I briefly alluded to Dollar General in a post that I wrote back in June.
The picture above is what I picture when I think of Dollar General. In fact, it looks similar to a Dollar General that I’ve seen outside of Huntsville, Alabama: just a building with a parking lot out in a field by a major road. You can hear the crickets chirping at night.
Not the kind of place where you’d expect to see a lot of futurists connecting a spectrum of innovation where human and biological system designs interact together seamlessly.
But as I noted in June:
Yes, even Dollar General is embracing technology, but as far as I can tell it is concentrating on consumer-facing technology and hasn’t adopted blockchain yet. But I could be wrong.
From https://bredemarket.com/2021/06/16/yes-walmart-is-a-technology-company/
I failed to quote from the linked article at the time, which dates from 2019.
Digital is becoming a “big part” of customers’ lives, Dollar General chief executive Todd Vasos said last year.
Dollar General is also building a digital strategy because customers who redeem digital savings coupons and use the new Dollar General app, released last year (2018), spend about twice as much on average as regular shoppers….
It’s not a surprise that Dollar General has been slow to embrace digital. The company’s core customers make about $40,000 a year per household, more than $20,000 below the national average.
Because of the income gap, Dollar General’s main customers are often “behind the curve” on new technology….But smartphones are ubiquitous now, and about 85% of Dollar General’s customers use one, in line with the national average.
From https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/14/business/dollar-general-app/index.html
Well, now Dollar General customers have a new way to use their smartphones.
Dollar General (NYSE: DG) today announced a partnership with DoorDash (NYSE: DASH), the nation’s leading last-mile logistics platform, to offer on-demand delivery of household essential items, including food, snacks, cleaning supplies, and more, at everyday low prices customers trust Dollar General to provide….
On-demand delivery from DoorDash is currently available from more than 9,000 Dollar General stores with plans to expand to more than 10,000 locations by December 2021. Dollar General and DoorDash initially piloted a program in summer 2021 with approximately 600 stores in rural and metropolitan communities.
From https://newscenter.dollargeneral.com/news/dollar-general-and-doordash-announce-partnership-to-offer-on-demand-delivery-of-everyday-essentials.htm
In the minds of some, Dollar General seems very old school while DoorDash seems very cutting-edge. But behind the scenes, Dollar General provides as much tech innovation as another rural success story, Cracker Barrel. And when you think about it, DoorDash is just a warmed-over techie delivery service.
And delivery services have been around forever.
Bredemarket 