A year after sticking it to Family Dollar for brushing off its $9 billion takeover bid by saying it would open 730 new stores in 2015, Dollar General is continuing to spend the money its rival retailer wouldn’t take, announcing its plans to open 2,000 new stores through 2017.
The Associated Press reports that Dollar General announced during an investor meeting Thursday that it will open 900 new stores and relocate or remodel 875 other stores during the next 12 months.
As for 2017, the company says it will open about 1,000 additional locations.
Dollar General’s determined expansion plan comes as a sign the company is continuing to respond to added competition from the year-old merger of the Family Dollar and Dollar Tree companies.
Those two companies combined to have about 13,000 stores. Under Dollar General’s plan it would recapture the top dollar store crown with a total of more than 14,000 stores.
While Dollar Tree was ultimately named the victor of the dollar store war and won the heart of Family Dollar, had Dollar General been successful in landing the smaller store, it would likely have had to sell off nearly 4,000 stores.
The sordid dollar store love triangle began back in July 2014 when Dollar Tree made an $8.5 billion bid for North Carolina-based Family Dollar. Not one to feel left out, Dollar General proceeded to provide an unsolicited bid of $8.95 billion for the smaller chain.
But Family Dollar wasn’t feeling the love and rejected the Dollar General offer citing “significant antitrust issues” because the two chains have similar business models. Both Dollar General and Family Dollar sell items at different dollar price points, catering to low-income shoppers, while Dollar Tree caters to more middle-income shoppers and sells most items at $1.
Dollar General came back with a second bid of $9.1 billion and in an attempt to ease Family Dollars’ anti-trust review fears, it proposed closing 1,500 of the potentially combined-companies 20,000 stores.
Yet, that still wasn’t enough and Family Dollar rejected the bid, choosing instead to stay with its true love, Dollar Tree. Dollar General subsequently turned hostile, taking its big directly to shareholders in September.
The ordeal concluded in January when the shareholders for Family Dollar overwhelmingly voted in favor of a smaller, but safer, takeover bid from Dollar Tree, effectively crushing the heart of aggressive suitor Dollar General.
by Ashlee Kieler via Consumerist
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