Dollar General Corporation

What does Dollar General own?

Dollar General owns the Dollar General store banner, the DG Market grocery format, the pOpshelf non-consumables chain, the Mi Súper Dollar General brand in Mexico, and a set of private labels including Clover Valley, True Living, and Believe Beauty.

Is Dollar General publicly traded?

Yes. Dollar General trades on the New York Stock Exchange under ticker DG. It was public from 1968 to 2007, taken private by KKR, and relisted in November 2009.

Who founded Dollar General?

James Luther Turner and his son Cal Turner founded the predecessor wholesale business J.L. Turner and Son in 1939 in Scottsville, Kentucky. They opened the first Dollar General store in Springfield, Kentucky in 1955.

Where is Dollar General headquartered?

Dollar General is headquartered in Goodlettsville, Tennessee, USA, just north of Nashville.

How many brands does Dollar General own?

Dollar General operates three retail banners, Dollar General, DG Market, and pOpshelf, plus the Mi Súper Dollar General format in Mexico and roughly a dozen private label product brands.

Who owns Dollar General?

Dollar General is publicly traded with no controlling shareholder. Large institutional investors, led by Vanguard, BlackRock, and State Street, hold the biggest positions.

How large is Dollar General?

For FY2025 ended January 30, 2026, Dollar General reported $42.7 billion in net sales, $1.5 billion in net income, approximately 20,800 stores, and about 194,000 employees.

James Luther Turner and his son Cal Turner started J.L. Turner and Son as a wholesale dry goods business in Scottsville, Kentucky in 1939. After World War II they began buying bankrupt general stores and converting them to a closeout retail model. In 1955 the family opened the first Dollar General store in Springfield, Kentucky with a radical premise: nothing in the store would cost more than a dollar.

The concept scaled fast across the rural South and Midwest. The company incorporated as Dollar General Corporation in 1968 and listed its shares publicly that year. Cal Turner Jr., the founder's grandson, took over in 1977 and turned Dollar General into a national chain, pushing past 1,000 stores by the mid-1980s and riding the everyday-low-price wave that made discount retail the dominant force in rural America. The Turners' insight was durable: small towns could not support a supermarket or discount department store, but they could support a 7,000-square-foot box selling essentials at prices below the local grocery. That whitespace strategy defined the company for decades and still does.

In 2007 private equity firm KKR took Dollar General private in a leveraged buyout valued at approximately $7.3 billion including debt. The company returned to public markets in November 2009 on the NYSE, and its stock became one of the strongest retail performers of the 2010s as it expanded toward 16,000 stores by decade's end.

Todd Vasos became CEO in 2015, retired in late 2022, and returned in October 2023 after successor Jeff Owen departed amid an operational slump marked by understocked shelves, excess inventory, and shrinking margins. Vasos launched a back-to-basics program focused on store labor and inventory discipline. Fiscal 2024 included a $232 million charge for a store portfolio review that closed underperforming locations and impaired much of the pOpshelf chain.

Fiscal 2025 marked the recovery. Net sales rose 5.2% to $42.7 billion, same-store sales grew 3.0% on traffic and ticket gains, operating profit reached $2.2 billion, and net income was $1.5 billion with diluted EPS of $6.85. The company guided FY2026 to net sales growth of 3.7% to 4.2% and EPS of $7.10 to $7.35.

Dollar General publishes an annual sustainability report covering packaging, energy use, and food donation programs through Feeding America partnerships. Its private brands carry no major third-party sustainability certifications, and the company does not hold B Corp status.

The more material ethics story is labor. Dollar General's one-or-two-employee store staffing model has drawn sustained criticism, and its OSHA record is among the worst in retail (see the following section). The company has also faced periodic criticism of wages and its effect on local grocery stores in towns where it becomes the dominant food retailer.

Dollar General is a long-standing Fortune 500 member, ranking in the low hundreds by revenue. Its literacy foundation, the Dollar General Literacy Foundation, has distributed more than $300 million in grants for adult and family literacy programs since 1993, the company's signature independent community initiative.

Dollar General's defining regulatory issue is workplace safety. OSHA inspectors repeatedly cited stores for blocked emergency exits, obstructed electrical panels, and unstable merchandise stacking, making the chain one of the most frequently penalized US retailers. In July 2024 Dollar General reached a corporate-wide settlement with OSHA, paying a $12 million penalty and agreeing to comprehensive hazard abatement, staffing changes, and a streamlined inspection process covering all stores. Compliance is monitored under the agreement.

The company has also paid settlements in pricing accuracy cases brought by state attorneys general, including multi-million-dollar resolutions over scanner price discrepancies in several states during 2023 and 2024. Each was resolved without admission of wrongdoing.

Earlier in its history, Dollar General paid settlements resolving overtime and employee classification suits, and its 2007 go-private transaction generated shareholder litigation typical of large LBOs. None has been existential.