The first all-dollar store was founded in Montreal in 1910 by Salim Rassy, a Lebanese immigrant, whose name became Rossy. His son George took over the retailer in 1937 and led the company until his death in 1973 when grandson Larry Rossy assumed leadership of it when it had 20 stores. The discount retailer grew to 44 stores by 1992 which until then operated under the name Rossy S Inc.. That year, Larry Rossy opened the first Dollarama at the shopping centre "Les promenades du St-Laurent" in Matane. By the late 1990s, Dollarama had become by far the primary source of revenue for the Rossy family. As such, the Rossy S chain was discontinued by the turn of the new millennium, with all of its stores either closed or converted into Dollarama locations. After converting all the locations to the dollar store concept, Larry Rossy continued to open new stores reaching 1,000 stores in 2015. In November 2004, 80 percent of the chain was sold for $850 million US, to a private equity fund, Bain Capital, of Boston, Massachusetts. In 2013, Dollarama was planning to expand its market to Latin America, and made an eight-year agreement to share its business expertise and provide sourcing services to Dollar City, a Salvadoran chain of dollar stores in Central America and Colombia In 2016, Dollarama established a partnership with the Marco G. R. Enterprise, resulting in the sponsorship of the first edition of the Formula Windsor Championship. In 2018, Dollarama recalled over 550,000 children's toys due to dangerous levels of phthalates.
Business practices
Many items are priced at $1.00 or less, and initially almost all items were priced as such. In early 2009 Dollarama began to introduce items priced up to $2.00. Due to the positive response from consumers to the multi-price point strategy, the stores subsequently introduced items at $2.50 and $3.00 in August 2012. They again increased price points to include $3.50 and $4.00 items in August 2016. This price level increase allowed the chain to acquire products from a greater variety of sources, including closeout sales. Adjustments may eventually happen to all prices. Payment in Dollarama stores was once by cash only, until Interacdebit cards were added as a payment option beginning in 2008. Gift cards began to be offered in 2011. As of 2015, all Dollarama stores additionally support contactless Interac Flash payments. In March 2017, Dollarama announced that credit cards would be offered as a payment option at all stores by the end of summer 2018. Customers will be able to pay with Visa, Mastercard, and American Express, following a successful pilot program. Many of the Dollarama stores are located where there once were BiWay stores, a defunct Canadian discount retail chain, which closed after a series of dubious financial transactions involving a new owner of the parent operation. Dollarama officially launched its online store on January 21, 2019 where it will sell many of its products in bulk. Only 1000 of the roughly 4000 products offered in Dollarama stores will be sold online, namely items that are easily purchased in bulk. Most large scale modern Dollar stores sourced products from their inception from China beginning in the mid 1990s when they appeared on the retail landscape. This was the same time when Chinese companies entered the market and were allowed to manufacture for Western countries. Dollarama started branding sourced products starting in the very early 2000s. One such brand was Studio, a name still used for stationary products. Another was Plastico for plastic kitchen containers. For a long period of time the public did not know that these were created brands by Dollarama. This would only have been known if customers scrutinized the labels. Such practices were not new: private labels were created as a far back as the early 1930s in Canada by Canadian Tire with Motomaster products, and most retail stores followed. It only became evident which products are sourced and branded by Dollarama, when prices appeared on the label. An extremely large percentage of Dollarama products are privately sourced. In mid-2009 it rolled out its own store brand, "D". Unlike small dollar/discount stores, it sources most of its products directly from manufacturers, rather than from local unknown distributors.
