and the car into which the groceries were loaded were indistinguishable from those of the upper middle class.

By that I mean that most consumers drove late-model Camrys, Accords, or Tauruses, had iPhones, Bluetooths, or BlackBerries, and bought everything in the store with public-assistance credit. This seemed a world apart from the trailers I had just ridden by the day before. I don’t editorialize here on the logic or morality of any of this, but I note only that there are vast numbers of people who apparently are not working, are on public food assistance, and enjoy the technological veneer of the middle class. California has a consumer market surely, but often no apparent source of income. Does the $40 million a day supplement to unemployment benefits from Washington explain some of this

Do diversity concerns, as in lack of diversity, work both ways? Over a hundred-mile stretch, when I stopped in San Joaquin for a bottled water, or drove through Orange Cove, or got gas in Parlier, or went to a corner market in southwestern Selma, my home town, I was the only non-Hispanic — there were no Asians, no blacks, no other whites. We may speak of the richness of “diversity,” but those who cherish that ideal simply have no idea that there are now countless inland communities that have become near-apartheid societies, where Spanish is the first language, the schools are not at all diverse, and the federal and state governments are either the main employers or at least the chief sources of income — whether through emergency rooms, rural health clinics, public schools, or social-service offices. An observer from Mars might conclude that our elites and masses have given up on the ideal of integration and assimilation, perhaps in the wake of the arrival of 11 to 15 million illegal aliens.

Again, I do not editorialize, but I note these vast transformations over the last 20 years that are the paradoxical wages of unchecked illegal immigration from Mexico, a vast expansion of California’s entitlements and taxes, the flight of the upper middle class out of state, the deliberate effort not to tap natural resources, the downsizing in manufacturing and agriculture, and the departure of whites, blacks, and Asians from many of these small towns to more racially diverse and upscale areas of California.

Fresno’s California State University campus is embroiled in controversy over the student body president’s announcing that he is an illegal alien, with all the requisite protests in favor of the DREAM Act. I won’t comment on the legislation per se, but again only note the anomaly. I taught at CSUF for 21 years. I think it fair to say that the predominant theme of the Chicano and Latin American Studies program’s sizable curriculum was a fuzzy American culpability. By that I mean that students in those classes heard of the sins of America more often than its attractions. In my home town, Mexican flag decals on car windows are far more common than their American counterparts.

I note this because hundreds of students here illegally are now terrified of being deported to Mexico. I can understand that, given the chaos in Mexico and their own long residency in the United States. But here is what still confuses me: If one were to consider the classes that deal with Mexico at the university, or the visible displays of national chauvinism, then one might conclude that Mexico is a far more attractive and moral place than the United States.

So there is a surreal nature to these protests: something like, “Please do not send me back to the culture I nostalgically praise; please let me stay in the culture that I ignore or deprecate.” I think the DREAM Act protestors might have been far more successful in winning public opinion had they stopped blaming the U.S. for suggesting that they might have to leave at some point, and instead explained why, in fact, they want to stay. What it is about America that makes a youth of 21 go on a hunger strike or demonstrate to be allowed to remain in this country rather than return to the place of his birth?

I think I know the answer to this paradox. Missing entirely in the above description is the attitude of the host, which by any historical standard can only be termed “indifferent.” California does not care whether one broke the law to arrive here or continues to break it by staying. It asks nothing of the illegal immigrant — no proficiency in English, no acquaintance with American history and values, no proof of income, no record of education or skills. It does provide all the public assistance that it can afford (and more that it borrows for), and apparently waives enforcement of most of California’s burdensome regulations and civic statutes that increasingly have plagued productive citizens to the point of driving them out. How odd that we overregulate those who are citizens and have capital to the point of banishing them from the state, but do not regulate those who are aliens and without capital to the point of encouraging millions more to follow in their footsteps. How odd — to paraphrase what Critias once said of ancient Sparta — that California is at once both the nation’s most unfree and most free state, the most repressed and the wildest.

Hundreds of thousands sense all that and vote accordingly with their feet, both into and out of California — and the result is a sort of social, cultural, economic, and political time-bomb, whose ticks are getting louder.