As Jersey Shore workers unpack and stock $8 girls' dresses and Good Tuff freezer bags ($2 for a box of 45), a Spacenet installer arrives to set up the satellite link.

Pulling a ladder off his truck, the installer zips up to the roof of the store and mounts a 2.5-foot antenna and a dish that looks like one used at home for satellite television. The indoor equipment is a satellite modem the size of a large dictionary and cables to connect to each IBM register.

"We connect, make sure our hub in Washington, D.C., sees this dish, it lights up," says Randy Anders, the senior account manager at Spacenet who closed the 10-year, $40-million deal with Dollar General in 2001. The IBM registers are connected to the network, and the store's coordinates are added to Spacenet's pre-established connection with Goodlettsville. The work takes three to four hours.

When the contract was signed, Dollar General had 5,000 stores. But it did the deal for 7,500 stores. "They knew their growth," Anders says.

Once the satellite network is humming, headquarters can start to send pricing files and product codes to the registers. Spacenet tests each piece of the Triversity point-of-sale applications, such as nightly polling and authorization of payments by bank and welfare debit cards. Also flung over the satellite are weekly payroll hours, uploaded from the registers.

In Whitesboro, Spacenet doesn't come until Day 5 because of other commitments. Dollar General allows the vendor a two-day window after the IBM delivery.

Dollar General chose satellite communications after balky dial-up connections and spotty broadband coverage in small towns prevented 5% to 8% of its stores from connecting to headquarters each night for mandatory sales reporting, Anders says.

The discounter also wants to avoid mixing communications technology, says Bruce Ash, vice president of information and administrative services. "If you have three or four different networks, it takes people with all those skills to manage them," Ash says. "It's been a philosophy here: Do things as simply as possible."