Dollar Tree Co-Founder Dies

Macon F. Brock Jr., the co-founder of Chesapeake, Va.-based Dollar Tree, its CEO from 1993 to 2003, and chairman until last September, died Dec. 9 at his home in Virginia Beach, Va., according to published reports. Brock was 75 and suffered from pulmonary fibrosis.

A Marine captain in the Vietnam War and later a Naval Intelligence officer, Brock began working at his father-in-law’s Norfolk, Va., variety store, which he and his brother-in-law, J. Douglas Perry, helped transform into the K & K Toys chain. That business lasted until competition from Toys “R” Us and video games proved its undoing.

Meanwhile, Brock, Perry and K & K executive H. Ray Compton began a side business in dollar stores, Only $1.00 in 1986, based on the Everything’s a Dollar chain. When that company sued over Only $1.00’s name, it was changed to Dollar Tree, first in overlapping markets, and then across the company.

In 2015, Dollar Tree acquired Family Dollar, creating a company with more than 13,000 stores in the United States and Canada.

In February, Brock’s autobiography, “One Buck at a Time," written with Earl Swift, was published.

Survivors include his wife, Joan Perry Brock, who worked for years in the company’s payroll department and traveled with him around the world in search of inexpensive products; two daughters; a son; two sisters; and six grandchildren.