A bright pink sign on the front door of the Family Dollar store in Corinth Friday afternoon said “We Quit! Bad Company to Work For.”

It included a phone number to “feel free to call.” The number was the store cell phone of Albert Dowling, district manager for Family Dollar.





Reached Saturday morning, Dowling would not comment on the circumstances surrounding the sign, but did acknowledge the store was closed for three hours on Friday afternoon.

“The person who put up the sign no longer works for the company,” he said.

A photo of the sign appeared in a Facebook post by Jonny Palmer of East Corinth.

Palmer said two women, who are friends of his family, quit on Friday around noon over “poor management” at the store. The two women, Hannah Mallett and Tracy Wells, left the store around noon, closed the registers, hung the sign, locked the door and left.

“The company really was completely unfair with everything they did,” said Mallett, who started working at the store at the beginning of December. “The manager left so we were down to four employees.”

Staff at the store Saturday declined to comment. A spokesperson at the Family Dollar headquarters in Chesapeake, Virginia, was not immediately available for comment.

Family Dollar is owned by Dollar Tree, which announced plans last March that called for closing as many as 390 Family Dollar stores and converting another 200 to Dollar Tree stores that were underperforming.

There are 54 Family Dollar stores throughout Maine, according to the company’s website.

Dollar Tree completed its $8.5 billion purchase of Family Dollar in July of 2015. At the time the two discount store chains had more than 13,000 stores. As of last February they operated 8,236 Family Dollar and 7,001 Dollar Tree stores in the United States and Canada.

The companies are scheduled to announce fourth quarter and full-year financial results on March 3.