Like many Jews in the South in the 19th and 20th centuries, his parents, Harry and Minnie Levine, ran a general store, in their case in the nearby city of Rockingham. Leon Levine was born on June 8, 1937, in Wadesboro, a small town in North Carolina. “Leon realized his customers often lived on the margins and struggled to make ends meet,” his foundation website says, adding, “It is his hope that the foundation’s investments lead to greater economic mobility.” Leon Levine hoped his foundation could help the same people who had made his business a success and him a rich man. Some supporters of dollar stores emphasize their value in periods of inflation. Some commentators have argued that dollar stores do not help address the ills of poverty so much as exacerbate them. In 2011, an article in The New York Times Magazine proclaimed a new era, that of “the dollar store economy,” caused by “a new and eroding reality in American life.” As Howard Levine, then Family Dollar’s chief executive, told the magazine, although “not necessarily a good thing for our country, more and more people are living paycheck to paycheck.” The success of dollar stores has often been portrayed as something less than a happy tale of capitalism functioning well. Levine funding antipoverty programs throughout the Carolinas, a cancer institute in Charlotte, an interdisciplinary science center at Duke University and a children’s museum in Rockingham, N.C. By 2020, his nonprofit, the Leon Levine Foundation, had granted more than $300 million, with Mr. Levine retired from Family Dollar in 2003 and focused on philanthropy. The chain expanded from the South to major metropolitan centers nationwide.
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