How Does Dollarama Make A Profit? One Buck At A Time
Posted January 9, 2009 12:00 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
T here aren’t many people on the Canadian Business Rich 100 who built their wealth one dollar at a time. Larry Rossy did – selling items for $1 apiece, and nobody does it better than him in Canada. A third-generation merchant, Rossy opened his first Dollarama store in 1992 in a mall in Matane, Que., 350 km northeast of Quebec City.
Now, four years after selling 80% of the business to Bain Capital for $1 billion, Dollarama Group LP boasts 536 stores across Canada (the next largest competitor has less than 200), and plans to open hundreds more in the coming years. With annual sales of about $1 billion and an average ticket per customer of less than $7, Dollarama serves more than 2.7 million Canadians a week.
“I have been very fortunate to have a career in a field I truly enjoy,” the 66-year-old Rossy told Canadian Business about his debut on the Rich 100 in a recent e-mail. “For me, it is all about doing what I enjoy – building a successful business with a great team of people. The financial success has been a byproduct of fulfilling the dream of creating a successful retail chain.”
Rossy grew up a die-hard five-and-dime-store aficionado. His grandfather, Salim, arrived in Montreal a century ago from Lebanon and peddled goods out of a knapsack before opening his first general store in 1910.
Salim’s eight sons and their children built a Quebec-based empire of Rossy-branded discount retail stores, with different branches of the family controlling their individual groupings of stores. Rossy inherited his father’s branch, and had a modest 44-store chain by the early 1990s.
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Photo courtesy: Wikipedia
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