Karen, this is Todd. We're really excited about that, the potential opportunity. And as you stated, we do have a lot of opportunity right here in the Continental United States. And you know us pretty well. I don't -- we won't take our eye off the ball on that. We are squarely committed, seeing 17,000 opportunities in the Continental United States to put a store between pOpshelf and Dollar General. That hasn't changed and nor has our focus on that.
I think as you look at Mexico, the intriguing piece, there's a couple of things. Number one, as you know, going into another country, it's a little bit more complex than going into your 47 state as an example. So we started working on this well over a year ago. And it takes many years to cultivate this initiative. And as we indicated, up to 10 stores next year is fairly aggressive, but it will take us many years to build out Mexico, right? And with that thought, even though we've got so many opportunities here, why not start now was more our kind of thinking because it will take many years.
We don't want to wait till we're down the road and need to move faster. We do everything pretty methodically here. And we feel that for sure, the right thing to do was to start working on it now, with the intent to put many locations down to Mexico. So where will we start? Well, we'll definitely start closer to home, if you will, that Northern Mexico feels right. So it will be probably more in that area. But it will open up as we continue to look at different opportunities as we go.
And then distribution-wise, stay tuned. We're not quite ready to talk about all that. But as you can imagine, before you start putting a lot of distribution centers in Mexico, we'll need some more critical mass. So we're working that plan as we speak as well. We've got a lot of folks on board already. The team has done a great job using a term that we've been incorporated, if you will, in the country of Mexico. So we're now hiring and able to transact in Mexico. I think that's very important. And that's what we're doing right now and starting to look at how we build out that assortment and what it looks like.
And stay tuned. We're excited, as you can probably tell in my voice, this is a real opportunity for us to continue to grow the brand and continue to move forward with Dollar General in different locations other than just the Continental United States.