Family Dollar and Dollar General

Family Dollar was established in Charlotte, North Carolina in 1959 by a 21 year old entrepreneur named Leon Levine. He was interested in operating a low-overhead, self-service retail store. Levine’s main goal was to offer a variety of high quality merchandise to customers for under $2.00 (Family Dollar: History). If everything in the store wasn’t a dollar to begin with why did he name the store Family DOLLAR? The fact is that any person can be influenced in a different way just by the way someone words a sentence or phrase. A prime example of this is a Family Dollar store. The problem is that Family Dollar doesn’t sale everything in their store for a dollar, like a Dollar Tree does. Dollar Tree is seen to be one of the very few true dollar stores there is that sales everything for a dollar. The name of the store Family Dollar just catches everyone’s eye and makes them think that they are getting a better deal on the items they purchase there. The fact is that everyone who goes into the store is thinking that generally everything in the store is going to be a dollar, but it’s not. That is the purpose of the usage of words in the title of the store. Dollar General is also another store that has the same usage of words in their store name to make their customers think the same way. Every customer is baited into thinking that everything in the store is going to be a dollar but in the end their thoughts will be different.

This kind of word usage is a part of businesses everywhere around the world. It is known as cognitive grammar. Cognitive grammar is known to influence people by making them think something you want them to think. According to the book titled Cognitive Linguistics, cognitive grammar also leads into a t...

... middle of paper ...

...to consideration for the future.

Works Cited

Akao, Yoji. Quality Function Deployment: Integrating Customer Requirements into Product Design. Cambridge, MA: Productivity Press, 1990. Print.

Croft, William, and D A. Cruse. Cognitive Linguistics. Cambridge, U.K: Cambridge University Press, 2004. USC Upstate Ebook. Web. 27 February 2011.

Family Dollar. “History: Introduction.” Family Dollar. Family Dollar Store, Inc. 2011. Web. 26 February 2011.

Hansen, Torben, and Hans S. Solgaard. New Perspectives on Retailing and Store Patronage Behavior: A Study of the Interface between Retailers and Consumers. Boston, Mass: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2004. USC Upstate Ebook. Web. 28 February 2011.

Philip Lief Group and Lynie Arden. 220 Best Franchises to Buy: The Essential Sourcebook For Evaluating the Best Franchise Opportunities. New York, NY: Random House, 2000. Print.