At Goldman Sachs' Annual Global Retailing Conference this week, Dollar General CEO Todd Vasos said, “As we look at [Q2 2024], what we saw was a pretty drastic slowdown in change. And it happened suddenly, I would say mid-quarter. And what led us to start looking even deeper at, is this macro? Is this something internal? Is it a combination? We started to take a look at a couple of different factors. One being, is it broad-based? With 20,000 stores, it's an advantage, right, because you're coast to coast. And if it's something macro, normally, you start to see that across the country, and it was definitely that. It happened across every region, every division that we had almost the same amount. The second thing was we looked at was well, is it happening in your new stores? Well, again, we're advantage there with opening as many new stores as we've done. And sure enough, our new store base all sort of ships went down in the harbor at the same time as well. So those are great leading indicators. And then lastly, what we noticed was an even tighter core consumer at the very last week of each of the months in Q2. While that's always a tighter week of the month for our core consumer, it was by far, though, the weakest when you look at each of the 4 weeks of each of the period. So, that led us to believe it's more macro in nature. While we still have a lot to do in our back-to-basics work, I would tell you that we believe that the macro effect of what we're seeing in our core customer is starting to take effect on her.” According to our data, Dollar General’s late-August traffic is pacing similar to fiscal Q2 2024: soft. Placer also shows the end-of-the-month pattern in traffic with Week 4 typically half the rate as the first three weeks.
