While no one can predict the future, as of now Dollar General has no plans to place a store in Grand Marais, said Corrine Smith, marketing coordinator for the retail giant located in Goodlettsville, Tennessee. Smith was contacted on Monday, Feb. 29.
With stores popping up almost daily around the country, Smith had to take some time to locate Cook County on the company’s map that shows where new stores are being built or are being planned to be built in the coming year. Based on that map, said Smith, there was no indication Dollar General had any future plans to place a store in Grand Marais or anywhere in the county.
Richard J. Knight, an attorney in Appleton, Wisconsin registered the DGI-Grand Marais LLC trademark name on December 7, 2015. His partner, Todd Platt, a builder, was looking at land adjacent to the Harbor Light Restaurant. Talks were under way with the owners of two pieces of property to build a 9,700 square-foot store. A survey was conducted and red flags marked off some of the area for a store, but no further action has been taken.
Dan MacDonald, Dollar General senior director, corporate communications with Dollar General on February 3, said, “We haven’t made any decisions yet. This project is in the ‘due diligence’ phase for us. We are still interested in the site, it looks like it will work for us, but we want to make sure it meets all of the criteria before we give it the green light.”
Those plans seem to have been halted following several public meetings where opposition against the discount store ran deep. An online petition with 1,500 signatures in opposition was sent to Dollar General headquarters mid-February.
A similar online petition in favor of Dollar General now has 185 signatures.
With public pressure mounting, on February 10, the Grand Marais City Council voted in favor of establishing a moratorium of up to one year on allowing any buildings larger than 5,000 square feet from being built on commercial/ industrial property along Highway 61 within the city limits. Without the moratorium, the city’s current zoning laws wouldn’t have delayed— or stopped—the store from being built.
To date, Dollar General or Richard Knight had not applied for a building permit for the property next to Harbor Light.
With national retail sales of $18 to $19 billion, Dollar General is a bargain retail chain selling a range of household goods, beauty products, groceries, over the counter medicines and more. Each store typically is open seven days a week from 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. and averages $1.5 million in annual sales.
As of January 29, 2016, Dollar General operated 12,483 stores in 43 states, a growth of almost 1,000 stores (and three more states) over what it had January 1, 2015.
Typically, Dollar General signs a 10-year lease on a building owned by an investor, in this case Platt and Knight, neither of whom returned phone calls regarding this latest news from the company.
However, Smith didn’t say this wouldn’t someday come up again. Dollar General is locating a store in Silver Bay, and in that case, the public is overwhelmingly in favor of the business.
Leave a Reply