Tuesday, March 26, 2024

Discount retail chain Dollar General Corp. ($DG) filed its 2023 annual report this week, which piqued our interest here at Calcbench. 

After all, a company so large — $38.7 billion in annual revenue, more than 20,000 stores across the United States — must have interesting things to say about consumer purchasing habits, right? So we decided to take a look.


We already know what some of you might say: “Hold on, Dollar General has only one operating segment! There are no smaller segments you can examine.”


Ah, but that’s not the case — if you know where to look.


Turns out that while Dollar General does report only a single operating segment on the income statement, it does break out several smaller categories in an Operating Segment footnote. Using our Interactive Disclosure database, we pulled up that footnote, exported the data to Excel, and within 60 seconds had created Figure 1, below.



Dollar General groups its total sales into four categories: consumables, seasonal items, home products, and apparel. As you can see, over the last three years, spending has decreased across every category except consumables, which went from $26.26 billion in 2021 to $31.3 billion in 2023, a jump of 19.3 percent.


Moreover, because Dollar General tagged that segment-specific data in the footnotes, we could capture it for display on our Company-in-Detail page! See Figure 2, below. 


  


The key is to look for that small word “Detail+” next to a line item. When you see it you can click on it, and whatever details are attached to that line item (in this case, segment disclosures) will pop up on your screen. 


We also want to note that these disclosures are typically not visible in the actual 10-K or 10-Q filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. For example, if you go directly to the SEC to view Dollar General’s income statement, you see this in Figure 3. 



To find those more specific disclosures about consumables and other segments, you’d need to either (1) wade through the entire filing, which ran 82 pages long in Dollar General’s case; or (2) know to look for a keyword such as “consumables” with quick Control-F. 


There is a better way, and it happens to be our way. With Calcbench you can find the footnote-level disclosures quickly and easily, and have them primed for in-depth analysis in just a few keystrokes.
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