There have been a few letters to the editor of The Star newspaper regarding the unofficial “announcement” of Dollar General Corporation being interested in establishing a store in Grand Coulee. I say unofficial because the origin of this statement was made by a non-employee of Dollar General Corporation. The corporation, which headquartered in Tennessee and was founded in 1939, currently operates over 18,000 stores in 47 states.

Committing a bit of time, I searched the internet for background information on Dollar General. The usual information was found. Later, I came across an interesting website called Good Jobs First. It is a national policy resource center that promotes corporate and government accountability in economic development, according to their website. They are in Washington D.C. One element found on Good Jobs First website is a section called Violation Tracker.

I typed in Dollar General in the Violation Tracker and up popped two pages of a number of federal regulatory violations. By far the greatest number of violations are workplace safety or health violation. Others included wage and hour, insurance, environmental, employment discrimination, employment screening, accounting fraud or deficiencies and consumer protection violations. Since 2000, there have been 159 recorded violations by various federal regulatory agencies. During that time, Dollar General has paid penalty charges of over $60 million.

To be fair, I checked into the two chain stores found in Grand Coulee — Do It Best and Safeway. I specifically checked the workplace safety or health violations as that is major violation issue faced by Dollar General. The violation numbers for these two retailers are small. For Safeway, I found five violations and for Do It Best, two violations.

One could break this down further — number of stores operated by the three different corporations, number of employees and by each on the various violations mentioned above for each corporation. I’ll leave that up to someone else.

Robert Valen