Dollar General and the Extreme Value Retailing = Industry – Internal Analysi

First, let’s look at “For Customers, A Better Life.” Dollar General doesn’t try to carry everything. They narrow their product selection down to include only the most common necessities.

There are several different types of stores within the discount retail industry, and for comparison's sake, the industry is further broken into many segments. DG is in the market segment known as the dollar store category. As a result, competitors such as Wal-Mart are in the same industry but not the same peer group. Comparisons will be made throughout this report to Wal-Mart and other big firms because they tend draw some of the same customers.

Virginia Postrel “In Praise of Chain Stores”.Chain stores have not turned Augusta into a boring

If we analyze Dollar Store, we will see that it has established over 140 stores across Canada since its inception in 1998. As it has been considerably increasing its market reach across Canada; they are considered a direct competitor to Dollarama. On the other hand, Great Canadian Dollar stores are extending their reach in eastern Canada. Additionally, they are very present in the community by offering both charitable and communal support. At last, Dollar Tree is a growing chain of discounted retail stores in the United States. It operates over 4400 retail stores in 48 states of the US and in Canada. Thus, they are ready to expand their customer base into Canada. Also, Dollar Tree offers a much broader range of products compared to Dollarama, for example frozen foods and dairy items. As such, there is a very high competition in the discounted retail stores industry. However, in such a high competitive environment, Dollarama is still able to open over 150 stores in the past four years only. Also, considering their stock trend, their share price had increased from 25$ to 56.90$ per share in only one year. That represents a growth of 128% in a single year. We can conclude that their shares are in demand in our current market environment. Thus, we can assess that they are very well positioned in today’s competitive environment.

Dollar General has been performing well financially ever since they were established in 1955. In its first 10 years of existence, Dollar General had grown to 255 stores with nearly $26 million in annual sales. In 2002, annual sales were $6.1 billion and there were 6,300 stores in 27 states in operation. Strategy shifts as well as major acquisitions allowed for Dollar General to continue performing well financially over the years. Even despite major accounting errors in 2001, Dollar General continued to increase their sales.

Dollar Tree where everything is a dollar! There are a lot of dollar stores out their but none of them compare to Dollar Tree. While the Dollar Tree does have some competitors there are very few. Competitors include little hometown dollar stores, Dollar General, Family Dollar and 99 Cents Only Stores. Everything in Dollar Tree is priced at or below $1. The store was founded in 1986. There are over 5,100 Dollar Tree stores in the United States and in the District of Columbia and approximately 180 in Canada (History of Dollar Tree, Inc.). Most Dollar Trees are located in busy plazas and malls, because of the heavy flow of trafic (History of Dollar Tree, Inc.).

Dollar General currently operates 11,789 discount merchandise retail stores throughout 43 United States. The majority of its merchandise is priced under $10 dollars and its stores are located in low cost real-estate areas. While reviewing the performance of Dollar Generals financial and strategic position my analysis shows your company has a winning strategy due to the improvements of its performance from 2005 to 2015 by, increasing its profit with shareholder investments, decreasing the number of day’s inventory is held, increasing its liquidity, and sustaining its profit margins.

The Kroger Company uses the broad differentiation strategy. They have business in at least eight different market segments. They operate two thousand, two hundred and fifty-five stores across America and operate under twenty four banners. Their market position ranks among the highest in the nation. They also have a strong bargaining power because of their many endeavors into different market areas. Kroger supermarkets have been in business for one hundred thirty four years and have made a substantial contribution to the business world (Annual report, 2017).

Within Logistics, there is a “Control Tower” and Distributor Connect” program that were with the intent to monitor all inbound or outbound activities within internal or external resources, it has since been able to effectively reduce deadhead moments. By bringing innovation into their supply chains to deliver better efficiency and lower cost, it is no surprise that P&G was ranked among the Top 5 in the award for Gartner Supply Chain Top 25. With the effective supply chain, it has help to keep hiking costs at bay, where P&G can price their product competitively; which ultimately spells benefit for the consumers.

The Dollar Tree brand of stores has been around since 1986, when Douglas Perry, Macon Brock, and Ray Compton founded the chain as a compliment to their other business, K & K Toys (Parnell, 2014). Through the years, Dollar Tree has acquired several different dollar store and low-end retail chains to grow their business to over 4000 stores (Shetty, 2010). One of the first and most strategic moves that the company made was to shift away from carrying closeout merchandise and to become more of a traditional variety store with a wide variety of basic goods all priced at a dollar or less. To accomplish this change, the chain had to discontinue their current purchasing strategies and had to begin buying directly from manufacturers to change the type of merchandise that they had available for consumers. The second major strategic move involved changing the location of where stores are usually located. Up until this point, the stores had been being in enclosed malls. With this change,

Since Wal-Mart is a mass market retailer, its primary source of value that it adds to the company is derived from its supply chain. Wal-Mart has suppliers located all over the world and it purchases goods from a wide range of different types of vendors. Many of the company's primary vendors are directly connected to Wal-Mart's IT systems through what is referred to as an electronic data interchange (EDI). An EDI can instantaneous transmit data between Wal-Mart and their vendors. Such information can consist of order information, stock supplies, demand forecasting and many other key supply chain metrics. The advantages of such a system are clear as they can greatly assist creating efficiencies in the supply chain. However, not all suppliers have developed sufficient IT technologies to participate in an EDI program with Wal-Mart. Another option for greater coordination between parties in the supply chain is web-based supplier integration. Although the web-based systems are not quite as sophisticated as an EDI, they are more accessible for many of the smaller suppliers and they have shown to improve long-term coordination, cooperation, and commitment.

 Good distribution concepts with no one store more than 6 hrs. away from warehouse.

The Dollar General is an American wholesale company that was first initiated in Scottsville, Tennessee by Turner and Cal Turner. Its headquarters are located in Goodlettsville, Tennessee. The mission statement of the Dollar General is "Serving Others." This mission statement helps to bring out the innate requests and intentions of the company in the United States of America and other countries in the world. The company has a vision that describes how it manages to cater for four different types of people. These four groups of people include the customers, the community, employees, and shareholders. Within these categories of people, Dollar General aspires to serve others through deliver of price quality and terrific prices for customers, opportunity, and respect for employees, a superior return for shareholders and a better life for the communities.

The five generic competitive strategies are low-cost provider, broad differentiation, focused low-cost, focused differentiation strategy, and best-cost provider strategy. According to the textbook, “a company’s competitive strategy deals exclusively with the specifics of management’s game plan for competing successfully” (Gamble, 93).

W. W. Grainger, Inc. is a leading supplier of maintenance, repair, and operating (MRO) products to businesses and institutions in the United States, Canada, and Mexico with an expanding presence in Japan, India, China and Panama. The company works with more than 3,000 suppliers and runs an extensive Website (http://www.grainger.com) where Grainger offers nearly 900,000 products. The products range from industrial adhesives used in manufacturing, to hand tools, janitorial supplies, lighting equipment, and power tools. When something is needed by one of their 1.8 million customers it is often needed quickly, so quick service and product