Dollar General is putting workers' safety at risk, Labor Department says

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Re: Dollar General is putting workers' safety at risk, Labor Department says

Post by veteran+ »

pseudo3d wrote: December 16th, 2021, 1:34 pm
veteran+ wrote: December 16th, 2021, 8:58 am
pseudo3d wrote: December 15th, 2021, 3:20 pm Dollar General has a few thousand more stores than McDonald's at this point. Isn't it expected that some stores are absolute disasters (beyond the usual mediocrity, of course) that get OSHA's attention?
No, I believe it is intentional and their M.O.

I spoke to their managers in Palm Springs way back when and they were doing the same things.
So I looked up some of the violations, including blocked exits and improperly stacked boxes. There's no good monetary reason to block off exits nor improperly stack boxes. That speaks more of managerial incompetence than some grand conspiracy by the company to...rack up OSHA fines and get bad press?

Furthermore, there were 54 stores that had violations in the last five years, and even we generously extrapolate that by 100 times, that's still 3% of their store base, a tiny minority of their stores, which means statistically you'd have a better chance of finding a non-violating Dollar General than a McDonald's with a working ice cream machine.
This is not a ground up thing. The onus is from the Top.
Last edited by veteran+ on December 18th, 2021, 9:51 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Dollar General is putting workers' safety at risk, Labor Department says

Post by storewanderer »

veteran+ wrote: December 17th, 2021, 7:40 am
This is not a ground up thing. The onus from from the Top.
I am actually very surprised and impressed by the financial performance of Dollar General. When you look at the stores and how they are run... also every Saturday is a $5 off $25 day. Many of the stores have a pile of coupons and scan them for any customer who doesn't come in with one. Dollar General's pricing is so competitive that $5 off $25 is a really good deal.

But I will say this: back when you could not find toilet paper, hand sanitizer at most retailers, Dollar General was replenished and replenishing quickly. I wasn't quite sure what to make of it. They did not have all of the brands but they had an assortment of brands/sizes, and quickly swapped in some alternate generics for when their private label items were unavailable...
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Re: Dollar General is putting workers' safety at risk, Labor Department says

Post by cjd »

All of the Dollar General stores around here seem to be well stocked organized with neat aisles and shelves. I don't see pallets or boxes lying around aisles or in the back. Granted these are all relatively new locations but they do only have one or two employees on staff.

I don't recall ever seeing a messy Dollar General. The Family Dollar here used to be a different story, boxes in the aisles, messy shelves, filthy floors and the back room always seemed to have boxes thrown all over. It's cleaned up quite a bit since. But it still isn't quite as nice as a DG.
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Re: Dollar General is putting workers' safety at risk, Labor Department says

Post by veteran+ »

I was speaking about OSHA violations and their history with it.
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Re: Dollar General is putting workers' safety at risk, Labor Department says

Post by storewanderer »

cjd wrote: December 18th, 2021, 5:15 am All of the Dollar General stores around here seem to be well stocked organized with neat aisles and shelves. I don't see pallets or boxes lying around aisles or in the back. Granted these are all relatively new locations but they do only have one or two employees on staff.

I don't recall ever seeing a messy Dollar General. The Family Dollar here used to be a different story, boxes in the aisles, messy shelves, filthy floors and the back room always seemed to have boxes thrown all over. It's cleaned up quite a bit since. But it still isn't quite as nice as a DG.
Go to Google Maps and look up the Dollar General in Sun Valley, NV. Once you get past their set store stock photos on every Google listing you will see many photos of boxes all over the store from various time ranges between now and 4 years ago. This is the type of condition I am talking about. And about half of their stores within a 100 mile radius of Reno look this way and have for this long. Others are quite neat. I always wondered how this happened- and how it has been allowed to happen for so long.
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Re: Dollar General is putting workers' safety at risk, Labor Department says

Post by BillyGr »

storewanderer wrote: December 16th, 2021, 11:30 pm I wonder what they think of those Wal Marts that have so many pallets all over...

The reason the Dollar General units are a mess is due to lack of labor. The stores that are relatively busy but have only 1-2 employees on shift are so far gone that it isn't like they can get an army in there and fix them overnight. The freight comes in and they have nowhere to put it. So they put it wherever they can and wherever there is space (the stores have small backrooms).
Though sometimes it isn't logical.

For instance, one store that had many empty spots in the paper goods section, but had some boxes stacked in a rolling cart nearby. Those could have at least been stuck on the shelves where they belonged (or in that section) until they had time to unpack them - that way, at least a customer looking for the item might find it and get it out of the box for themselves (and thus save some time for the employees if they are short handed).
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Re: Dollar General is putting workers' safety at risk, Labor Department says

Post by pseudo3d »

veteran+ wrote: December 18th, 2021, 10:01 am I was speaking about OSHA violations and their history with it.
Dunking on the C-suite is pretty easy when a chain is in bad shape (especially if it's clear that they're milking the company for every cent its worth) but if the failures of a chain sit at the end of the executives at the end of the day, isn't it also true in reverse that they are ultimately the reason a chain is successful?

There's going to be exceptions, obviously--employees "making the best of it" in an underfunded store or a well-funded store destroying itself in incompetent local management, but to blame the executives when things go wrong and never giving credit when things go well is "axe to grind" type material.
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Re: Dollar General is putting workers' safety at risk, Labor Department says

Post by veteran+ »

No axe to grind, just lots of inside experience.

Success and failure is a function of Leadership (not "management") and not a reflection of employees.

The buck stops here is with the executive suite............full stop.
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Re: Dollar General is putting workers' safety at risk, Labor Department says

Post by Brian Lutz »

Don't know much about Dollar General since there are none here, but I do know that a number of Dollar Tree stores around here have been fined heavily for safety violations (here is a thread from 2018 on here about a Dollar Tree in Vancouver being fined over $503k by Washington's L&I department, at the time one of the largest fines ever imposed by Washington L&I). At the time this fine was announced a Dollar Tree in Bonney Lake had also recently been fined $166k and one in Kelso had been fined $140k by L&I for safety violations. It wouldn't surprise me to see a lot more of this coming out as these stores become more and more common.

Edit - Here's a more recent one: in April of this year a Dollar Tree in Beverly Hills Florida was fined $265k by OSHA for safety violations. The article says that nationwide Dollar Tree stores have earned over $9.3 million in fines over the past 5 years:

https://ehsdailyadvisor.blr.com/2021/05 ... -citation/

And another one: a $477k fine for a Dollar Tree store in Wisconsin in 2020:
https://www.jsonline.com/story/money/20 ... 902151001/
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Re: Dollar General is putting workers' safety at risk, Labor Department says

Post by TW-Upstate NY »

And the aisles are just so narrow and shelving so high to begin with that there literally isn't enough room for two customers to pass each other. And then add overflow freight to the mix and you're just asking for trouble. Still with all that said, their stores are usually always busy. Honestly though, given the current public health situation, smaller stores with narrow aisles and long lines at checkout are places I avoid . I've got a Dollar General maybe 4 miles from home and Target is probably around 12 miles and the "Bullseye" wins my business every time.
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