Family Dollar Shifts Focus to Home, Urban Stores

By Staff -- Home Textiles Today, 6/13/2005 12:00:00 AM

New York —

Family Dollar Stores plans to improve the performance of its urban stores, open 500 to 560 stores this year, and increase its focus on home by upgrading the merchandise quality and adding more special events, company President and Chief Operating Officer David Alexander said during a presentation at the Piper Jaffray Consumer Conference last week.

More than two-thirds of consumer spending takes place in the 50 top urban markets, Alexander said, but Family Dollar has seen a major gap between the performance of its rural and urban markets. “We are seeing opportunities in these underserved markets. Our urban initiative is designed to address the unique challenges of stores in urban areas,” Alexander added.

“We will continue to experiment with how we merchandise our stores based on the geographic areas,” he said, adding that Family Dollar assigns demographic attributes to each of its stores geared to the regional customer. “Stores where we have rolled out our new initiatives, such as bringing in more treasure-hunt merchandise, have performed much better.”