Retail History | Dollar General — Five Thousand Dollars Each on East Main
· 1939-1
Unreviewed contributionBy kevin · · updated · Report an issue
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Retail History | Dollar General — Five Thousand Dollars Each on East Main
kevin
People treat Dollar General as a yellow-signed box that always sat on a four-lane bypass.
The first book was a wholesale loft on East Main Street.
In 1939 James Luther Turner and his son Hurley Calister Cal Turner each put in $5,000 in 1939 dollars and bought a warehouse at Old East Main and Seventh in Scottsville, Kentucky, at half price.
They named the firm J. L. Turner and Son and sold dry goods to the country stores that had survived the Depression.
Luther Turner had left school after the fourth grade when his father died. He later liquidated bankrupt general stores and resold the stock through a Bargain Store on South Court.
The 1910 warehouse they bought had previously housed Davidson Brothers, a wholesale poultry house.
After the war the wholesale trade thinned. The Turners shifted into junior department stores of their own and by the early 1950s ran about thirty-five shops in Kentucky and Tennessee with annual sales above $2 million in period dollars.
On 1 June 1955 they opened the first Dollar General store in Springfield, Kentucky. No item on the floor cost more than one dollar.
Other Turner shops converted to the same ceiling price. The corporation took the Dollar General name in 1968.
The Scottsville warehouse stayed in company use until 1986 and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2001.
It now houses a community-action office. Headquarters later left Allen County for Goodlettsville, Tennessee.
The mechanism that survived is the one the Bargain Store proved: buy a failed merchant's stock cheap, put a hard price ceiling on every shelf, and plant the next store in a town that already knows that ceiling.
Photo: the Turner building neighborhood in Scottsville, via public mapping and Wikimedia Commons city views.
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