Where Will Dollar General Stock Be in 5 Years?

Most of the time, companies are more or less what they were five years ago, as well as what they will be five years from now. Oh, they may get slightly bigger, but that's often largely a byproduct of inflation and resilience. Not a whole lot's actually changing with the businesses themselves. That's not quite the case for discount retailer Dollar General (NYSE: DG).

Dollar General is in the midst of a sweeping transformation that should be good for shareholders. But it's also experiencing growing pains that are working against the stock. For better and worse, most of this reinvention will be over five years from now, by which time the overarching investment thesis for this company will have changed.

On the off chance you're reading this and aren't familiar, Dollar General operates over 19,000 relatively small discount general merchandise stores peppered across the United States. More than two-thirds of them are found in communities with populations of less than 20,000 -- places where larger-footprint retailers such as Walmart and generally don't make an effort to establish a presence. In many cases, Dollar General may place more than one store in a single town. Although they are not truly grocery stores (they stock a select assortment of groceries), they can also compete with nearby grocery stores.

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Source Fool.com