Dollar General recently announced that it will be expanding, planning to build a new distribution center which will bring 400 jobs to the state of Texas. A long-favored one-stop-shop for household items across the U.S., the company made the announcement on Wednesday, December 27, citing Longview, Texas as the facility’s location which will serve up to 1,000 store locations throughout the southeastern U.S.
Coming just weeks after they announced the opening of 900 new stores in the next year, Dollar General’s distribution center announcement marks its second year of expansion at this scale. The Tennessee-based company presently operates in 44 states, with a total of 14,300 stores. Their growth over recent years has been attributed to low-income shoppers in rural America, which has had a slow recovery rate following the country’s economic downturn. And since then, industry reports indicate that Dollar General is in a neck-and-neck competition with Wal-Mart for the loyalty of shoppers in many communities.
“We are putting stores today [in areas] that perhaps five years ago were just on the cusp of probably not being our demographic,” the company’s CEO, Todd Vasos, recently explained in an interview, adding, “and it has now turned to being our demographic.” This new Longview distribution center will be Dollar General’s 17th overall, and its second in Texas, following their San Antonio facility which opened in 2016.
