Leon Levine, the founder of Family Dollar, a chain of stores that shaped the daily lives of the nation’s poor, died April 5 at his home in Charlotte, NC. He was 85.
His son, Howard, confirmed the death, but did not specify a cause.
In 1959, with $3,000 of his own money and $3,000 from a partner, Mr. Levine opened the first Family Dollar on Central Avenue in Charlotte.
In 2015, a competitor, Dollar Tree, acquired Family Dollar for nearly $9 billion in cash and stock. That year the family fortune of Mr. Levine $1.4 billion according to Forbes. Howard Levine, who succeeded his father as president of Family Dollar in 2003, stepped down in 2016.
There are approximately 8,000 Family Dollar locations nationwide. By contrast, there were 3,572 Walmart supercenters in the United States at the start of the year.
Family Dollar stores sell an encyclopedic array of household essentials and conveniences at the lowest possible prices, including laundry detergent, winter coats, party napkins, pet food, wireless speakers, rakes, strollers, wind chimes, and 95-cent cans of Viennese sausage. The stores are relatively small, generally less than 10,000 square feet, and locations across the country place the same merchandise in the same spots under the same fluorescent lighting.
From the early years, the shops of mr. Levine focused on poor people. He often told interviewers that he picked their locations by looking for oil slicks in parking lots, which he believed meant the leaking cars of the poor.
He continued to visit one of his stores every other day until his 15th opened, in the 1960s. He was shocked when a New York brokerage firm approached him in 1970 about going public. He did so quickly.
“I opened my first store with $6,000,” Mr. Levine in 2011 to The New York Times. “For 10 years I didn’t stand up for air; I had no idea how much money I had.”
In 1982 there were 500 family dollars. Two years later there were 1,000. The chain expanded from the South to major urban centers across the country.
Mr. Levine retired from Family Dollar in 2003 and focused on philanthropy. By 2020, his nonprofit organization, the Leon Levy Foundation, had donated more than $300 million, with Mr. Levine funding poverty reduction programs in the Carolinas, a cancer institute in Charlotte, an interdisciplinary science center at Duke University, and a children’s museum in Rockingham, N.C.
The success of dollar stores has often been portrayed as something less than a happy tale of well-functioning capitalism.
In 2011, an article in The New York Times Magazine heralded a new era, that of “the dollar store economy,” brought about by “a new and eroding reality in American life.” As Howard Levine, then-CEO of Family Dollar, told the magazine, while “not necessarily a good thing for our country, more and more people are living paycheck to paycheck,”
Some commentators have argued that dollar increases help not so much to address the ills of poverty as to exacerbate them.
A 2018 report from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, a nonprofit organization critical of corporate retailers, found that dollar stores are harming the areas they serve by crowding out supermarkets while employing fewer people and offering less healthy food. Two years later, a New Yorker article on Family Dollar argued that the stores lacked adequate staffing and security, inviting theft and sometimes violent crime.
Local governments in different places, included Cleveland and Oklahoma City have responded to these problems by taking measures to limit the growth of dollar stores.
In an interview, Howard Levine said the dollar store industry had work to do to secure stores, but added, “What people don’t fully understand is the nature of our customer and the nature of our locations. We’re in some tough areas; we are dealing with difficult customers.”
He defended the goods Family Dollar wants to sell; the company, he said, pays attention to what shoppers want. “We’ve been trying to sell more healthy food, so to speak, and our customer isn’t buying that stuff,” he said.
Some dollar store advocates emphasize their value in periods of inflation.
Leon Levine hoped his foundation could help the same people who had made his business a success and made him a wealthy man.
“Leon realized that his clients often lived on the margins and struggled to make ends meet,” says his foundation’s website, adding, “He hopes the foundation’s investments lead to increased economic mobility.”
Leon Levine was born on June 8, 1937 in Wadesboro, a small town in North Carolina. Like many Jews in the South in the 19th and 20th centuries, his parents, Harry and Minnie Levine, ran a general store, in their case in the nearby town of Rockingham.
Harry Levine died in 1949. A few years later, while still a teenager, Leon became the store’s executive vice president. He experimented early on with running his own real bargain basement, selling cheap items a flight away.
He later attended the University of Miami for a short time and took classes at what is now Wingate University in North Carolina, but never graduated.
Mr. Levine was inspired to open Family Dollar after visiting a Tennessee chain of stores that sold items for less than $1.
In 1958 he married Barbara Leven, whom he had met during a summer vacation in Florida. She died of breast cancer at the age of 27. A relatively short second marriage ended in divorce. In 1978 he married Sandra Poliakoff.
Besides his son, from his first marriage, he leaves behind his wife; their daughter, Amy Dawson; a daughter from his first marriage, Lori Sklut; 11 grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren. Another daughter from his first marriage, Mindy, died in 1987.
While in charge, Mr. Levine spoke personally about the crime in his stores.
He once ran into a family dollar and when he discovered all the employees were in the warehouse, he walked out with the cash register to teach them a lesson. On another occasion, to make a similar point, he bought a 20-gallon garbage can for $1, filled it with merchandise he hadn’t paid for, and dragged it out of a store.
The next day, during a business meeting, he poured the contents of the bin onto a conference table, he recalled in his 2011 interview with The Times. He then made a statement to his colleagues: “Look what I got for money!”
