A Mobile Clinic Parked At A Dollar General? It Says A Lot About Rural Health Care: NPR 🚐

[mahatmakanejeeves]

5. What a great idea.

Hat tip, The Wall Street Journal.

WORLD | OBITUARIES

Leon Levine, Who Made Small Box Retailing Pay, Dies at 85

Founder of Family Dollar put cut-price stores in poor neighborhoods

By James R. Hagerty
April 12, 2023 9:59 am ET

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Leon Levine, Who Made a Billion One Dollar at a Time, Dies at 85

He created the discount chain retailer Family Dollar, which found success, and criticism, by catering to the poor.



Leon Levine opened his first store with an investment of $6,000. By the time he retired, he had created a thriving chain and a billion-dollar fortune. via Leon Levine Foundation

By Alex Traub
April 19, 2023

Leon Levine, the founder of Family Dollar, a chain retailer that shaped the daily lives of the nation’s poor, died on April 5 at his home in Charlotte, N.C. He was 85. ... His son, Howard, confirmed the death but did not specify a cause. ... In 1959, with $3,000 of his own money and $3,000 from a partner, Mr. Levine opened the first Family Dollar on Central Avenue in Charlotte. ... In 2015, a competitor, Dollar Tree, acquired Family Dollar for nearly $9 billion in cash and stocks. That year, Mr. Levine’s family fortune amounted to $1.4 billion, according to Forbes. Howard Levine, who in 2003 succeeded his father as chairman of Family Dollar, stepped down in 2016.

There are about 8,000 Family Dollar locations nationwide. By contrast, there were 3,572 Walmart “supercenters” in the United States as of the beginning of this year. ... Family Dollar stores sell, at the cheapest possible prices, an encyclopedic array of domestic necessities and comforts, among them detergent, winter coats, party napkins, pet food, wireless speakers, rakes, strollers, wind chimes and 95-cent cans of Vienna sausage. The stores are relatively small, generally under 10,000 square feet, and locations across the country place the same merchandise in the same spots under the same fluorescent lighting.



By 1982, there were 500 Family Dollar stores. Two years later, there were 1,000. The chain expanded from the South to major metropolitan centers nationwide. via Leon Levine Foundation

From its early years, Mr. Levine’s stores have catered to poor people. He often told interviewers that he picked their locations by looking for oil stains in parking lots, which he thought signified the leaky cars of the poor.

He continued visiting one of his stores every other day until his 15th opened, in the 1960s. He was shocked when, in 1970, a New York brokerage company approached him about going public. He quickly did. ... “I opened my first store with $6,000,” Mr. Levine told The New York Times in 2011. “For 10 years I didn’t come up for air; I had no idea how much money I had.”

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