Cal Turner Sr., the founder of Dollar General.
20 Years of Employee Care at CFMT
The most precious resource of a business, any business, is its employees.
his father, J.L. Turner, converted a department store in Springfield, Kentucky, to the first Dollar General Store. No item cost more than $1.
Whether hunkered over a computer keyboard, swinging a pick ax, waiting on a customer at a restaurant or pushing a mop and broom, individual workers provide the labor in any labor force.
“The best price point God ever made,” Cal was fond of saying.
The Community Foundation of Middle Tennessee has served workers and their employers through its employee care funds for more than 20 years. The first such fund opened May 3, 2000, as Dollar General co-founder Cal Turner Sr. established the Turner Family Disaster Relief Fund, which offers one-time financial assistance to Dollar General employees recovering from a recent natural disaster.
Cal Turner Sr. (left) walks with son Cal Turner Jr., his successor as president and CEO of Dollar General. Photos courtesy of Dollar General
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At the same time Turner, to celebrate the 60th anniversary of Dollar General, established the Turner Family Scholarships at CFMT to benefit the company’s thousands of employees spread across 44 states and more than 4,300 stores at the time. They would be two of Cal Turner Sr.’s last philanthropic acts. He passed away on Nov. 20, 2000, in his hometown of Scottsville, Kentucky. He was 85. The idea for the company came to him from the success of major department stores’ frequent ‘’Dollar Day’’ sales. So, in 1955, he and
The company eventually moved its headquarters to Goodlettsville, Tennessee, just outside of Nashville, where his son, Cal Turner Jr., led the company from 1977 until his retirement in 2003. Under Cal Jr.’s leadership, the company grew to more than 6,000 stores and $6 billion in sales. Today Dollar General, now a publicly-traded company, is the country’s leading discount retailer with more than 17,000 stores in 46 states and over 143,000 employees. Cal Turner Jr., in his 2018 autobiography “My Father’s Business,” recalled that his father worried that, in such a large organization, management risked losing touch with life in the stores. He lived just a block away from a store in Scottsville, after all, and would often stop by to check on his managers and to shake the hands and thank each and every customer. The elder Turner, lauded as a retail genius of the 20th Century, recognized, his son related:
“The real genius in the company,” Cal Sr. said, “lay with the employees.”
