Dollar General Corp. Goldman Sachs Global Consumer and Retail Conference

Okay. Thank you everyone for joining us. It is my pleasure to introduce Dollar General and to moderate this fireside chat. Today we have with us Todd Vasos, Chief Executive Officer, Emily Taylor, Chief Operating Officer, Donny Lau, Executive Vice President, Chief Financial Officer, and Kevin Walker, Vice President of Investor Relations. I am going to turn it over to Kevin to read the safe harbor statement.

Yeah. Thanks, Kate. Let me caution you that statements made during today's fireside chat will include forward-looking statements as defined in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, such as statements about our financial guidance, long-term financial framework, strategy initiatives, plans, goals, priorities, opportunities, expectations or beliefs about future matters, and other statements that are not limited to historical fact. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from our expectations and projections. These factors include, but are not limited to, those identified in our earnings release issued on August 27th, under Risk Factors in our 2025 Form 10-K filed on March 20th, and any later filed periodic report, and in the comments made during this event.

You should not unduly rely on forward-looking statements which speak only as of today's date, and Dollar General disclaims any obligation to update or revise any information discussed today unless required by law. Now it is my pleasure to turn it back over to Kate.

Thank you. Thanks. Thanks so much for joining us today.

Todd, I wondered if we could start with you. You have led Dollar General now for a combined 10 years and are now more than halfway through your final year as CEO. Just reflecting on the past few years, what have maybe been your biggest learnings, and what are the most important priorities you hope to accomplish before the transition?

Well, first, thanks, Kate. Thank you. First, I will always bring Kevin for the filibuster, right? Because that always takes a couple minutes of the time.

I did not give you this many questions today.

Yeah. No. But thank you.

I would tell you, number one, I could not be more honored to have had the opportunity to lead Dollar General for, as you said, the past 10 plus years, but been with the company 18 years in total. And what I found is this is a wonderful company, and wonderful from the soul in to out. And what I mean by that is that this company lives the mission of serving others. And what better service than to serve the community that we serve, and that is that community that is disadvantaged in many ways, right? Not only economically in many instances, but also in just having facilities to be able to go to and shop because of the rural nature of our business and who we have.

And the last thing I would say, Kate, is that I've always lived by the motto, you leave it better than you found it, right? I want to say that we did that in 2022 and definitely, we'll be leaving it much better than we found it here in 2027 when I bow out in January.

Great. If I could just maybe close the loop on that. If you could maybe talk a little bit about the CEO transition and how you're approaching this in order to get to the next chapter for the company.

Yeah. We've spent a lot of time, as you can imagine. The board asked me to be directly involved as we chose my next successor in JJ Fleeman. We interviewed a tremendous amount of people. As you can imagine, there was a lot of interest, a great company, again, in Dollar General. We landed on JJ for a few reasons. One, he knows the business. He's a student of the business. I don't want to take any thunder from him. I'm sure he'll introduce himself when the time is right. But grew up in the Ahold Delhaize scheme, if you will. But not only grew up in it, but from a bag person, and worked his way up to be the CEO of the U.S. operation. What we looked for was somebody that was very steeped in all parts of the operation, and we found that in JJ.

I've spent a lot of time with him, not only during the interview process, but even post acceptance as we work toward his garden leave being finished and he coming in in January. I've committed to the board that I would stay as a senior advisor and on the board at least until 1st of April. I will work directly with JJ to make sure that his onboarding is very smooth. The last thing I'll also say is, in the last couple of years, we've worked tremendously hard on shoring up our management team internally. I would tell you, in the 18 years I've been here, we've got the strongest senior management team that we've ever put on the field here at Dollar General, and Emily Taylor and, of course, Donny Lau being two of those folks that are sitting to my left.

Great. Thank you for that. Maybe if we can start with the health of the consumer. Obviously, this whole conference is kind of predicated on assessing the health of the consumer. We have heard a lot in this last day and a half about the K shape economy and how the lower income consumer is faring, and you have 21,000 plus stores in rural communities. Could you maybe talk a little bit about the changes you are seeing in shopping behavior as customers continue to navigate this inflationary environment we are in? As you look to the second half, how are you thinking about the consumer and the broader demand environment?