Dollar Tree prepares to double store size

Sarah Kenny shops at the Dollar Tree in Warrenton a couple times a week.

Kenny likes the prices but also the variety at the Warrenton Village shopping center store on West Lee Highway.

“You never know what they’re going to have,” the 31-year-old certified nursing aide said last week, moments after buying batteries for Christmas toys, snack food and drinking glasses. “Sometimes you can get brand things for a good deal.”

Kenny hopes the store expansion underway to more than double the store to 10,631 square feet will mean more variety.

Dollar Tree’s 4,300-plus stores offer an array of items like housewares, cleaning supplies, candy, food, health and beauty products and party, craft and teaching supplies -– all for $1 or less each.

The Warrenton store will expand into the adjacent space previously occupied by Bare Woods and Home Furnishings, which closed in April 2010.

Renovation of the vacant storefront began on Dec. 12, said Patrick Carter, project superintendent for general contractor Titan Contractors Inc. of Suffolk.

The new space should be completed by the end of January, Carter said.

Dollar Tree wants to move in to the new space and remodel the existing store without closing, he said.

The entire project, estimated to cost $76,000, should be completed in mid-February, Carter said.

“Our motto is to finish on time,” he added.

As far as Francis Larkin’s concerned, the expansion can’t be finished soon enough.

“It’s about time,” said Larkin, a 59-year-old retired stonemason who lives near Warrenton and shops at Dollar Tree four to five times a week.

“It’s a good store. But I’ve always said they could make it bigger. They’ll do more business. It’s a big improvement for them,” he said.

On a visit to the store last week, Larkin picked up a notebook , snack food and a bottle of mouthwash.

Clarita Morris, a 67-year-old part-time caregiver from Jeffersonton, shops the Warrenton Dollar Tree “now and then” but has had plenty of experience with the one in Culpeper.

The Culpeper store dwarfs the existing Warrenton one, Morris said.

“They have a lot more items [and] frozen foods and coolers” for other perishable items, said Morris, who wondered if the bigger Warrenton store would carry a similar inventory.

A Dollar Tree representative couldn’t be reached for comment.

Kristin Perry, a senior leasing representative with The Rappaport Cos., which handles the shopping center, said of the Warrenton store: “This was undersized. It’s about 4,800 square feet. Most of the [Dollar Tree] stores are 10,000 square feet. This was a great opportunity to get to the prototype next door.”

The store opened at Warrenton Village in September 1995, according to town records.

The Chesapeake, Va.-based company’s decision to enlarge the Warrenton store appears consistent with an aggressive program to grow the business.

During the third quarter, Dollar Tree opened 98 stores and expanded or relocated 24 stores, giving it 4,335 stores in the United States and Canada as of Oct. 29, according to the company.  

Net   sales for the quarter totaled $1.6 billion, up 11.9 percent compared with the same period in 2010.

The publicly held company traces its history to K.R. Perry, who in 1953 opened a Ben Franklin variety store in Norfolk and over the next several decades started a series of retail operations that eventually led to the founding of Dollar Tree Stores Inc.

It adopted the Dollar Tree name in 1993 and began to buy likeminded discounts chains, including Dollar Bills, Dollar Express and Greenbacks.

The company opened its 3,000th store in 2006 and in the following year for the first time topped $4 billion in annual sales.