Who Owns Dollar General?

The Dollar General concept grew out of J.L. Turner and Son, a wholesale dry goods business James Luther Turner and son Cal Turner started in Scottsville, Kentucky in 1939. The Turners bought bankrupt general stores after World War II and learned the closeout trade. In 1955 they opened the first Dollar General in Springfield, Kentucky on a single idea: nothing would cost more than a dollar.

The format caught on across rural America at exactly the moment the countryside was losing its general stores. Dollar General incorporated in 1968 and went public the same year. Cal Turner Jr. took over in 1977 and built it into a national chain, passing 1,000 stores in the 1980s and standardizing the small-box, everyday-low-price model. Store growth through the 1990s was funded by the company's own cash flow, keeping the model disciplined even as it scaled into thousands of towns.

KKR's 2007 buyout took the company private for two years before the 2009 re-listing. Through the 2010s the brand expanded aggressively, adding roughly a thousand stores a year and passing Walmart's count long ago, while layering in cooler doors, private labels such as Clover Valley, and the DG Market fresh format.

The 2020s brought turbulence. Post-pandemic cost inflation, shrink, and understaffed stores hurt margins, and CEO Jeff Owen departed in 2023 when Todd Vasos returned. Fiscal 2024 included a $232 million charge for a store portfolio review and pOpshelf impairments. Fiscal 2025 showed the repair: net sales up 5.2% to $42.7 billion, same-store sales up 3.0%, and net income of $1.5 billion. The brand also operates in Mexico as Mi Súper Dollar General, launched in 2023.