Dollar General will open 450 stores in 2026. Eighty percent of them will be in towns of 20,000 people or fewer. Across that same year, the cooperative system is on track to lose another 150-plus institutions to consolidation, and most of the branches that close will sit in the same zip codes Dollar General is building into — the ones the Federal Reserve and the FDIC classify as banking deserts.
The two trends are not unrelated. They are mirror images of the same fact about rural and low-income America: somebody is going to serve this household. Dollar General has a plan for it. Credit unions, which were chartered specifically for this household, mostly do not.
A site-selection thesis that's also a banking thesis
Dollar General operated 20,893 stores as of the end of its fiscal 2025 — more brick-and-mortar locations in the United States than McDonald's. CEO Todd Vasos told analysts on the Q4 2025 call that "approximately 80% of our current store base serves towns of 20,000 or fewer people," and that households earning $30,000 a year or less drive about 60% of revenue. The site map is not a coincidence. It's a thesis: customers without other options will pay reliably for small basket purchases, every week, for decades.
That thesis is also, almost word-for-word, the individual the Federal Credit Union Act of 1934 set out to serve — "people of modest means," through cooperative ownership, at not-for-profit cost. The household Dollar General positions around as a customer is the household the cooperative system was chartered to bring in as a member.
The food-desert map and the banking-desert map are the same map
USDA's Food Access Research Atlas identifies roughly 53.6 million Americans — 17.4% of the population — as living in census tracts that are simultaneously low-income and low-access to a supermarket. The methodology uses tract-level income thresholds and distance-to-supermarket measures: half-mile and one-mile in urban tracts, ten miles in rural ones.
The Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia defines banking deserts the same way — census tracts without a bank branch within a radius that varies by population density (two miles urban, five suburban, ten rural). Banking deserts grew by 217 tracts between 2019 and 2023. In the Deep South, 8% of census tracts qualify, twice the national rate. In several large metros, the rate of low- and moderate-income branch loss has run at nearly twice the rate of overall branch loss.
When two definitions use the same census tracts, the same income thresholds, and the same distance methodology, you don't need a study to confirm they overlap. The food-desert map and the banking-desert map are the same map. Dollar General opens stores on it. The financial services industry mostly does not.
What Dollar General is selling there isn't groceries
Since 2012, Dollar General has carried Western Union general-purpose reloadable prepaid cards in its stores. Since April 2019, Western Union money transfer service has been live at more than 15,400 DG locations across 44 states. Most stores sell money orders. Some cash checks.
None of this is hidden. It's at the register. A customer who walks in for cereal and laundry detergent can also pay a utility bill, send money to family, or load a paycheck onto a card. The DG counter operates as a financial services counter for households whose financial life does not run through a deposit account. According to the FDIC's biennial survey, the unbanked share of U.S. households was 4.2% in 2023, and the underbanked share was meaningfully larger. They use exactly the products Dollar General sells.
The cooperative system used to be the institution that intercepted that household at the point of need.
What the credit union charter says about banking deserts
The structural designations are there. As of Q3 2025, 2,392 federally insured credit unions held NCUA's low-income designation — about 55% of the industry. As of January 2026, 446 credit unions are CDFI-certified, the largest depository-institution category inside the CDFI Fund. More than one in ten federally insured credit unions reports MDI status. These institutions are doing the work; many are doing exceptional work.
But in aggregate, the credit union footprint has been compressing. The number of federally insured credit unions dropped from 4,455 at the end of 2024 to 4,287 at the end of 2025 — a net 168 institutions gone in twelve months. The branches that close in a merger tend to be the rural, low-volume ones. Dollar General is adding 450 stores into the same kind of geography.
The original charter language is written in the aggregate. Congress did not create a financial cooperative system to serve people of modest means in growing metros only. It created a system to serve them, full stop. The geography of that mission has been ceded one merger at a time.
What a credit union presence in a banking desert looks like in 2026
The instinct to read this as "credit unions should open more rural branches" misses what Dollar General figured out. Brick branches don't pencil in towns under 20,000 — not at CU cost structures, not at bank cost structures, not at anyone's. That is why bank branches closed in the first place.
Dollar General's model is the opposite. Low overhead, lease the real estate, sell financial services as a counter product, not a building product. The credit union equivalent is not a branch. It is some combination of shared-branch density that actually reaches rural tracts, kiosks inside existing retailers, employer-payroll partnerships at the source of income, school CU programs that catch the next member at fourteen, and mobile onboarding that does not require an existing account at another bank to start. None of this is hypothetical. The LICU, CDFI, and MDI credit unions that take the mission seriously already do most of it.
What the industry does not do, in aggregate, is plan for these communities the way Dollar General does — as the prospective member, not as the obligation.
Dollar General will open 450 stores in 2026. The household they are serving — by income, by geography, by transaction profile — is the household the Federal Credit Union Act was written to bring into membership. Credit unions do not need to compete with Dollar General. They need to remember that the banking desert is the geography their charter was written for, and that the address is currently being held by somebody else.