The Dollar Tree gets a trim. You're listening to Motley for Money.

I'm Mary Long, joined on this fine Wednesday morning by a Mr. Tim Byers.

We are live and in a kind of studio in Denver, Colorado.

Tim, great to see you.

How you doing?

Doing well, Mary.

Fully caffeinated, ready to go.

As am I, refilled my coffee right before we walked in here.

We'll kick off this morning with a story about a family of dollars.

Once upon a time in the year 2015, the Dollar Tree bought the family dollar chain for $9 billion.

Today, about 10 years later, the Dollar Tree is selling that family dollar chain for $1 billion. It's going to a duo of private equity companies.

Tim, solve this for us.

Why couldn't family dollar find its place within the dollar tree family tree?

I mean, I think there are different businesses, to be honest.

The price for the deal isn't necessarily awesome. I do know that, but I'm not sure it's

actually bad because if it doesn't fit, then it doesn't fit. And you have to figure out how to

make the business work on its own. And to be fair, the current Dollar Tree Management has been figuring this out for quite

some time. I mean, they, when they bought Family Dollar, they really piled up quite a lot of debt.

And, you know, they have ever since been lowering their costs, figuring out how to, you know, optimize merchandising, figuring out pricing and so forth.

And so it has gotten, you know, a bit better. Now, I have heard from our colleague Buck Hartzell about this, and he's done a lot more work on this than I have. And I think he's right

in that removing kind of this anchor from Dollar Tree might unleash them because even if it's only

a billion dollars, if you can take that billion dollars and use it to pay off even more debt and get, you know,

...