The company plans to open approximately 730 new stores and remodel approximately 1,620 stores in fiscal 2024. This reflects a planned decrease in new store openings and a planned increase in store remodels.

The company expects store format innovation to allow it to capture additional growth opportunities within its existing markets. It is using two larger format stores (approximately 8,500 square feet and 9,500 square feet, respectively).

The company seeks to drive profitable sales growth through initiatives aimed at increasing customer traffic and average transaction amount. Historically, sales in our consumables category, which tend to have lower gross margins, have been the key drivers of net sales and customer traffic.

To address shrink challenges, as well as to enhance the overall customer and associate experience in our stores, we continue to implement and refine our self-checkout strategy, including limiting self-checkout to transactions of five items or fewer, and converted some or all self-checkout registers to assisted checkout options in approximately 12,000 stores.

We have made significant investments in retail labor, primarily through labor hours, to further enhance our store standards, including on-shelf availability, and compliance efforts as well as the customer and associate experience in our stores.

We are taking actions designed to reduce our higher than targeted store manager turnover, including through our labor investment and allocation of labor hours, simplifying in-store activities, and reducing excess inventory.

We have continued to experience significantly higher inventory shrink. Although we continue to take actions designed to reduce shrink, we anticipate it will continue to materially pressure our financial results in 2024.

Significant or rapid increases to federal, and further increases to state or local, minimum wage rates or salary levels could significantly adversely affect our earnings if we are not able to otherwise offset these increased labor costs elsewhere in our business.

While we believe the overall growth rate of inflation is moderating, we expect some inflationary pressures will continue to affect our operating results and our vendors and customers.

As we work to provide everyday low prices and meet our customers' affordability needs, we remain focused on enhancing our margins through inventory shrink and damage reduction initiatives, as well as pricing and markdown optimization, effective category management and inventory reduction efforts.

Competitive pressures and changes in the competitive environment and the geographic and product markets where we operate, including, but not limited to, pricing, promotional activity, expanded availability of mobile, web-based and other digital technologies, and alliances or other business combinations.

Such opportunities include providing our customers with a variety of shopping access points and even greater value and convenience by leveraging and developing digital tools and technology, such as our Dollar General app, which contains a variety of tools to enhance the in-store shopping experience.

Efficient management of our inventory has been and continues to be an area of focus for us.

Our plans, objectives, and expectations regarding future operations, growth, investments and initiatives, including but not limited to our real estate, store growth and international expansion plans, store formats or concepts, shrink and damages reduction actions, inventory reduction efforts, and anticipated progress and impact of our strategic initiatives (including but not limited to our digital initiatives, DG Media Network, DG Fresh, self-checkout, and pOpshelf) and our merchandising, margin enhancing, distribution/transportation efficiency (including but not limited to self-distribution), store manager turnover reduction and other initiatives.

We have established a position as a low-cost operator, always seeking ways to reduce or control costs that do not affect our customers' shopping experiences. We plan to continue enhancing this position over time while employing ongoing cost discipline to reduce certain expenses as a percentage of sales.

Such opportunities include providing our customers with a variety of shopping access points and even greater value and convenience by leveraging and developing digital tools and technology, such as our Dollar General app, which contains a variety of tools to enhance the in-store shopping experience.

Significant components of property and equipment purchases included information systems upgrades and technology-related projects.

Damage or interruption to our information systems as a result of external factors, staffing shortages or challenges in maintaining or updating our existing technology or developing, implementing or integrating new technology.

Capital expenditures for 2024 are currently projected to be approximately $1.3 billion to $1.4 billion. We anticipate funding 2024 capital requirements with a combination of some or all of the following: existing cash balances, cash flows from operations, availability under our Revolving Facility and/or the issuance of additional CP Notes.

As planned, to preserve our investment grade credit rating and maintain financial flexibility, we did not repurchase any shares during 2023 under our share repurchase program and do not plan to repurchase shares during 2024.

The Company paid a cash dividend of $0.59 per share during the first quarter of 2024. In May 2024, the Board declared a quarterly cash dividend of $0.59 per share, which is payable on or before July 23, 2024, to shareholders of record on July 9, 2024.

The 10-Q filing does not explicitly detail any new or ongoing ESG initiatives. Further research is needed to determine Dollar General's ESG commitments and progress.

Our customers continue to feel constrained in the current macroeconomic environment, and accordingly we expect their spending to continue to be pressured, particularly in our non-consumables categories.

Our customers were impacted by the elimination of the emergency allotment of SNAP benefits and lower tax refunds resulting from the elimination of COVID-related stimulus programs, each of which occurred in the first quarter of 2023, and continue to be impacted by the overall macroeconomic environment.

Additionally, our customers continue to experience elevated expenses that generally comprise a large portion of their household budgets, such as rent, healthcare, energy and fuel prices, as well as cost inflation in frequently purchased household products (including food).