Marion, Peabody Dollar Tree stores to close
Staff writer
Both Marion and Peabody Dollar Tree/Family Dollar stores will close within the next four weeks.
They are among 1,000 stores to be closed nationwide, although a complete list of stores is not available. The announcement is in the wake of a fourth-quarter corporate loss of $1.71 billion.
The Marion store opened Oct. 6, 2022. The Peabody store opened about three years ago.
Joshua Catlin, who works at the Marion store, said the regional manager told store employees Wednesday that several stores in the region would close.
Marion’s store was the best performing store in the group, he said.
Fines for health and safety standards also took a bite out of the chain’s 2023 profits. The company agreed Aug. 17 to pay $1.35 million in penalties to the Occupational Health and Safety Administration to settle alleged safety violations.
On Feb. 26, it entered a plea agreement with the Department of Justice to pay $41.675 million fines and forfeiture over a now-closed, rat-infested distribution warehouse in Arkansas.
The Justice Department called it “the largest-ever monetary criminal penalty in a food safety case.”
The location of Marion’s Family Dollar store on N. Roosevelt St. was a source of consternation and argument after the city sold a section of its industrial park reserved for use as a drainage ditch to a developer for construction of the store, an action met with backlash from neighbors, planning commission members, and community members.
Most Family Dollar and Dollar Tree stores are located in cities instead of rural areas.
The first 600 stores will close in the first half of 2024 and 400 more stores will close over several years as leases expire. Of those 400 stores, 370 will be Family Dollar stores and 30 will be Dollar Tree stores.
Dollar Tree bought Family Dollar for $8.5 billion in 2015. Dollar Tree hoped that combining the companies would grow its customer base, reduce expenses, and fend off bigger retailers such as Dollar General.
In both Marion and Peabody, Dollar General stores, there before Dollar Tree/Family Dollar stores opened, are so close they can be seen from the Dollar Tree parking lots.