Nothing exciting will happen if you walk by a Dollar Tree on a Tuesday afternoon. There are stacks of cardboard boxes near the door. A few people shopping and comparing cleaning supplies. Fluorescent lights are working well. This is a common scene in America, and for millions of people on a tight budget, it’s a useful one. That’s why the news that about 75 Dollar Tree stores will be closing this year carried a little more weight than the numbers alone might have suggested.
Dollar Tree announced the closings along with its earnings report for the first quarter of fiscal year 2026, which came out at the end of May. The results looked good on paper. There were $5 billion in net sales, which is 7.2% more than the same time last year. Earnings per share that were diluted but still increased by more than a third reached $1.74. When talking about where the company is going, CEO Mike Creedon used the word “thoughtful” a lot of times. You should pay attention to what that word covers in a press release because it does a lot of work.
Seventy stores are closing, which is less than one percent of all Dollar Tree stores. There are 9,382 stores for the company in the U.S. and Canada right now, and 113 more opened in the first quarter. By the end of the fiscal year in January, plans call for about 400 new stores to open. The chain isn’t on the run here. It’s more like a chain that prunes quietly while planting loudly, which is a strategy that gets lost in the bigger picture.
Some shoppers have still seen it. It was brought to our attention on Reddit that a store in Astoria, Queens temporarily lost power. The store in Wilmington, North Carolina, shut down earlier this spring. Dollar Tree hasn’t released a full list of which stores are being closed, and this lack of information tends to make people more worried in areas where the store is a real lifeline for cheap household goods.
A question about prices has also been hanging over Dollar Tree for a number of years. Even though it’s called Dollar Tree, most things are now $1.25, and the Dollar Tree Plus section has items that cost as much as $10. The multi-price format, which is now used in about 5,900 stores, was created to offer more products and attract a wider range of customers. It depends on who you ask if shoppers have liked it or felt like they were quietly lied to. People were quick to criticize the format when it first came out, in a way that usually only happens when someone feels like an agreement has been broken.
Perhaps Dollar Tree knew this was going to happen and chose to accept the risk. Bloomberg says that the chain has been consciously moving into zip codes with higher incomes. In fact, almost half of its new stores have opened in more affluent metro areas in the last six years. That customer isn’t the same as the one who made Dollar Tree famous, which shows that the company is trying to expand without leaving its core customers behind. It will be interesting to see if that balance stays the same over the next few years.
H&M, Glossier, and a number of restaurant chains have already closed stores in 2026. For Dollar Tree, things feel different because of what the brand stands for: not style or prestige, but usefulness. People who thought that store would be there will feel sad when it closes, even if it’s just one out of nine thousand.
