Dollar General fills a convenience niche, it has a lot of stores scattered mostly in rural or suburban areas and meets the core essential grocery needs. A MD daughter likes living on a lake in a rural setting. Working long hours she prefers shopping at a DG store to going out of her way to one of the larger chains. One of the charities came out with an essential low income charity food basket list. She bought all the items in a basket from Publix (most expensive), Winn Dixie, Walmart, Aldi and DG. For this example DG and Aldi were the lowest price. She did say that they had a lot of low-price low-quality items.

In our area Aldi appears to be the big DG competitor. Typical DG stores are ~7,200 sq ft, Aldi stores are larger ~16,400, larger than DG but smaller than the Publix and Winn Dixi. But Aldi has just bought 400 of the Winn Dixie & Harvey Groceries stores to take advantage of a larger more efficient distribution system.

Best I can tell DG has been very aggressive at trying to keep employee wages low. Spend a little time browsing the web observing what DG and Aldi employees have to say about their pay and benefits. In every category employees of Aldi say they are better off than employees of DG. A company can't be profitable and overpay the competition but I have seldom seen such a large difference in employee sentiment.

My current two cents; Despite the problems I still believe Jim was correct, it has a profitable niche and is undervalued.
RAM