CHESAPEAKE, Va. -- Dollar Tree is accelerating the pace with which it adds freezers and coolers to its stores, expanding its reach into the refrigerated and frozen food category.
“We're rolling out freezers and coolers at a faster pace. In the second quarter, we installed freezers and coolers in 215 additional stores for a total of 444 store installations in the first half,” CEO Bob Sasser said during an earnings call this week. “We now offer frozen and refrigerated products in 2,993 stores.”
With the increase, Dollar Tree is raising its installation plans “to 550 stores for the full year. This will be the most installations we have ever done in a year.
“This category serves the current needs of our customers, drives traffic into our stores and provides incremental sales across all categories, including our higher-margin discretionary product.”
Sasser said the dollar-store chain’s “consumable business has grown a lot faster over the past several years for a couple of reasons. One is the rollout of the cooler program. We went from basically zero to a lot of coolers, a whole brand-new business during that timeframe. We added and expanded a lot of the consumer product categories over the past, almost all of them over the past 10 years and certainly a lot of them over the past five years. So those are newer businesses to us.”
That growth has included better sales in beverages and snacks.
“Store associates are emphasizing more effective customer engagement and working to drive sales of related items through cross-merchandising and suggestive selling,” Sasser said.
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