You know that big yellow sign. 75% of all Americans live within 5 miles of a Dollar General. That's right, 13,000 stores. Here is the amazing story of how J.L. Turner created this Empire.

Dave Young:

Welcome to the Empire Builders Podcast, teaching business owners the not so secret techniques that took famous businesses from mom and pop to major brands. Steven Semple is a marketing consultant, story collector, and storyteller. I'm Stephen's sidekick and business partner, Dave Young. Before we get into today's episode, a word from our sponsor, which is, well, it's us, but we're highlighting ads we've written and produced for our clients. So here's one of those.

[Aurora Pro Services Ad]

Dave Young:

Hey, Stephen, you got a dollar I could borrow?

Stephen Semple:

Well, you going shopping?

Dave Young:

Heck yeah. I'm going to Dollar General. You see them everywhere. They're all over, everywhere. Big yellow sign.

Stephen Semple:

Here's a scary stat when it comes to how big Dollar General is. 75% of the population in the United States lives within five miles of a Dollar General store. They do just under $30 billion in sales, a buck at a time.

Dave Young:

Out of a tiny little store that's smaller than any supermarket you've ever been.

Stephen Semple:

Yeah, most of their stores are only a couple thousand square feet. And today they have 17,000 stores, 143,000 employees, and are doing 30 billion in sales.

Dave Young:

Mind boggling.

Stephen Semple:

Mind boggling.

Dave Young:

How'd they do it?

Stephen Semple:

Well, all this started back in 1939, right in the midst of the Great Depression. And they started out of Scottsville, Kentucky by J.L. Turner and his son Cal. And they both invested $5,000 to start their first store. And they really invented the idea of the dollar store. So J.L. Turner was a traveling salesperson. He was functionally illiterate. He had a grade three education. When he was 11, they lived on a mortgaged farm and his dad died and he had to quit school to take care of the family. And he worked in retail up until the point of the Depression. Local businesses were dying all around him. So what he did is he bought the merchandise from these businesses that were going out of business and turned around and sold them to department stores.

Stephen Semple:

And this gave birth to their first idea, which was J.L. Turner and Sons. By the early 1950s, they were doing 2 million in sales. So 10 years after starting, they grew this business to 2 million in sales in the 1950s. By the mid 1950s, they had 35 stores in Kentucky and Tennessee. Pretty good, right? But the real success came next. What J.L. noticed was in retail stores at the time, one of the things that was really popular was to run these dollar days. The store would set aside a section of the store and for a day, say everything in that section is on sale for a dollar. He loved the simplicity of that idea. So in 1955, they renamed the store Dollar General and decided that what they were going to do was focus on this whole idea of everything for a dollar.

Dave Young:

Okay.

Stephen Semple:

So they had these really small stores, non-perishable items and consumables, focusing on selling everything in the store for a buck all the time. So in one way, they did something that is different. Almost all of the empire builders that we've talked about today have looked outside their industry and found an idea from outside their industry they brought to their industry, but what they found was something that was done in their industry, but limited, done every once in a while and only a portion of the store. What they said, "Why can't you make a whole store that way? And every day?"

Dave Young:

What's really cool is what they noticed was the excitement of their customers about things for a dollar.

Stephen Semple:

Right.

Dave Young:

It's not, "Oh, we could sell a lot.