Dollar General to open in former Rite Aid in Cheswick, Pennsylvania

Dollar General is turning the former Rite Aid on Pittsburgh Street into a new Cheswick store, a move that will soon mean hiring, training and opening-week setup work for nearby employees and applicants. The company said it was finalizing due diligence on 1200 Pittsburgh St. and expected to break ground in the coming weeks.

For associates and district managers, a conversion like this is more than a property swap. It usually means a burst of freight, merchandising, scheduling and training work before the doors open, along with decisions about how many workers the store will need and how quickly the team can be built. The site sits about a mile from another Dollar General in Springdale, a reminder that the company keeps layering stores into places where it thinks the format can still support local demand.

Cheswick officials have welcomed the fill-in use. Borough Council President Brad Yaksich said the community was glad to see the vacant building put back to work, and he pointed to Cheswick’s plans to revitalize Pittsburgh Street with a $1.1 million state grant for sidewalks, curbs and lighting. That matters on the ground because a new retailer can bring a steady stream of deliveries, more foot traffic and a bigger role for store-level staffing in a stretch of town trying to draw activity back to the corridor.

The Cheswick location would become one of more than a dozen Dollar General stores in the Alle-Kiski Valley, underscoring how dense the chain’s footprint already is in suburban and semi-rural western Pennsylvania. Dollar General said in its latest annual report that it operated 20,594 Dollar General, DG Market, DGX and pOpshelf stores across 48 states and Mexico as of Jan. 31, 2025, and that it completed a store portfolio review during the fourth quarter of fiscal 2024. For workers, that signals a company still willing to grow by reworking existing retail boxes, not just by building on empty land.

The former Rite Aid’s closure was part of a wider bankruptcy wave that hit Pennsylvania hard, with roughly 70 Pittsburgh-area Rite Aid stores shuttered during the proceedings. Cheswick’s new Dollar General is another example of how discount chains are moving into the space left by pharmacies and other mid-market retailers. For employees, that shift can mean faster store launches, tighter staffing plans and another round of hiring around a building that already knows how to serve customers.