Dollar General grows, rival shrinks

While Family Dollar has not yet released the list of some 390 stores it plans to close in 2019, its rival Dollar General has announced it plans to open 975 new stores this year.

CNN reported that Dollar General will also remodel 1,000 of its older stores.

Dollar General opened 900 stores in 2018 and 1,315 in 2017.

Currently it has more than 14,500 stores nationally, with three-quarters of those in towns of fewer than 20,000 population. Family Dollar has struggled in recent years.

Both chains have a significant local presence, with Family Dollar stores in Portland and Dunkirk and Dollar General stores in Redkey, Ridgeville, Geneva and Fort Recovery.

Dollar General’s business plan has been to open stores in areas without a big box retailer or supermarket within 15 or 20 miles.

Joins staff

Dr. Mark Meyer is joining the staff of Family LifeCare in Berne.

Dr. Meyer, who currently works as a family medicine physician in Peru, will join Family LifeCare on June 1 as hospice associate medical director.

A native of Flora, Indiana, Dr. Meyer is a graduate of Indiana University and did his family practice residency at IU Methodist Hospital, Indianapolis.

Thai tacos?

Yum Brands, parent company of KFC, Taco Bell and Pizza Hut, is expanding its operations in Asia and plans to open a Taco Bell outlet in Bangkok, its first in Thailand.

The company said it would adapt the brand to local tastes with an extra-spicy sauce. It will also sell Thai beer and beer from The Philippines.

Yum’s Thai franchise partner, Thoresen Thai Agencies, is owned by the billionaire Mahagitsiri family, a shipping company that branched out in 2018 into the food and beverage business.

Taco Bell, which has nearly 7,000 outlets in this country, has 450 restaurants outside the U.S., almost 100 of them in the Asia-Pacific region.

Plug it in

Indiana-Michigan Power is launching a new program to help the owners of electric vehicles. The new service allows those customers to get lower rates by charging their vehicles during off-peak hours using a sub-meter connected to the customer’s electrical panel.

For more information, contact I&M.

Over-the-top?

The video landscape keeps changing daily, with a giant like Comcast shifting strategically to balance its cable business as just one part of the equation.

The Hollywood Reporter this week quoted the president of the company’s cable systems unit saying that while cable is profitable, “Broadband is the foundation.”

Speaking at the Deutsche Bank 2019 Media, Internet and Telecom Conference, Dave Watson, president and chief executive officer of Comcast Cable, said video is an "intensely competitive" business, partly because of the "large amount of OTT folks" that have jumped into the field over the last few years. 

OTT is industry term for over-the-top, the name applied to video streaming services such as Netflix.

Comcast is "simply not going to chase unprofitable video relationships," the executive said. 

“The U.S. pay TV industry recorded its largest-ever video subscriber decline in 2018 amid cord-cutting and satellite TV providers' decision to also stop chasing, via expensive promotions and the like, customers that don't pay much and therefore don't allow the companies to make money,” The Hollywood Reporter said.

Watson touted Comcast's X1 platform, which allows customers to access content across live TV, on demand and DVR libraries. Netflix, YouTube and Amazon are already integrated into X1.

"We'll think about those applications over time," Watson said. "But at the same time, because of consumer choice, because of all this competition, we're just not going to chase video.”

China venture

Allegheny Technologies Inc., parent company of Portland Forge, this week announced another expansion of a joint venture to produce precision stainless steel strip for China and other Asian markets.

“This expansion allows us to meet the growing demands of the Asian market,” Robert S. Wetherbee, president and chief executive officer of ATI, said in a press release. “This enables us to produce the ultra thin, ultra flat, and ultra hard precision stainless steel products that are crucial to the functional parts of the consumer electronics industry—giving protection and rigidity to smartphones, as well as enabling more energy efficient flexible solar panels and narrow tolerance applications in many other industries.”

Beefy DNA

Tyson Foods Inc., parent company of Tyson Mexican Original of Portland, announced this week that its beef and pork subsidiary is collaborating with IdentiGEN to use DNA technology to trace beef back to the individual animal of origin.

IdentiGEN’s trademarked DNA TraceBack system will be used to trace the cattle raised for Tyson’s Open Prairie brand Natural Angus Beef.

The DNA TraceBack process is intended to assure customers that the Open Prairie beef products they buy were sourced from ranches where the cattle were raised to meet specific requirements, such as no antibiotics ever and no added hormones, the company said.