Even $100,000 Earners Are Turning to Dollar General as Household Budgets Get Squeezed

Dollar General is seeing a customer shift that would have been difficult to imagine a few years ago: households earning $100,000 or more are increasingly shopping at the discount chain as rising costs change how Americans define a comfortable income.

Chief Executive Todd Vasos said the company is seeing middle- and upper-middle-income shoppers behave more like its traditional lower-income customers. The comments, reported after a Goldman Sachs consumer and retail conference, pointed to fuel costs as an important trigger. When gasoline approaches $4 a gallon, Vasos said, customers tend to shop closer to home, make more frequent trips and buy less at a time.

The trend arrives as Dollar General’s business is expanding. The company reported $11.3 billion in second-quarter fiscal 2026 sales, up 5.2% from a year earlier. Same-store sales rose 3.5%, driven by a 2% increase in customer traffic and a 1.5% increase in the average transaction. Dollar General said traffic has increased for five consecutive quarters.

Those figures do not mean every shopper is in financial trouble. A higher-income household may visit Dollar General for cleaning supplies, snacks or other selected items while continuing to shop elsewhere for most of its needs. But the movement is important because it shows how broadly households are trying to protect their budgets.

The company’s own filing underscores the emphasis on necessities. Consumables—including food, household supplies and other everyday products—represented more than 82% of Dollar General’s sales during the first half of fiscal 2026. That makes the chain a useful window into how shoppers are handling recurring expenses, not merely where they look for occasional bargains.

The broader income data help explain why a six-figure salary may feel less powerful than it once did. Median U.S. household income reached $87,460 in 2025 after adjusting for inflation, according to Census Bureau figures reported by The Associated Press. That was a record, but real median income was only 2.5% higher than in 2019. By comparison, inflation-adjusted household income rose 19% from 2013 to 2019.

In other words, Americans have made progress on paper, but much of the gain has been consumed by the higher cost of maintaining ordinary life. Fuel, groceries, insurance, utilities, vehicles and caregiving expenses compete for the same paycheck. A household making $100,000 may have more income than the median household, yet still respond to price increases by switching brands, reducing trips to expensive stores or buying only what is needed immediately.

There is also a limit to what Dollar General’s data can prove. The company has not published an independently audited breakdown showing how much of its customer base earns above $100,000. The high-income shift is management’s description of customer behavior, not evidence that all six-figure households are living paycheck to paycheck.

Still, the combination of rising traffic, broader income appeal and continued pressure on essential expenses points to a durable change in retail. Discount shopping is becoming less of an identity tied to income and more of a budgeting tool used across income groups.

The next test will be whether those higher-income shoppers stay after fuel prices and inflation pressures ease. If they do, Dollar General may be gaining more than temporary traffic: it may be building a broader customer base around the idea that saving money is no longer a niche strategy, even for households that once considered themselves comfortably above the bargain-shopping line.