Hundreds of Family Dollar Stores Sold to Dollar General

(April 6 update: New information has emerged about the rationale behind Dollar Express’ decision to close its stores and sell them to Dollar General – and the company says Dollar Tree is to blame. Click here to read the story).

Remember when 330 Family Dollar stores across the country were sold a couple of years ago, and slated to be rebranded as part of a brand-new dollar store chain called Dollar Express? If your local store was on the list, you probably haven’t noticed any changes yet. They’re all still operated as Family Dollar stores, because the official rebranding wasn’t scheduled to occur until next month.

But now that rebranding won’t happen quite as planned. In an unexpected move, the owners of Dollar Express have abruptly unloaded their Family Dollar stores – onto Dollar General.

So the stores will have a new name out front, all right – but not the name anyone had expected. If, that is, they stay open at all.

Dollar Express owner Sycamore Partners has announced that it will sell “all 323 of its store locations” to Dollar General. A company spokesman would not elaborate on what became of the seven other stores that were originally part of the 330-store package, nor did the company say what prompted its decision to sell.

Sycamore did say that the 323 stores “will be converted to the Dollar General banner in the coming months.” But it’s unclear if that’s entirely accurate. In mass layoff notices filed with several states, the company said “Dollar Express has made the difficult decision to liquidate and close all of its stores on approximately June 30, 2017.” Dollar General may be purchasing empty stores then, so their eventual fate is unknown.

Plus, many of the newly-acquired locations are very close to existing Dollar General stores, so it’s unlikely that two Dollar Generals will coexist down the street from each other. Depending on the age, size and condition of the Dollar Express-owned stores, Dollar General may choose to relocate nearby stores into the new buildings and close down the old, as it did when it acquired dozens of former Walmart Express stores last year. Or it may decide to keep its existing locations and close down the new ones.

In either case, it’s not known what would become of the two stores’ staffs, if they have to merge into one. For that matter, it’s not known whether any existing staff will be retained even after their stores transition to Dollar General, if they do at all.

Dollar General representatives – the only ones who have the answers to these questions – have not responded to requests for comment or clarification.

News of the deal comes two months after Dollar General unveiled a bold plan to open 1,000 new stores this year, and remodel or relocate 900 others. So acquiring the 323 would-be, never-were Dollar Express stores will go a long way toward helping Dollar General expand its footprint of more than 13,000 stores in 44 states. The list of stores also includes a single location in Idaho, which would represent Dollar General’s 45th state. But that location is hundreds of miles away from the next closest Dollar General location. So it’s also not known, and Dollar General hasn’t clarified, whether it plans to convert that location to a Dollar General and officially expand into Idaho.

The transaction caps off a dizzying period of uncertainty for these particular stores and their employees. Back in July 2014, they expected to become part of Dollar Tree, when the rival dollar store chain announced its intention to buy out Family Dollar. Then it looked like the Family Dollar stores might turn into Dollar General, when that chain swooped in with its own buyout offer. Dollar Tree won the buyout battle, but in order to gain regulatory approval for the deal, it agreed to sell 330 stores to Sycamore, which announced plans to turn them all into a new chain called Dollar Express. And now they’ve been sold to Dollar General after all.

So if you’re keeping track, that means over the past two and a half years, shoppers and staffers at these Family Dollar stores at various times thought the stores would become Dollar Tree, Dollar General, Dollar Tree, Dollar Express and now Dollar General.

What follows is a list of the 330 Family Dollar stores owned by Sycamore that were slated to become Dollar Express. 323 of them have now been sold to Dollar General, so seven stores on the list have apparently closed since Sycamore first acquired them.

So if you’re a Family Dollar fan, look over the list – and find out whether you might end up becoming a Dollar General shopper soon.