Dollar Tree plans to close 1,000 stores

Dollar Tree will close 1,000 Family Dollar and Dollar Tree stores, the retailer announced Wednesday.

“During the fourth quarter of fiscal 2023, the Company announced that it had initiated a comprehensive store portfolio optimization review which involved identifying stores for closure, relocation, or re-bannering based on an evaluation of current market conditions and individual store performance, among other factors,” the company said in a press release.

As a result, the company said it planned to close about 600 Family Dollar stores in the first half of fiscal 2024, followed by the closure over the next “several years” of about 370 Family Dollar and 30 Dollar Tree stores, as their leases end.

Dollar Tree said in the press release that as of early February, it operated more than 16,000 stores in 48 states in the U.S. and five Canadian provinces.

A study from January found that dollar stores are the fastest-growing food retailers, with households making the majority of purchases at the stores generally having lower income and headed by people of color. 

The food and beverages in dollar stores commonly have lower nutrients and higher calorie counts and the stores have a quickly growing presence in the remote South, where baseline levels of obesity and food insecurity are high, according to the researchers behind the study.

“Dollar stores play an increasingly important role in household food purchases, yet research on them is lacking,” first author Wenhui Feng, a Tufts University professor of health care policy, said in a statement.