Trotwood mayor’s diatribe against Dollar General leads to customer service program

TROTWOOD — Businesses in Trotwood will be afforded the opportunity to give their employees the chance to participate in a customer service training program, all because Mayor Mary McDonald lashed out at Dollar General.

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Mayor McDonald took to Facebook Live in early May after noticing that the Dollar General location on East Main Street in Trotwood was in disarray. She called the store “filthy.”

Days after her post, Dollar General closed the location because of her post and cleaned the place.

Thursday, her office announced that “recent discussions with Dollar General management regarding their responsibility as a community partner to provide good customer service while maintaining a clean and healthy environment” led McDonald to initiate a training collaborative with Goodwill Easterseals Miami Valley.

“As mayor, I have an obligation to look for strategies aimed at improving and maintaining the public health, safety, and welfare in the community at-large. Therefore, I intend to work with the city’s fire and rescue department and Code Enforcement Division, along with community partners like the Dayton-Montgomery County Health District, to ensure negligent business owners are held accountable,” she said in a prepared statement.

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Under the municipal powers of local self-government, “Home Rule” authorizes the city of Trotwood to exercise all powers of local sell-governance to enforce within limits such things as public health, safety, and welfare, according to the statement McDonald’s office issued Thursda

The city intends to crack down on negligent business owners who fail to meet standard community norms of maintaining healthy and safe environments for our residents, she said.

City Manager Quincy Pope Sr. said, “We have a fundamental responsibility to make sure the public health, safety, and welfare are a top priority, and we are going to do that.”

Tuesday, in a related development, federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration inspectors listed a Dollar General location in Kettering as one of several stores operated in four states where they found “unsafe conditions typically found by federal workplace safety inspectors,” the U.S. Department of Labor said in a statement.

The workplace safety failures identified in these inspections add $3.4 million in proposed penalties to the more than $21 million in fines the department’s OSHA has proposed since 2017 after conducting 240 inspections at stores nationwide.

The findings of OSHA inspections were made in October, November and December 2022 in Maine, North Dakota, Ohio and Wisconsin.

Based in Goodlettsville, Tennessee, Dollar General Corp. and Dolgencorp LLC operate about 19,000 stores and 28 distribution centers in 47 states and employ more than 173,000 workers. In fiscal year 2022, the company reported more than $9 billion in net sales.

The company has 15 business days from receipt of its citations and penalties to comply, request an informal conference with OSHA’s area director or contest the findings before the independent Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission.

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