Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/03/customers-pay-more-rising-dollar-store-costs

by bookofjoe • 8 months ago

514 728 8 months ago

JSR_FDED• 8 months ago

23% of items are rung up at a higher amount at the register than what it says on the shelf, yet North Carolina law caps penalties at $5,000 per inspection, offering retailers little incentive to fix the problem.

In other words, regulatory capture at its finest, over the backs of the poorest in the country.

itsdrewmiller2• 8 months ago

It’s not regulatory capture unless the regulatory body itself is controlled by shady grocers. This is just garden variety insufficient regulation. Although if they inspected every day it would probably still be profitable for the state.

lowbloodsugar• 8 months ago

The rich own congress. At this point, it's all regulatory capture.

gessha2• 8 months ago

What this calls for is an Amazon-style optimization of inspections. Given X inspectors and Y locations, what is the most optimal routing to optimize for coverage and penalty collection?

mindslight7• 8 months ago

Amazon-style optimization? You mean they send three different inspectors to the same store on the same day, each scanning one third of the necessary items for the audit?

burnt-resistor5• 8 months ago

Offtopic, but I made the mistake once of buying groceries from Amazon and they instead sold me a package of cheddar cheese that was completely blue from mold. Some "quality" inspections they got going don't bode well for public-private "partnerships" that outsource essential government functions to a corrupt third-party that's likely to be owned by a craptastic private equity hedge fund.

terminalshort5• 8 months ago

Better optimization would be to make everybody an inspector. You catch a store doing it on video and report it to the agency, you get 50% of the fine.

burnt-resistor5• 8 months ago

I don't know NC law. Does it have an "invitation to treat" practice there where prices marked are a customer relations issue rather than a legally-binding offer?

To attain change, enough people have to:

1. Correctly identify the source of their misery, because it ain't [insert scapegoats].

2. Find others who agree with them.

3. Make a plan for effective countering of 1.

4. Use intestinal fortitude and endure temporary setbacks to achieve 3. to overcome 1.

5. Prevent 1. from ever happening again structurally, culturally, and through vigilant participation.

The 0th problem is the political operating system is captured by criminals and power has centralized grotesquely in ways that defeat the fundamental function of separation of powers. All elected officials corrupted by lobbyist bribes need to face accountability and have a code of ethics and integrity, because continuing down this path is the road to ruin.

dmurray3• 8 months ago

I don't think the laws of the specific jurisdiction matter. In every US jurisdiction, the prices aren't completely legally binding (what if the previous customer changed the price tag?). In ~every US jurisdiction, if you systematically show one price but charge customers another, that's an offence.

So intent matters. What would decide an individual case is not the exact characterisation of the laws on the books, but how sympathetic a regulator or a judge is to the supermarket's claim that these things just happen sometimes.

joshuaissac• 8 months ago

NC law. Does it have an "invitation to treat" practice [...] rather than a legally-binding offer?

Are there any common-law jurisdictions in the world where having products on sale in a supermarket is not generally considered invitation to treat but as an offer to sell?

progval• 8 months ago

Regulatory capture is when a large company encourages stronger regulations that small competitors cannot afford to satisfy. Here the issue is regulation that is too weak, not too strong.

thfuran3• 8 months ago

No, that’s just one form of regulatory capture. If this legislation is a result of lobbying from retailers opposing imposing meaningful fines, particularly if the state of things before its adoption was that penalties from failed inspections were often higher, then this is regulatory capture.

mystraline2• 8 months ago

yet North Carolina law caps penalties at $5,000 per inspection

So, have every agent in the state inspect them. Fine 5k. Immediately inspect again, different goods. Fine another 5k. Keep doing it opening hours.

Treat them like an inspection money piñata until they fix their ways. State gets a big pile of money to do better, and massive fines at 5k a pop for a few weeks punish the company and their bottom line.

pixl977• 8 months ago

I mean, more like someone elected and really high up in the state government calls the inspection office and tells them to stop, or everyone at the inspection office will get fired, since said elected person cares far more about getting reelected then the people that they should be representing.

phil218• 8 months ago

Why are we taking this whole “the $5k fine is nothing” thing at face value?

A long time ago I used to help manage a couple retail stores. A $5k random expense would have put that location into the red for the month. Perhaps not the volume of a dollar store chain, but certainly not small either.

I have a feeling that if the $5k fines were basically guaranteed to happen with some regularity you’d see this cleaned up pretty quickly with local management replaced ASAP if not.

Enforcement doesn’t have to be over the top abusive with the goal to put a location out of business overnight. Especially in already underserved communities. Like everything to do with humans there simply needs to be consistent, reliable, and timely consequences to form a reliable and immediate feedback loop for behavior.

If a store makes it an actual policy to eat these fines then the fine amount needs adjusting. From everything in this article though the problem is simply it’s worth the gamble they don’t happen at all.

amarant• 8 months ago

Say what you will about the EU, but they figured out how to scale corporate fines correctly: max 10% of owning entities annual income.

sneak• 8 months ago

Why are fines capped?

fencepost2• 8 months ago

Depending on how much independence the inspectors have they could probably turn a heck of a profit per inspector (thus being able to argue their continued existence to the legislature).

Could an inspector manage two per day? If you figure the full cost of each inspector is $150,000/year but dedicated ones could do 8 inspections at $5k each per week, there's well over $1 million/year per inspector (assuming not all inspections would be the full fine, there's travel costs per inspector, inspectors would have to spend some office/court time, etc. that would bring it down from the potential maximum of ~$1,800,000 each factoring in vacation and holidays).

Even Republicans could get behind it! "We're reducing the direct budget of the department, but authorizing it to hire additional inspectors in order to bring in additional revenue that can be utilized to bring the budget to or above its current levels." It's a cost reduction measure!

thfuran3• 8 months ago

Even Republicans could get behind it!

No, they have no actual interest in saving the government money, especially if it comes at the cost of enforcing regulations on corporations.

bux93• 8 months ago

There's precedent for this; the Federal False Claims Act lets you sue on behalf of the government if you spot someone defrauding a federal program (in this case, perhaps if they take SNAP?). If your suit is succesful you get 15%-30% of the recovery for your troubles. There are "private attorney general" rules on the books at a state level too. I think it's kind of elegant, we can all see that inspections are understaffed, but non-compliance is often not that hard to spot and document. I'd propost that employees should have some whistleblower protection (and relief from NDAs and such) for building dossiers with supporting documentation of criminal fraud.

These provision are called "qui tam" from "qui tam pro domino rege quam pro se ipso in hac parte sequitur", or “who sues in this matter both for the king and for himself.”

I think they suit well with the US's history of bounty hunting, much like class action suits.

apparent• 8 months ago

Seems like it actually creates an incentive to go big or go home. If you're already going to be busted and hit with the maximum fine, might as well have even larger mispricings, so you come out ahead after the fine is taken into account.

rightbyte• 8 months ago

little incentive to fix the problem.

It is all these Karen memes that ruined complaining about being screwed over by corparate interests.

nlh• 8 months ago

“In one court case in Ohio, Dollar General’s lawyers argued that “it is virtually impossible for a retailer to match shelf pricing and scanned pricing 100% of the time for all items. Perfection in this regard is neither plausible nor expected under the law.””

Sorry—-what? Isn’t that one of the fundamental basic jobs to be done and expectations of a retailer? You put physical things on display for sale, you mark prices on them, and you sell them. When the prices change, you send one of your employees to the appropriate shelves and you change the tag.

When on earth did we get into a world where that absolutely fundamental most basic task is now too burdensome to do with accuracy?

tokai2• 8 months ago

Just make the sticker price legally binding and this issue would be solved with almost perfect precision.

mindslight7• 8 months ago

The sticker price is legally binding - it constitutes an offer, and the cash register surreptitiously charging a higher price from what the customer has agreed to constitutes fraud. The problem is that asserting your rights takes time, resources, and energy that people shopping at these stores generally do not have. The people that would have the ability to push back instead just use their resources to move on and shop somewhere else that isn't immediately abusing them.

xrd• 8 months ago

Dollar General: "people these days just don't want to work (meaning, my clients don't want to do that work or pay lazy genZers...)!"

jrmg3• 8 months ago

It’s virtually impossible for them because they’re not considering hiring more people to do it.

Dollar General stores often run with one overworked staff member doing everything in the store, from stocking to working the register (which is why the register is unstaffed so much and you have roam the store to find someone to ring you up…)

nkrisc• 8 months ago

“Because of conditions of our own making, it is virtually impossible to comply with the law, thus we shouldn’t be held accountable to it.”

It’s the same BS when Meta and others say they can’t moderate posts because there’s too many.

jlund-molfese• 8 months ago

I used to work at Best Buy replacing pricing stickers before the store opened. We had a sheet of new stickers for changed prices every time and had to scan every sticker in the store to make sure they were all up to date.

It makes sense they’re all switching to e-ink tags though, probably saves a ton in labor and the occasional mistake.

spwa44• 8 months ago

That's because those stickers constitute an offer of sale for a given price. If a customer comes in, takes the item, throws down the cash to an employee and leaves, that's a 100% bone fide legal sale.

That's also why messing with price stickers is a crime.

terminalshort5• 8 months ago

An easy test for this is how often the price at the register is higher vs lower than the marked price. If it's close to 50%, then ok, it's a mistake. But if it's higher...

Spivak• 8 months ago

I don't think you would reasonably expect it to be close to 50/50. Most price changes are increases and the mistake theory basically boils down to the employees never updating the shelf tags. Which I think is an extremely plausible theory since the one employee at the store isn't paid enough to bother. And who's even going to check that they updated the tags? Dollar General isn't shelling out money for that.

There's another kind of store that's in a similar situation: thrift stores and nearly all of them have also decided this problem is too hard. Lots of items are marked with just colors based roughly around their estimated value and the store changes the price/color mapping occasionally.

adolph2• 8 months ago

When on earth did we get into a world where that absolutely fundamental most basic task is now too burdensome to do with accuracy?

It always has been this way since barcoded stock keeping units because of the problems identified by CAP Theorem [0]. Since the price data of an object must exist in two locations, shelf and checkout, the data is partitioned. It is also relatively expensive to update the shelf price since it depends on physical changes made by an unreliable human. Even if all stores used electronic price tags there will a very small lag, or a period in which prices are unavailable (or a period of unavailability like an overnight closure).

It would be interesting to understand at what point of shelf/checkout accuracy would lead to what increases in overall prices [1]. That is to say that pricing information has a cost: a buyer must bring the item to checkout to find out the true cost in the case of authoritative checkout, or the clerk must walk to each shelf in the case of authoritative shelf.

Once upon a time, each item in the store was labeled with a price tag and the clerk typed that tag into a tabulation device in order to calculate tax and total. The advent of the bar code lead to shelf label pricing since the clerk needn't read a price from each item, leading to the CAP Theory problem of today.

I suppose that the future will bring back something similar to individual price tags in the form of individual RFID pricing. This way each individual item on a shelf can be priced in a way that is readable by the buyer and the seller in the same manner.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAP_theorem

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_efficiency

11235813214• 8 months ago

This is poor behavior by the stores. The solution will be conversion to eink shelf labels that sync like registers do. Realistically, the fines will not be increased to the point where increasing store staffing and training is cheaper. I don’t know where Dollar General is in this process, but many other c-stores and grocery stores have implemented digital labels. Digital labels come with the temptation to experiment with more dynamic pricing which would also make it harder to shop on a budget. However, high staffing or fines also increases prices. I wish we had better retail in more of the United States, especially needier areas.

morkalork2• 8 months ago

I am convinced the wallmarts in Canada are doing dynamic with the eink price tags. I was in the same location twice in a week to pick up snacks for a gathering and the price of chips were 50% more on the Friday vs earlier in the week.

netsharc• 8 months ago

Huh, with eInk prices, how do customers prove "Wait, the price on the shelf was different!", the store can just change the price as they go to double-check. As a customer you can take a picture of the price, but then it'll be an argument of "This picture is old/doctored/AI".

Of course the chances of this sort of scam happening are probably not that high, but hey, considering the country is rotting more and more, from the top...

11235813214• 8 months ago

I believe they may in the US, too. Anecdotally, I bought all of the Dr Thunder Zero Sugar at one store twice, and they bumped it about 20% for a few weeks after that. They didn’t change the other generic sodas’ prices.

potato37328426• 8 months ago

Seems shortsighted for a retail business since people will only need to get burned once or twice to stop showing up.

iinnPP• 8 months ago

This happens at Walmart Canada all the time. The policy there is to slash 10$ off shelf price (or free for anything 10 or less).

Since COVID, Walmart has stopped having immediate fixes of the problem.

Since 2020, I have accumulated about $1200 in free merchandise using the above. Almost always food.

paulcole3• 8 months ago

Publix in the southeast US will give you anything that rings up wrong for free. I shopped there for 20+ years and only remember getting a handful of things free.

bombcar7• 8 months ago

The disastrous Target Canada (iirc) was similar; obviously nobody cared at all.

zahlman2• 8 months ago

I'm in Toronto and I've never had anything ring up incorrectly at Wal-Mart. I can't recall ever having anything ring up incorrectly anywhere else, either. There have maybe been a couple of times where a sale price didn't apply to all the SKUs I thought it did.

modzu2• 8 months ago

what's the point of this hit piece? isnt that frying pan with a sticker price of $10 and rung up at $12 still $50 anywhere else?

paulcole3• 8 months ago

Is it a hit piece if it’s true lol?

jrmg3• 8 months ago

I don’t think this is true. Even if pricing in the shelves is accurate, in my experience Dollar General is typically a little more expensive than a normal mid-range supermarket (or e.g. Amazon) for most things.

modzu2• 8 months ago

then why do poor people shop there? is the idea dollar general is strategically misleading them to see prices advertised lower than a normal supermarket but in fact they are higher? i didn't think the article was making that strong of a claim at all. it seemed more like, operations are minimal and staffing short (which in theory enables lower prices) and they linked the staffing issue with simply just not being on top of updating price changes on the shelves

jancsika• 8 months ago

Could work like this:

1. You help your friend wash the dishes and notice their hefty, 5-quart stainless steel pot. You look it up on Amazon and it's like $50.

2. At $store, you see something that looks like that size and style of pot, but for only $10. What a steal! It's even ultralight so it should be easier to load in the dishwasher...

*Several months later*

3. Your pot is all warped to hell, making it difficult to cook evenly. But your friend's pot is probably fine for the next few decades if not longer. (Note: if this were an oven pan the warping would make it dangerous to use.)

4. To add insult to injury, $store got two more of your dollars just because.

I picked the 5-quart pot because I've seen one of these with my own eyes.

In any case, OP would have been better off paying me $38 for nothing but crushing their dream of buying a decent quality $10 frying pan.

analog8374• 8 months ago

Happened to me yesterday. Haagendaz ice cream. $4 on the shelf, $5 at the register.

spwa44• 8 months ago

If it says $4 on the shelf and you pay $4 at the register and walk out with the goods, that's a 100% legal sale and not theft. Not even if it was a mistake on the part of some employee (and it's not the employee's fault either, by the way)

masfuerte• 8 months ago

It literally is the employee's fault but they are not legally liable for it.

gruez19• 8 months ago

If it says $4 on the shelf and you pay $4 at the register and walk out with the goods, that's a 100% legal sale and not theft.

Source? What happens if somebody stuck a $1 sticker on a ps5? Does that mean you can walk out paying $1 for it, even if the cashier corrects you? What if it's not something absurd but a plausible good deal, like $50 off?

mminer237• 8 months ago

The store is under no legal obligation to sell it to you, just like you're not obligated to buy it for that price. Depending on the situation, that might be false advertising they could get in trouble for, and obviously you're not committing a crime if you don't know the real price, but if someone says "oops, that's a mistake", and you take it anyway and give less money, that is theft in most states.

firefax3• 8 months ago

I had a clerk flip out on me a while back at a Dollar Tree because I wanted a charge for a dollar -- it rang up as 1.25. They rolled their eyes and told me not everything is a dollar, and I maintained that absent pricing stickers indicating otherwise, the default is a dollar. When I pointed out another way to look at it is it's a twenty five percent price discrepancy, someone came out of an office and literally screamed at me and chased me out of the store for "causing a problem", telling me that if I'm going to cause problems, so will she.

I wasn't cursing or yelling, just calmly making the points I made above as the employees took a dive bar approach to customer service...

It doesn't surprise me at all that this kind of thing is intentional -- they're banking on you not walking out without the item having carried it to the checkout.

aimor• 8 months ago

"the default is a dollar"

There is no default price.

firefax3• 8 months ago

It's called "dollar tree" for a reason, historically prices were and are a dollar unless otherwise noted.

mistrial9• 8 months ago

I can't cite details, but I believe that case law has settled this many times.. When a customer enters a commercial business, there are implied contracts that are enforceable.. I am thinking of restaurants first. I believe it is the responsibility of the goods and services provider to show prices accurately and honor them, and variations of that are well-understood in court. These kind of transactions are common for thousands of years in the West.

hamdingers2• 8 months ago

Even if they accurately charged shelf prices, these places are still a ripoff targeting the vulnerable. The list price is low but the per-unit price is astronomical compared to grocery store prices.

throwaway98797• 8 months ago

time value of money

we don’t complain that the per unit cost at target is higher than at costco

DangitBobby10• 8 months ago

Because it's very rare that Target crowds out the only Costco that sells produce in a 20 mile radius leaving only boxed shit food for people to buy.

neilv2• 8 months ago

The "dollar stores" vary.

I've been able to find good deals on some things at Dollar Tree. Usually the good deals were a smaller quantity of a normal-quality brand-name item. I mostly avoid the substandard quality items. But even sometimes substandard is OK if, say, you want to make your political demonstration sign on white foamcore (much cheaper than the art supply store, and you don't care if it's smaller, thinner, or outgassing) rather than on an Amazon shipping box.

There was a Family Dollar across from a large public housing project here, where I also went looking for deals, but the shelf prices looked like a convenience store. I didn't find out whether they were fraudulently charging even more at the register like this article describes. (I hope it closed because the residents knew there was an affordable Market Basket a 20-30 minute walk away, over the city line and train tracks, and they were able to get there and find the time for it.)

analog312• 8 months ago

>> rather than on an Amazon shipping box.

My wife attended a political protest, and said she noticed signs made from my employer's shipping boxes.

adrr2• 8 months ago

Have you ever been to a dollar store? Its much cheaper for the same items than a regular grocery store. Also not everyone needs a Costco sized tub of mayo. You test it yourself go by a standard sized candy bar at safeway/alberstons and then at a dollar store. Bottle of coke. Birthday card. Better yet compare the cost spices. Try to buy bay leaves at regular grocery store for under $5.

hamdingers2• 8 months ago

Candy bars and soda sure whatever. Look at essentials. The dollar store near me charges $1.99 for 8oz of Tide, the Albertsons a single block further charges $9.99 for 84oz, the dollar store is over double the cost. It's the same story with soap, cleaning products, etc. A tiny container for cheap feels like a deal if you can't do the math, but it's not. Feel free to "test it yourself."

I'm lucky in that I have a real grocery store nearby to compare to. If you live in a food desert where these big chains have driven out all competition you wouldn't have a choice.

thfuran3• 8 months ago

Spices are pretty much universally horribly overpriced at grocery stores.

phil218• 8 months ago

Spices might be the most universal ripoff anywhere in the US. You can get it so much cheaper either at ethnic stores, generic plastic bags at certain grocery stores in the ethnic aisles, or restaurant supply stores for spices that don’t have a short shelf life.

It’s so bizarre to me. At some point someone needs to do an in-depth expose on how this spice monopoly happened.

qingcharles2• 8 months ago

I lived for an entire year out of just Dollar General and Dollar Tree. In some rough areas they are the only stores where you can buy groceries, so they have very clear monopolies. There are good value products, and like everything these days you have to use their apps to get the best offers. Also, the Dollar General app lets you check the price of everything before you take it to the counter. They regularly have items marked up at 1 cent.

burnt-resistor5• 8 months ago

Yup. Dollar General is worse than a convenience store like 7-11, it's an expensive inconvenience store.

And we need more local co-op grocery stores like Berkeley Bowl, the Davis Co-op, and ATX Wheatsville.

zdragnar2• 8 months ago

I have yet to visit a co-op that had cheaper than grocery store prices. Every single one focused on quality over cost savings.

raptor999• 8 months ago

LOL yeah OK, are we just making random statements now?

Yup. Outback Steakhouse is worse than a fast food store like McDonald's, it's an expensive not fast food store.

IncreasePosts6• 8 months ago

People usually understand this, but realize driving 10 minutes to dollar tree for a few items is preferable to driving 30 minutes to cheaper shop

kube-system2• 8 months ago

While that can be bad, sometimes you come out ahead after accounting for spoilage, time, and travel.

Sometimes I pay higher unit prices at a dollar store intentionally because they offer smaller package sizes not offered elsewhere and I only need the smaller amount. I could get a much better unit price at another store but would waste the rest of the product.

kotaKat• 8 months ago

Speaking of travel, that's why I go for them.

If I'm going for a multi-day stay somewhere and I don't want to deal with annoying mini bottles of hotel soap, I'll just pop into a Dollar Whatsit for a small bottle of something suitable at my destination.

mschuster913• 8 months ago

The list price is low but the per-unit price is astronomical compared to grocery store prices.

The problem is, so is material cost and handling effort. Say, a 2 liter bottle of soda compared to 10x 200 mL. Same amount of soda, but more handling required for stocking, inventory management (aka, make sure there is no soda expiring on the shelf) and finally scanning it over the cash register, and more packaging material.

Larger units of anything will always be cheaper than small units.

raw_anon_111110• 8 months ago

Saying it only targets the vulnerable because of high unit prices is like saying the local gas station is a rip off that only targets the vulnerable because prices are higher.

I lived in a city that’s in North Metro Atlanta (Johns Creek) where the median household income was $160K. There was a Dollar General right by a Publix. People still went in the Dollar General for little things where the small packages that you could buy was feature and not a bug.

We still stop by the dollar store for snacks sometimes because it is convenient just to get things to pack for a flight. It’s especially popular for tourists in Orlando where I live

pests• 8 months ago

There is one near Naples in Florida I go to often just for the insane drink discounts compared to the Publix or Wawa or the Walmart Neighborhood Market thing across the street.

raptor999• 8 months ago

Aw man, that is such a rip off!

Grocery stores are a rip off too. The per unit price of items at them are astronomical compared to Sam's Club prices.

Sam's Club is a rip off too. The per unit price of items at them are astronomical compared to the wholesale price.

paulcole3• 8 months ago

North Carolina law caps penalties at $5,000 per inspection, offering retailers little incentive to fix the problem. “Sometimes it is cheaper to pay the fines,” said Chad Parker, who runs the agency’s weights-and-measures program.

Well, there’s your problem.

paultopia3• 8 months ago

At a certain point we have to acknowledge that a huge share of our economy is just raw predation.

swatcoder• 8 months ago

We might also acknowledge that a pretty significant share of people do know that already and just shrug their shoulders to it, convinced that it's better to allow for that than do anything about it.

There's been a lot of work put into distilling "free market" into its most radical interpretation, and lots of people just aren't open to bringing much nuance or pragmatism to bear upon it any more. Many lessons learned painfully in late 19th and early 20th century have been forgotten and the counterweight and containment policies that they earned now tend to get ignored or dismantled.

c-linkage• 8 months ago

Always has been.

_DeadFred_• 8 months ago

It really wasn't this bad in the past on a whole. There were plenty of bad actors, but EVERY actor wasn't bad.

Just look at food recipes American corporations feed to Americans, and their different recipes for Europe that look more like the American recipes circa the 1990s. Everything in America is optimised to the max permissible bad action.

A4ET8a8uTh0_v2• 8 months ago

And somehow instead of trying to make it better, there are never ending attempts to make it even worse somehow ( if some of the patents are to believed ). I honestly sometimes wonder if some of the stuff is not in place already only because public reaction if all those were plopped in place in one go.

IncreasePosts6• 8 months ago

Well, why don't the ethical non-predators open up shops in economically disadvantaged areas and offer non-predatory prices? The margins must be huge if they really are predators.

smallmancontrov2• 8 months ago

The loot is already spoken for by complements and embedded in real estate prices, stock prices, etc.

Hobbes arguments can rationalize any Nash Equilibrium.

conrs2• 8 months ago

Good question, was on my mind too. The problem I could see is Walmart style - the predator will beat the prices of the non-predator down until the non-predator goes out of business, then raise their prices again.

They can do this because they are operating in other areas with predatory prices, giving them the ability to operate at a loss, and relying on the fact that at least some of those areas are not being challenged by non-predators.

Everybody seems to be playing the game right in this scenario. Interesting to try to come up with a good counter.

potato37328426• 8 months ago

Yeah. Why do I have to pay a plumber to install gas appliances? It's just a protectionist racket.

Point is, it's easy to screech "predation" or whatever but the problem is that every one of these things has some justification that can be used in the abstract.

It does legitimately cost more to run a store like Dollar General than Walmart so the same can of beans has to cost more on their shelf for the same margin.

How much more, how much is justified? I don't know.

paultopia3• 8 months ago

A justification for lying to poor people about the prices of things they're trying to buy? Do tell.

_fat_santa• 8 months ago

I experienced this first hand maybe a year ago when I randomly walked into a dollar general to get something, their prices often times are pretty close to the "regular" versions of the product, but packaged specifically for dollar stores.

I get why people shop at them in rural places because that's the only shop within 10-20 miles but in cities it makes no sense. Had prices been 20-30% cheaper but in a smaller size it would still be a ripoff but an understandable one, but often times I saw products that were priced just 3-5% below their standard counterparts while giving you maybe 30%-50% of the product.

itsdrewmiller2• 8 months ago

Every store has some stuff that is overpriced compared to peers and some stuff that is underpriced. Dollar stores make their money more on drastic understaffing (leading to the issue in the article) and national scale than they do on being a consistently worse value. They have the cheapest freeze dried strawberries by weight you can get anywhere other than making them yourself.

silisili• 8 months ago

Same. My city has a Walmart, Publix, Food Lion, Kroger, and Aldi. Yet they keep building dollar stores, I think there's now 5 within 10 miles of my house. They all seem to do decent traffic, which baffles me. The stores are a mess, items disheveled everywhere, and rare to see more than a single person working. Really depressing places, I cannot figure out their appeal.

bombcar7• 8 months ago

People still think they’re getting. Deal. They’ll figure it out eventually. Same with goodwill selling clothes for at or above new prices, eventually the knowledge propagates.

The main thing keeping the local dollar stores alive is the death of Party City as far as I can tell.

parpfish• 8 months ago

an interesting contrast that i think about a lot:

- in rural america, there are dollar stores everywhere that overcharge for small items. people treat them as a necessary evil and begrudgingly shop there.

- in nyc, there are corner bodegas everywhere that overcharge for small items. they are generally seen as beloved neighborhood institutions.

so... what's the difference? corporate owned vs family owned? length of time in community? presence of cute cat at the register?

inglor_cz• 8 months ago

Once upon a time I lived near the Prague city centre, and if the intent of such a corner shop is to rip off tourists and one-time visitors, the locals don't mind - at least as long as cheaper alternatives off the most notorious areas exist and are usable for them (Lidl etc.)

Quite to the contrary, the locals are sometimes happy to have such overcharged options at hand, for example if they are throwing a party and find out that they are short on vodka+cigs, and it is 1 am and all the regular shops are closed.

thenewwazoo• 8 months ago

Bodegas charge you a little bit more because a real human owner accepts the risk of serving a small community in exchange for being part of that community, and you pay that extra in order to make their existence possible.

Dollar Generals charge you a little bit more because a huge chain has driven out all the competition and you have no choice. The people who work there do not benefit from the extra you pay, and the owners are not members of the community.

IncreasePosts6• 8 months ago

There was no competition in many places dollar stores operate. They moved into those places specifically because they were underserved by larger retailers.

leipert• 8 months ago

Probably „only store that’s in my vicinity“ in rural areas vs. „if that bodega sucks, I go to another“. So one is a necessity which overcharges, the other a convenience which overcharges.

analog312• 8 months ago

In both cases they charge a little more because the next store charges a little more too.

gessha2• 8 months ago

Because in NYC I pass by tens of the bodegas on the way to work and I can shop at any one of them. I can also shop at Aldi’s, Trader Joe’s, Costco, what have you.

You said it well yourself - “begrudgingly”. With so many options and price points, I don’t have to begrudgingly shop at bodegas. I do it happily if it serves my goal of getting a single can of Coke. If I want to get a whole stack of them, I’d happily get them at Costco. Options are great when you have them.

gdulli• 8 months ago

Minimum wage in NY is $15.50, in Kansas it's $7.25. The overcharging in rural areas is not adjusted downward for lower wages. But I wouldn't shop at a bodega and don't find it virtuous there either.

woodruffw2• 8 months ago

This article is about something subtly different than overcharging: it's about consumers believing that they're paying one amount (the list/sticker price), and being charged a different amount (typically higher in the company's favor) at checkout.

In my experience, this doesn't really happen with bodegas: they might be overpriced in the "this is a bad deal for milk" sense, but they don't misrepresent their sticker prices to any degree that I've ever experienced.

(But also, I don't think bodegas do categorically overcharge in NYC. I think they're about the same as grocery stores, i.e. there's a large amount of internal variation in pricing because people generally don't want to make multiple bodega pit stops just to save $2.00 on eggs.)

bluedino• 8 months ago

Hey, Starbucks charges $3.50 for a cookie, I could buy 4 at the local bakery or two at the farmers market for that much (and get a better cookie).

pixl977• 8 months ago

Hey, Starbucks charges $3.50 for a cookie

No, that's not what the article is about.

"Starbucks has a sign saying the cookie is $3.50. You are charged $5 at the counter".

That is the infraction here.

raptor999• 8 months ago

Not really sure where your examples or experiences come from, but the majority of rural people that I know love most of their dollar stores.

valbaca3• 8 months ago

what's the difference?

Did you read the article? Charging what's actually on the price tag is the first thing that's the difference.

ccamrobertson• 8 months ago

One simple solution here (and for all sorts of legislated fines and thresholds) would be to tie them to inflation; it looks like the fine of $5,000 dates to the early 90s.

eudamoniac• 8 months ago

As someone who typically only enters a Whole Foods or a Home Depot for her retail experiences, the one time I entered a Dollar General, I was struck by how depressing it felt. I would never go back into one. Yes, I know how out of touch this sounds.

linsomniac• 8 months ago

I think that's deliberate: you walk into a dollar store and think "they aren't spending a dime on the shopping experience, so they must be passing that dime onto me."

raptor999• 8 months ago

Yes, yes of course. The leftover smell of homeless urine by the front door isn't real; it is only carefully calculated scents piped in by corporate dollar store yuppies to have you believe this is an authentic experience.

ghaff• 8 months ago

I have a very, very convenient Walmart including a pharmacy so I do go in from time to time especially for standardized purchases. But I don't really like it. And I poked my head into an adjacent Aldi once and retreated. Otherwise not really worth the headache.

CommenterPerson• 8 months ago

I shop at Walmart and Costco. The customers at the Costco appear much better off, but they seem much more arrogant and inconsiderate. They leave carts in the middle of the aisle, talk on phones with their families blocking the way, and so forth. Same behavior in the parking lots. Maybe it's because Costco is always packed. The shoppers at the Walmart definitely look less well off. They are much more respectful and considerate of others. I like shopping at the Walmart more.

burnt-resistor5• 8 months ago

Dollar stores are the new neighborhood "outlet stores" compared to outlet stores of yesteryear (remote locations for not much/any savings). They're actually glorified convenience stores while also not being proper substitutes for grocery stores in food deserts. Most US grocery stores are also now rip-offs like convenience stores were, while big box stores are somewhat savings stores now... f'kin' turbo inflation.

I don't know about the feasibility of government grocery stores, but I'm pretty sure the entire food supply chain would benefit from massively changing to the employee-/customer-/supplier-owned co-op model and get megacorps and private equity out of the normalized deviancy of predatory money extraction for essential goods and services.

danaris• 8 months ago

"The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. ... A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. ... But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet."

"This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socio-economic unfairness."

- Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms

——

Dollar stores, even when they're actually giving you low prices (and not just charging $1 for 1 of something that you could get a 3-pack of for $2 elsewhere), are often selling lower-quality versions of the products they sell—sometimes versions specifically made for them, but without any visible difference in packaging.

phantasmish• 8 months ago

are often selling lower-quality versions of the products they sell

Clothes brands do this too.

Clothes at the outlet store aren't the same as clothes at Dillards, what's stocked at a struggling Macy's in a relatively poor area may be different from what's available for the same brand at Macy's in Manhattan, and all that may not be the same as what's in their flagship stores.

Sometimes they make it semi-obvious provided you learn their secret label language (Polo by Ralph Lauren, Chaps by Ralph Lauren, Ralph Lauren Purple Label, and about a half-dozen other major variants, for example). They do this so they can sell shit to unsophisticated consumers at a large mark-up for the name, riding on the reputation and clout of the good versions of what they sell (elsewhere, at even higher prices).

tialaramex• 8 months ago

Yes, being poor is expensive and people just don't seem to grok that

Take energy. I'm not rich but I'm comfortable, my energy is paid for in an efficient way, I can shop around easily for the best rates for my lifestyle and so on. But if I had no money they'll fit a pay-per-use meter, they charge more money to fill that meter, if I can't fill it or forget to then the power goes out - and it's inconvenient to use it.

Years ago now I had a dispute with the water utility. I refused to pay, so, they eventually concluded that fixing their error was too difficult so they just created a new account starting from zero and wrote off all the costs for the disputed period entirely. If I'd been poor, they'd have threatened to cut off the supply (they're only threatening, fortunately it's not actually legal here to cease supplying clean water to poor people like they're not even animals) and sent scary people to demand payment.

absoluteunit1• 8 months ago

Dollarama Inc. stock price is up 273% in the last 5 years.

potato37328426• 8 months ago

Listen, I know we all love to circle jerk about how dollar stores are evil, but you can walk into just about any regional chain supermarket and replicate the same exercise and get about the same results.

woodruffw2• 8 months ago

Can you? I think the implicit counterclaim in TFA is that other supermarkets/stores don't fail state pricing inspections nearly as often. If you have evidence/articles showing that TFA has cherry-picked dollar stores for criticism, that would be helpful to share.

potato37328426• 8 months ago

I've got one local grocery store where the meat prices are sometimes off and another where it's the bakery. The fact that it seems to be confined to certain departments makes think it has a lot to do with the quantity and quality of labor being applied. And dollar stores being dollar stores they apply the cheapest and they apply it sparingly. Not that that excuses it but it at least explains it.

venturecruelty9• 8 months ago

What a rude, dismissive comment about a very real issue affecting real people.

rtp4me9• 8 months ago

Sorry, real people who are on a real (strict) budget pay attention to the price of goods when they shop. If you are really hurting from a $3 overcharge, chances are you pay very close attention to the register receipt and bring it to the store's attention. Regardless of income, my wife and I routinely scrutinize the register receipt. Force of habit.

stevenwliao• 8 months ago

I check prices on my reciepts. I shop at Costco, Walmart, 99 Ranch, Sprouts, and Trader Joe's.

I'm fairly certain the error rate for all those shops is less than 5%.

jmclnx• 8 months ago

I wish I could be surprised and I can see this happening in many places. This type of 'fraud' was predicted when we allowed the stores to stop marking items with the price.

Many places were I shop, hardly any products are lined up with the price attached to the shelves, plus the descriptions of some items are confusing due to the multiple names for the same thing.

Time to force stores to mark each item with the price once again.

exasperaited2• 8 months ago

Cash strapped, but also presumably more likely than the general population to be innumerate or have dyscalculia or dyslexia.

It's the same bullshit that allows discount prices on Black Friday or during January sales to be completely misleading.

In the UK we are much tougher on this kind of manipulative pricing, but you still find manipulative things, like being unable to find the price-per-100g on discounted items and "clubcard" items, or bulk buys that end up having higher unit costs and yet seem not to be errors.

securingsincity• 8 months ago

Massachusetts has a quite prominent law against this.

"When buying groceries—food and non-alcoholic beverages, pet food or supplies, disposable paper or plastic products, soap, household cleaners, laundry products, or light bulbs—you must be charged the lowest displayed price, whether on the sticker, scanner, website, or app.

If the lowest price you saw for an item is $10 or less, and that lowest price is not what you were charged or not what appeared on the in-aisle price scanner, the first item should be FREE. If the lowest price you saw for an item is more than $10, and that lowest price is not what you were charged or not what appeared on the in-aisle price scanner, you should receive $10.00 off the first item."

https://www.mass.gov/info-details/consumer-pricing-accuracy-...

Not to say it's not happening in a Mass based Dollar Stores but you could be walking away with a lot of free stuff and it would be enough of a deterrent to stomp out the practice. I've had it happen at grocery stores usually at their suggesting.

kube-system2• 8 months ago

I can’t help imagining that the likelihood of successfully arguing for a free product with a DG cashier is slim to none.

hippo22• 8 months ago

Unfortunately, this type of conflict can only be adjudicated by courts, which low-income people don't have the time and money for. You couldn't just walk out of the store with the items. You'd need to either:

1. Buy the items and sue.

2. Take the items without paying, likely get the police called on you, and defend yourself in criminal and civil court.

michaelmrose• 8 months ago

If you walk out and it goes to court you will surely lose. You may have started with the right to get it for nothing but you cannot realize that right by force. Self-help is almost always illegal in any case of disagreement between parties.

mschuster913• 8 months ago

Unfortunately, this type of conflict can only be adjudicated by courts, which low-income people don't have the time and money for.

Here in Europe, we have consumer protection agencies. Get wronged? Shoot them off an email and they'll take care of it. And overcharging at the cash register? That gets handled by the responsible authorities. Again, call them, tell them what happened and it can get real messy real fast.

jkaplowitz10• 8 months ago

Theoretically there is a third option, stay in the store near the cash register and call the police to come deal with it on the spot before the purchase. The problem is that they probably won't bother coming, and if they do, they won't come quickly enough to make it worth waiting for them given the amount of money at stake.

Edit: Yeah, I did say before the purchase, but I should have said after the purchase when they pay the legally correct price but the store accuses them of shoplifting and tries to detain them. And I know it's often infeasibly hard to pay the legally correct price from a logistical perspective without the cashier's cooperator, especially if you want to pay with a card. It is clearly possible to put at least the right amount of cash on the counter, ask for the change, and attempt to leave if they refuse, but that doesn't guarantee ever getting the change. Anyway, I did list this option as (purely) theoretical and not as actually practical.

JumpCrisscross20• 8 months ago

this type of conflict can only be adjudicated by courts, which low-income people don't have the time and money for

Massachusetts has a strong consumer arm at its AGO [1] and consumer regulator [2].

The problem is less one of cost of litigation than education about available options. (And the time to pursue them.)

[1] https://www.mass.gov/how-to/file-a-consumer-complaint

[2] https://www.mass.gov/orgs/office-of-consumer-affairs-and-bus...

jefftk4• 8 months ago

3. Point at the sign, which is posted at every register, and ask for your discount. If they say no you ask for the manager. I've done this several times, and never had an issue (but sometimes it takes a little while).

gnulinux• 8 months ago

You live in Massachusetts and speak from experience? Because this law seems to work quite well in MA as it's a particularly popular law.

cormorant• 8 months ago

Not only that, but they post a sign about this at every register. (That must be required.) So you can point to the sign. I think a typical store manager would comply. Maybe I'm not cynical enough.

doctor_radium2• 8 months ago

So this means I would get the app-only sale price, without using the app?

While doing some research into state retail pricing laws a few years ago, I discovered how tough Massachusetts is, being one of the last holdouts mandating ticketing on all items, and only relenting in exchange for price scanners every so many aisles. Living in Pennsylvania and annoyed by stores tying their best prices to their apps, I fancifully emailed Elizabeth Warren, asking if she'd prod a friend in state government to consider a legislative end run around apps. I had no idea such a law really existed. "First in the nation" I expect. Wonder how long it's been around?

phil218• 8 months ago

Probably doesn’t apply for most app pricing, since those are typically advertised as “digital coupons” or the like in the fine print.

phyzome2• 8 months ago

Yup. My local Star Market was pretty bad about this, so I started paying close attention to prices on the shelf and at the register. Pretty soon I was taking home free items every shopping trip. (I also reported them to Inspectional Services when aisle scanners were broken or prices were particularly egregiously missing or wrong.)

Some of the cashiers had to have it explained to them with much pointing to the sign that hangs on every register; others knew the drill and called a manager over right away.

After about 6 months they started shaping up. Maybe the store manager got fed up, or maybe corporate stopped having them skimp on sticker hygiene.

From the article:

In one court case in Ohio, Dollar General’s lawyers argued that “it is virtually impossible for a retailer to match shelf pricing and scanned pricing 100% of the time for all items. Perfection in this regard is neither plausible nor expected under the law.”

...but in my experience, they're perfectly capable of doing the right thing, given appropriate incentive and enforcement. In particular I noticed that this really varies from store to store, even in the same chain.

cyberax4• 8 months ago

...but in my experience, they're perfectly capable of doing the right thing

It's both true. Given that a typical store can have thousands of SKUs displayed, mistakes will _always_ happen once in a while. A forgotten price tag, an incorrect sale price, etc.

But at the same time, stores are more than capable of having a system to _fix_ these issues as soon as they are detected. It doesn't even take much, just a way for a cashier to flag an inconsistent price for someone at the back office.

veunes5• 8 months ago

What's interesting is how uneven the landscape is across states

regera2• 8 months ago

Dollar stores are private equity with a checkout lane.

In 2025, Dollar Tree sold Family Dollar to a group of private-equity firms: Brigade Capital Management, Macellum Capital Management and Arkhouse Management Co.

https://corporate.dollartree.com/news-media/press-releases/d...

It’s a business model cosplaying as poverty relief while quietly siphoning money from the people least able to lose it. They already run on a thin-staff, high-volume model. That 23% increase is not a glitch. They know their customers can’t drive across town to complain. They know the regulators won’t scale fines to revenue.

calmbonsai• 8 months ago

Kudos! This is beautifully succinct, elegant, and accurate writing.

sema4hacker• 8 months ago

Has private equity ever done anything good for anyone outside of the investors?

regera2• 8 months ago

Not yet. Sometimes employees if they get second bite of the big apple. PE do well in capital-intensive sectors. I'm not sure if their playbook fits the real needs of dollar stores. Instead of focusing on things like debt and aggressive cost cuts, most customers just want fair prices, stocked shelves, clean stores, friendly cashiers and basic respect—things that PE firms often ignore. In DFW, I was surprised to see 1-2 person dollar stores!

jahsome• 8 months ago

To me, that is an utterly hilarious question to be posing on this website of all places.

chongli5• 8 months ago

Private equity are the crows of the economy. They pick off weak / dysfunctional businesses and open space for fresh competition (or for other markets to open up).

gruez19• 8 months ago

I'm not sure why private equity is singled out here, when every time a public company does a bad (eg. Boeing), people crow about how public companies only care about juicing next quarter's earnings.

eagleinparadise• 8 months ago

So I work in commercial real estate, obviously a large private equity influenced industry. I've worked in REPE and in other capacities.

There's degrees of PE. Some good, fine, and some worse.

Take real estate development. It's probably one of the suckiest businesses to be in. I know 3 developers who have committed suicide because when things go wrong, your entire life collapses (you put up all your assets in order to obtain construction loans). The litigation, brain damage, and risks are enormous. Increasingly, the payoff is awful (due to worsening legislation and NIMBYism and worse market condiditions)

However, private equity in development I think is a good thing. When there are investors willing to put this money at risk, we get much needed construction of housing (see Austin, TX where rents are falling off a cliff due to over building).

Now look at Los Angeles, which new permits are literally almost non-existent because LA is one of the most hostile places for developers. You can't make money in LA, so there's no capital available.

Then you end up with "affordable" housing developers adding the only supply at $600-900k/unit costs vs the market rate developer at $300-600k/unit.

----

On the other hand, "value add" private equity is much more suspicious. It's more cut throat, easier to end up in crony capitalist situations by operating with a "cut expenses, provide less, make big bucks" model. The people in this world are the kind of guys who have never done anything hard with their hands other than gotten a sore thumb from pounding too hard on their keyboards to adjust their excel model ("Mr. The Model is Always Right") too hard all night long.

This is how we end up with old properties who get flipped 4x each being sold with "upside the seller was too stupid to take advantage of" and ending up in situations where tenants get priced out due to private equity seeking infinite growing returns. Oh and by the way, every previous owner did "lipstick on the pig" jobs because why not try to save costs and make your levered IRR 16% instead of 12%? You cannot show that kind of return when you promised 18%... then it'll make it harder to fundraise your next deal!

This isn't to say that "value add" is a dirty business. We certainly need to balance the incentive to modernize and renovate properties. An d developers overbuilding isn't always a good thing.

So its nuanced. I think people need to fairly give credit that there are both good and bad. The capital efficiency is real and produces real world outcomes since there is a strong financial incentive at the end of the door.

But financial incentives sometimes bump up to issues causing harm in real life, which need to be recognized and called out.

holysoles• 8 months ago

In general I have a pretty negative view of private equity. However I did see this awhile back that seems at least partially positive: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/07/27/private-equity-giant-kkrs-an...

WarOnPrivacy4• 8 months ago

Has private equity ever done anything good for anyone outside of the investors?

If it's not publicly traded, it's super secure from any public accountability.

And while I'm increasingly hostile toward the shareholder model, we do get one transparency breadcrumb from this (gov managed) contrivance: The Earnings Call

Earnings Calls give us worthwhile amounts of internal information that we'd never get otherwise - info that often conflicts with public statements and reports to govs.

Like CapEx expenditures/forecast and the actual reasons that certain segments over/underperform. It's a solid way to catch corporations issuing bald-faced lies (for any press, public, gov that are paying attention).

    AT&T PR: Net Neutrality is tanking our infra investment
    ATT's EC: CapEx is high and that will continue

I'll bet 1 share that there are moves to get this admin to do away with the requirement.

xhkkffbf• 8 months ago

Why is private equity different from any other form of organization? Publicly traded companies are even more addicted to getting revenue. Non-profits like universities may not have shareholders, but somehow the price of tuition keeps skyrocketing even faster than the prices at the dollar stores. And it's not like the religious charities have been pure.

JumpCrisscross20• 8 months ago

Has private equity ever done anything good for anyone outside of the investors?

Yes. Productivity typically goes up [1]. Its reputation for job cutting is overblown [2], as is its record on price increases [3]. And historically, it's tended to decrease concentration in the industries it operates in. (The conglomerate break-ups of the 1980s were fuelled by new entrants and carve-outs.)

Instead, what I think we have is a category error. Berkshire Hathaway is a private equity shop as is all venture capital [4], and most family businesses of any scale are structured identically to sponsor-owned firms. Meanwhile, LBOs have been unable to shake the private-equity label for decades, unless they're lead by a founder, in which case they're "take private" transactions. In essence, we brand failed alternative asset strategies as private equity ex post facto.

Moreover, transaction size is negatively correlated with returns, particularly for leveraged buyouts. So the biggest private equity deals, which represent a minority of transaction activity, are disproportionately (a) bad and (b) public.

Finally, we get a lot of false conflation of market failures to private equity per se. Private-equity owned hospitals are bad [5]. But I haven't seen great evidence they're worse than other privately-owned hospitals with similar scale. The problem is hospitals probably shouldn't be run for profit or on-locally. But because nobody in particular is defending private equity, that's easier to attack.

[1] https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=67233

[2] https://www.jstor.org/stable/43495362

[3] https://centers.tuck.dartmouth.edu/uploads/cpee/files/Is_Pri...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_history_of_private_equit...

[5] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2813379#go...

tpmoney• 8 months ago

If you're a Dell customer, Michael Dell taking the company private again seems to have done wonders for them.

jimmydddd2• 8 months ago

It seems to offer interesting opportunities for young recent high level MBA's.

adolph2• 8 months ago

Has private equity ever done anything good for anyone outside of the investors?

This is a bit like asking if public equity has ever done anything good for anyone outside of its investors. It really depends on what is meant by "anything good."

Has any company that has taken venture capital (a variety of private equity) ever done anything good for anyone outside the VCs?

Private equity is more often associated with late stage takeovers and reorganizations than with startups, however. An example might be the privatization and refocus of Dell. Was a refreshed Dell good for its workforce and customers?

https://www.wallstreetoasis.com/forum/private-equity/the-lea...

bawolff• 8 months ago

In theory it helps people who have some sort of trade and just want to do that trade, focus on that, while the business experts from the PE firm handle the business side. Running a business is a skill, and people who want to sell some other skill often don't have it as you can't be good at everything.

Are there other ways of addressing that gap, like hiring experts? Sure, but its not like PE is entirely evil.

Keep in mind there is some selection bias here. You only hear about private equity when its being comic book evil. When things work out or its a non scummy PE company, you never hear about it.

bloppe• 8 months ago

If you have a pension, you're an investor in PE. If you live in a country with a sovereign wealth fund, you're a beneficiary of PE. If you're connected to a school with an endowment, a lot of that money ends up in PE funds, and can fund lots of research and student resources.

So ya, I'd agree the PE is rarely good for anyone but the investors, but you'd be surprised how many people are investors without realizing it.

blitzar• 8 months ago

vc, private equity; potayto, potahto

gadders• 8 months ago

I can't think of a single example. It normally means making a company worse whilst relying on existing name recognition to drive sales with the aim of re-selling it before people realise how bad the company has begun.

epolanski2• 8 months ago

Private equity has rarely done good for investors too.

With the boom of popularity of ETFs in the last decades it has been increasingly hard for active fund managers to justify their costs by investing on public markets where benchmarks are visible and public.

Thus they removed themselves from the benchmark entirely and moved to private equity where there's no benchmark and returns are very hard to gauge.

Analysis shows that:

- The overwhelming majority of PEs lose money.

- Annualized return of PE in UK has been 2.1%, this doesn't even match parking money in short-term bonds.

- PE performance is extremely murky, as their gains are virtual and whether you exit profitably is heavily dependent on your timing

- The entire sector is ripe with corruption and little regulatory oversight. PEs keep ballooning their holdings valuations by essentially trading companies among themselves. So fund A sells Acme to to fund B at twice the valuation, and will return the favour by buying Foobar at inflated valuation. This all obviously requires access to cheap credit. Many startups are approached by PEs that have already lined up to sell the startup to another PE after few years guaranteeing everybody (from founders to all the PE managers) nice profits, up to the last sucker stuck with the bill.

The only ones that have profited out of PE, beyond the managers working there, are those that invested in the PE itself, meaning buying shares of the fund itself.

pembrook• 8 months ago

I assume you're asking this rhetorically and just want people to affirm how 'evil' private equity is to support the narrative-driven belief you already have?

PE became a favorite journalist boogeyman in the 80s for saddling companies with high interest debt they could never repay or slicing up industrial companies and selling for parts. That's not reality today. A vast majority of private equity buyouts nobody ever hears about or cares about because everything turns out totally fine.

A private equity buyout that makes the company worse off, destroys customer trust, kills employee loyalty, and leaves room for competitors to swoop in is a failed private equity buyout. If that were true in the majority of cases the entire PE model wouldn't work at all.

Here's just a few success stories of companies you've heard of (there's thousands you haven't heard of, so no point in bringing them up).

- Hilton Hotels - Dunkin Brands - Beats by Dre - Dominos Pizza - Petsmart / Chewy

Businesses that sell to private equity are often businesses that are not doing well or are not long-term sustainable, hence why the owner wants to sell. Think about it logically. If you're running a fantastic business that is profitable, growing, sustainable, with happy employees -- why would you sell?? Or in the case of public companies being taken private, why would anybody take the risk if everything is going wonderfully?

satvikpendem2• 8 months ago

Valve is private equity and seems to do a lot of good things, for gamers and for Linux users in general.

lotsofpulp• 8 months ago

They already run on a thin-staff, high-volume model.

Like every other retail business not targeting the top 5%.

And Dollar Tree and Dollar General are both publicly listed companies, not private equity.

Dollar Tree sold Family Dollar for $1B 10 years after buying it for $8.5B, a pretty big loss. Dollar Tree’s market cap is $25B, so a pretty negligible part of the national dollar store business is “private equity”.

whynotmaybe• 8 months ago

Costco

jmspring• 8 months ago

The sad thing is, people in rural areas that depend on places like Dollar General, and are getting fleeced blame everyone but republicans and they are usually in red areas

antonymoose5• 8 months ago

I’ll bite…

I live in a rural area with a Dollar General about a half mile from my neighborhood. For staples, it’s honestly fine. You want a 6 pack and some hot dog buns because you missed it in the Wal-Mart run the other day (15 miles away), it’s great!

You’re not getting fleeced and if you are, the gas savings alone more than make up for it (0.65 per mile per the IRS.)

For folks who depend on the local DG for, idk, clothes and household goods it might be much worse, I don’t shop for those there ever, but on staples it’ll do, especially given the density of stores compared to major chains.

thanhhaimai• 8 months ago

And this is exactly why I only shop at Costco. While other retailers try to get me to buy more stuffs, Costco try to make sure I'm satisfied enough that I'll renew my yearly membership (their main profit source). The incentive structure aligns very well.

Waterluvian2• 8 months ago

Buying in bulk is about having the ability to both afford next week’s food this week and have the means to store it. Not to mention the annual subscription.

Responding to a comment about dollar stores preying on the poor with, “that’s why I shop at Costco” is… a choice.

gruez19• 8 months ago

While other retailers try to get me to buy more stuffs, Costco try to make sure I'm satisfied enough that I'll renew my yearly membership (their main profit source). The incentive structure aligns very well.

This doesn't make any sense. Costco makes a profit on the goods sold as well. They have every incentive to sell you as much stuff as possible. That's why they also engage in the usual retail tactics to increase sales, like having the essentials all the way in the back of the store, and putting the high margin items (electronics and jewelry) in the front. They might practice a more cuddlier form of capitalism than dollar general, but they're still a for profit retail business.

expedition32• 8 months ago

Interesting. The Netherlands is no class society so rich or poor nobody has any goddamn shame to stand in line at the Action checkout if there's a good sale to be had.

Seeing people in BMWs at the Aldi parking lot. Strange country.

antonvs4• 8 months ago

The Netherlands is no class society

Americans used to claim this too. It’s invariably false. It just means that the wealthiest people do a better job of concealing, or not advertising, how vast the wealth discrepancy between them and the average person is.

Seeing people in BMWs at the Aldi parking lot

The least wealthy person on the list at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Dutch_by_net_worth could afford 10,000 high-end BMWs and still be extremely wealthy, far too wealthy to have any interest in lining up at Aldi’s for a sale.

sgerenser2• 8 months ago

I do most of my grocery shopping at Aldi (in the US). There’s plenty of Teslas, BMWs and Mercedes in the parking lot (although late model Hondas, Toyotas and Kias are probably the most prevalent). Turns out people of all income brackets like saving money.

antonvs4• 8 months ago

cosplaying as poverty relief

Does it really? Who says this, and who believes it?

WarOnPrivacy4• 8 months ago

> cosplaying as poverty relief
Does it really? Who says this

(search engine: 22 relevant results in 0.85s.)

    we’re here to provide affordable and convenient access to name brands,
    DG’s private brands, nutritious foods, household essentials and more.

ref: https://www.dollargeneral.com/hereforwhatmatters

array_key_first• 8 months ago

I mean, it's in the name.

dehrmann2• 8 months ago

Dollar stores are private equity with a checkout lane.

Dollar Tree and Dollar General are publicly traded.

So Family Dollar might be the result of PE tactics, but the other two aren't, and Dollar Tree sold Family Dollar because they saw it as under-performing.

It's actually sort of weird Dollar Tree couldn't make it work. I know the dollar stores all have somewhat different businesses, but you'd think that Dollar Tree could have either turned Family Dollar around or knew it was selling a loser (see the market for lemons) to PE.

EnPissant• 8 months ago

Then why doesn't some other established brand open in the same area and undercut them?

sergiotapia• 8 months ago

private equity is a tumor on this country. it seems any business stained with this actively becomes worse for the customer for as long as possible.

JKCalhoun• 8 months ago

Here's how shitty of a business person I am: I had no idea that the poor were a "market" you could prey upon.

Somehow I thought that if I presented a business plan that began, "Our target audience are those living paycheck to paycheck…" that I would be quickly shown the door.

toomuchtodo• 8 months ago

It’s an industry worth tens of billions of dollars in the aggregate unfortunately.

cwmoore• 8 months ago

Paid For By Poor Folks (PFBPF)

thephyber• 8 months ago

Dollar Tree and Dollar General are sometimes located in the poor part of a city, but most of their locations are in areas which are too poor to sustain good margin businesses. Rural towns with a single road and only 1-2 gas stations, etc. their core business is to offer smaller and smaller portions to maintain profits while rival stores go under. They are so prolific, they can get giant companies (think drinks, household items, and pharma) to create smaller and smaller portioned SKUs over time.

The businesses were originally just exploiting a gap in the market, but then PE realized that they could just buy out these local monopolies.

agumonkey2• 8 months ago

Makes me wonder if the right way to help lower classes is to give them some space (association, platform) to meet and solve issues on their own terms so nobody tries to leech from them.

veunes5• 8 months ago

When the goal isn't to run a good store but to extract value as fast as possible, all the classic PE patterns show up

reenorap• 8 months ago

Private equity is even more insidious than you can imagine.

How it works is that PE will buy a profitable company, and then strip out everything it can, and then load on the debt. In exchange for loading on the debt, the banks will give preferential treatment to the other companies in the PE fund's portfolio. <----- This is the part everyone misses.

In addition, they will force the company to purchase services and even entire companies from the PE company's fund portfolio. <----- This is the part everyone misses.

Then, after a year or so, PE will IPO the company and sell to retail suckers. Mutual fund companies will hold their nose and buy into the IPO even though everyone knows it's a shitty company. The reason why is because the PE company will give early access to investment in their other more promising companies. <---------- This is the part everyone misses.

So PE companies will make a lot of money by stripping every part of the company out, maximizing and leveraging its portfolio of other companies so that banks and mutual fund companies will dump money into them. It's literally like harvesting a farm animal and carving absolutely everything of value off of it, as well as leveraging other companies to dump into it with the promise of access to other companies in its portfolio.

And then they turn around and dump the carcass into the hands of retail suckers, either through their mutual funds like Fidelity or straight onto the markets.

raydev2• 8 months ago

Family Dollar isn't a dollar store though.

seizethecheese3• 8 months ago

This comment section is full of allegations that dollar stores are predatory, yet when I look up their operating margins they are super low (4% for Dollar General, for example).

venturecruelty9• 8 months ago

Just because your margins are low doesn't mean you still aren't screwing over poor people.

devilbunny2• 8 months ago

It’s a bit like payday loans; they are a bad financial deal, but the alternative is no credit at all because the people who get them are high-risk borrowers and the costs associated with making and servicing a loan aren’t radically different for $500 or $50k.

Being poor is tough. But the low margins are a pretty good indicator that the alternative to shady businesses is simply not having businesses at all.

seizethecheese3• 8 months ago

Wait, why? I get the emotional resonance of this, but unless their marketing spend is egregious I just don’t know how you can argue their whole business model is predatory.

raptor999• 8 months ago

LOL it just seems that no business can do right here. So these low margin stores should just shutter and close up shop because they are somehow still "screwing poor people"? Would you commend them if their business just infinitely ran at a loss or gave people cash at the register instead of charging them anything for the items that they want?

rtp4me9• 8 months ago

Yeah, queue the HN fake outrage about big companies and their C-Suite who are billionaires on the backs of the little people. So predictable.

Fact is, Dollar General and similar stores provide a real value to people who live in rural areas. Yes, their prices may be higher for some goods, but that is the price you pay for the convenience they provide. People are free to drive another 20mins to a WalMart or another store to save $0.50 for the same can of corn or loaf of bred. And, people who are really on a budget actually scrutinize the register receipts to make sure they are paying the price listed on the shelf. They can immediately bring up the discrepancy to the staff.

tgsovlerkhgsel• 8 months ago

listed on the shelf at $5, rang up at $7.65. Bounty paper towels, shelf price $10.99, rang up at $15.50

I'm sure the US obsession with not putting the actual price (tax included) on the shelf helps a lot with this. I would notice quite quickly if a store would systematically overcharge me in Europe. It'd be much harder in the US where I expect the price on the shelf to not match the price at checkout.

venturecruelty9• 8 months ago

Those prices aren't because of tax; even the highest sales tax wouldn't cause $10.99 paper towels to ring up as $15.50.

dotancohen4• 8 months ago

Yes, but the US consumers are conditioned to see one price and pay a higher price. You and I might see +40% and think "that's too high a percentage". Others see +something and think "just like every other time". If they even look - I'm sure these items are often in a cart with many other items.

DangitBobby10• 8 months ago

Have the fines pay out to customers that report and suddenly the issue is gone.

cm20122• 8 months ago

Dollar stores have on average a 2% profit margin, just like grocery stores. They are not the villains here.

bjackman3• 8 months ago

This is like cheating in a golf match against a professional and then saying "I got the same score as my opponent, I am not the villain here".

sejje4• 8 months ago

I don't think it is, so maybe you can help me draw the parallels.

cm20122• 8 months ago

Do you think large dollar stores are faking or cheating their profit margin numbers?

bombcar7• 8 months ago

Especially since it’s advantageous to adjust suppliers that you own to maintain tiny margins (who owns the land they rent, for example)

dehrmann2• 8 months ago

Not charging the best-advertised price is dishonest. It might also be in customers' best interest if the cost of keeping consistent price data on low-margin items costs more than whatever the inconsistency is. Or the answer might be that dollar stores sell too wide of a variety too cheaply on too low-margin product to play supermarket-style pricing games effectively.

skippyboxedhero3• 8 months ago

Their returns (margins are irrelevant) are usually lower than grocery stores. Large retailers will turn over their inventory tens of times a year, dollar stores won't so the returns are typically lower.

For some reason, left-wing journalists turn into law of one price zealots when confronted with this issue. The reality is that these locations have low-volume and stores everywhere are relatively expensive to run now. For some reason, journalists get angry at the company rather than people who control how much it costs stores to operate. I mean local governments in the US had no problem accepting Dollar General's sales tax from their poor constituents shrug probably more than the corporation is making from the store.

I live in the UK and there is a store like this, Co-Op. The Guardian finds it easier to blame evil foreign corporations because the Co-Op has much higher prices but is a non-profit so the narrative of the evil corporation crumbles.

nrhrjrjrjtntbt3• 8 months ago

You can find a poor me for almost any corporation to excuse their ripping people off.

tclancy• 8 months ago

What does their margin have to do with anything? Or, what things do you think they should and shouldn’t be able to do given their low margins?

fencepost2• 8 months ago

I believe Michigan has laws on the books that should be the model for this (the "Scanner law") - if you're overcharged at the register and the sale is completed, you have 30 days to get the price corrected plus ten times the amount of overcharge (between $1 and $5). Paying you the 'bonus' is optional, but if they don't do so you can file a suit for the greater of your actual damages or $250 (in small claims on your own or regular court which allows up to $300 in attorney fees).

An alternative would be to force stores with mischarge rates exceeding a specified level to close until they've completed a full audit of all shelf prices in the store but in some areas that could cause significant local hardship.

nrhrjrjrjtntbt3• 8 months ago

That is already ludicuously complex. Designed by Kafka so you give up.

cryptonym• 8 months ago

force stores with mischarge rates exceeding a specified level to close

They'd leverage it as if it was an allowance and stay just below that rate.

cluckindan• 8 months ago

”Dollar General argued that when customers create accounts – for example, by downloading the company’s mobile app – they agree to use arbitration to resolve disputes and forfeit the right to file class-action suits. The judge agreed.”

Let me guess, the mobile app provides discounts…?

itchingsphynx3• 8 months ago

In Australia, according to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission:

- Businesses must communicate clear and accurate prices prior to consumers booking, ordering or purchasing. They must not mislead consumers about their prices.

- There are specific laws about how businesses must display their prices.

- Businesses must display a total price that includes taxes, duties and all unavoidable or pre-selected extra fees.

- If a business charges a surcharge for card payments, weekends or public holidays, it must follow the rules about displaying the surcharge.

- If more than one price is displayed for an item, the business must charge the lowest price, or stop selling the item until the price is corrected.

In practice, if the checkout price is more than listed price, many retailers give the item for free. It doesn’t stop dodgy constantly fluctuating ‘on sale’ pricing…

https://www.accc.gov.au/business/pricing/price-displays

Full_Clark• 8 months ago

Requirements about surcharge notifications and displaying all-up prices are nice, but the gap here will still be about enforcement and not regulation. The core problem for dollar-store shoppers in the US is about getting the retailers to honor the sticker price, not whether the sticker price shows all state and local taxes.

Is the Australian shopper protected simply by a stronger culture of adherence amongst retailers or is it because regulators inspect more often and take stronger action against failures?

motza• 8 months ago

I guess it might be a cultural thing? The shelf price is the binding price here in practice. If you get to the register at the supermarket and the price is higher, you can just let them know and they will send someone to check the price and match it.

itchingsphynx3• 8 months ago

Yes, probably difficult to compare regulation and inspection.

As for enforcement, ACCC recently took Microsoft to Federal Court for hiding Copilot pricing shenanigans, as discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45721682

protocolture• 8 months ago

Regulators take tip offs and if one gets through, the enforcement action is usually pretty fast and strong.

They also like doing this. The ACCC makes a huge deal out of parading their latest conquest in the media.

Has its faults, the ACCCs dealings with telcos are especially terrible.

I still have friends at an Applecare provider based in oz, and they had a big one where as a settlement with the ACCC over trying to have it both ways with consumer law, they agreed to provide repairs or replacements for like a decade of wrongfully denied hardware issues. Hushed it right up. It was in lieu of a public apology from memory. But my friends spent weeks calling back old customers, chasing new contact details etc, to try and get them all free replacements.

cs702• 8 months ago

Red Baron frozen pizzas, listed on the shelf at $5, rang up at $7.65. Bounty paper towels, shelf price $10.99, rang up at $15.50. Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes, Stouffer’s frozen meatloaf, Sprite and Pepsi, ibuprofen, Klondike Minis – shoppers were overpaying for all of them. Pedigree puppy food, listed at $12.25, rang up at $14.75.

Surely, now that this made the news, there will be an investigation into the fraudulent behavior of Dollar General and Family Dollar.

Left unsaid is that both Dollar General and Family Dollar would become unprofitable if they stop tricking customers. (Both companies typically earn only 3-4% on sales.)

nrhrjrjrjtntbt3• 8 months ago

It was investigated. They got fined $5k. 4 times.

Is there another law that can get them for repeat abuse.

limagnolia5• 8 months ago

Their attorney general could also sue them, as was done in several states mentioned- resulting in much larger settlements. Only the fines by the dept of weights and measures are limited.

jeltz2• 8 months ago

It was investigated, the issue is that the fines are smaller than the profit. I would personally want to see things like this considered fraud and that it can result in prison sentences for executives and other people invovled in the decision making.

dawnerd2• 8 months ago

Ya the problem needs to be a fine the first time, second time it’s fraud. Allow for honest mistakes. Punish for clearly defrauding customers. We really need jail time for execs making these decisions but that rarely happens.

teeray• 8 months ago

Corporate fines should all be percentages of profits.

rtp4me9• 8 months ago

You want prison sentences for execs if you were charged $1.50 for a can of corn instead of $1.45? Surely you can't be serious.

pjc50• 8 months ago

This is very American: it's illegal, but everyone accepts both that the law will be enforced very unevenly, and that this kind of thing doesn't get solved by the regular political process. There's no political consumer complaints culture, it's seen as an individual matter.

You couldn't get away with this for as long in the UK as a retailer. Either the CMA or Trading Standards would deal with it.

JumpCrisscross20• 8 months ago

everyone accepts both that the law will be enforced very unevenly, and that this kind of thing doesn't get solved by the regular political process

Nobody agrees on that. TFA follows "a state government inspector" whose effectiveness is hampered solely by a "North Carolina law" which "caps penalties at $5,000 per inspection." That law [1] doesn't exist outside North Carolina.

This is the first time I'm reading about this. We have a dollar store in my town. I'm curious to replicate this experiment myself and send the results into the local newspaper if the discrepancy is real.

[1] https://www.ncleg.gov/enactedlegislation/statutes/html/bycha... § 81A-30.1

cogman10• 8 months ago

this kind of thing doesn't get solved by the regular political process.

Yeah it does. This is specifically the sort of thing that the FTC is in charge of addressing.

That is ultimately controlled by who the president is. There is some funding problems with these enforcement agencies that forces them to pick and chose their battles. However, you'd be naive to think that there isn't a significant difference from how Lina Khan ran things and how Andrew Ferguson runs things.

antonymoose5• 8 months ago

Keep in mind, this is also a state thing. I live on the NC/SC/GA border so I view news for all three daily.

I routinely see this type of crime heavily policed and reported on in NC. Whereas my entire life is in coastal SC and never once in my life saw this repeated on or enforced.

wkat4242• 8 months ago

Left unsaid is that both Dollar General and Family Dollar would become unprofitable if they stop tricking customers. (Both companies typically earn only 3-4% on sales.)

They could of course show the actual prices instead of tricking customers?

If the margins are so low nobody else will be significantly cheaper anyway.

ssl-35• 8 months ago

Some people say it's trickery, but when I apply the razor I find pricing errors more likely to be the result of stupidity than of malice.

Having worked in retail myself, I understand that some days there just isn't time to get it all done. A debt of unfinished tasks can accumulate. It happens. Sometimes old prices get left up. (I think the stupidity is on the part of management more than it is the employees, but it's still more stupid than it is malicious.)

---

Dollar General got into the thick of it with the Ohio Attorney General a couple of years ago[1] over this issue: The prices on the shelf didn't always match the prices at the register. Stores were closed[2] while they updated their price tags to match reality.

And as part of the settlement with the Ohio AG: Nowadays, when I go into a Dollar General and Red Baron pizzas are on the shelf for $5 and they ring up at $7.65, they're required to honor the posted price of $5 when I bring this up to them.

(That last bit really should be enshrined in law instead of the footnotes of a legal settlement with a single entity, but alas: It just isn't that way in Ohio.)

[1] https://www.ohioattorneygeneral.gov/Media/Newsletters/Consum...

[2] https://www.supermarketnews.com/foodservice-retail/ohio-ag-d...

nerdponx2• 8 months ago

Hanlon's Razor is not relevant with large amounts of money at stake. in fact the complete opposite is the best approach: The more money that's involved, the more you should suspect malice until it has been conclusively ruled out.

shepherdjerred3• 8 months ago

As a company seeking to maximize profit, why would you fix this problem? It seems optimal to say "it's out of our control" -- you get to overcharge customers, and you have a reasonable explanation if a lawsuit comes.

I would be curious to see how often it's the other way around, e.g. they undercharge a customer.

doctor_radium2• 8 months ago

I would like to think incompetence as well, but when the problem is this widespread, IMHO it does point to a corporate issue...even if that's simply leaving too many incompetent managers in charge. IMHO if you're the manager and the part-time teenager didn't finish updating all the shelf pricing, then it's on you to finish before going home. But today too many people just don't give a damn.

My first job was in retail as well, going back to the days before scanners when every item item was ticketed individually. When something goes on sale you ticket it again, then tear off the sale price stub when the sale ends. Repeat as needed. Maybe that could be a suitable punishment, too? Force stores to abandon shelf pricing for a period of time until it hurts enough that they get their act in order?

ryan_lane4• 8 months ago

You're applying that razor incorrectly. These dollar stores are run with a skeleton crew, where it's impossible for the workers to keep the store in order, or to update the prices on the shelves. The prices of items at the register is managed centrally. They ensure resources exist to increase prices at the register and not on the shelves, and that's misleading and fraudulent.

This isn't a pricing error. They should change their practices to require prices be updated on the shelves, and for that to be verified, prior to the prices at the register applying (and this should be required by law).

It's funny that it's criminal when someone shoplifts from a dollar store, but knowingly showing one price and charging a higher price isn't a crime. We need to start treating corporate theft as crimes, rather than as a cost of business.

tzs• 8 months ago

> Red Baron frozen pizzas, listed on the shelf at $5, rang up at $7.65.

The crazy thing is that even if it did ring up at the correct price it isn't a good deal. It's around $4.80-4.90 at Walmart and Target and others.

delfinom2• 8 months ago

It's worse than that. In many cases the dollar stores now get skus of items made for them that are "cheaper" than a sku in Walmart but for a more expensive unit price than Walmart as they shrink the product.

limagnolia5• 8 months ago

Paying 10 to 20 cents more for an item can still be a better deal than traveling further away to a larger store. The mis-pricing is completely unacceptable, though.

deepbreath1• 8 months ago

I am a POS system developer. Such errors can occur in the systems I develop, but they are unintentional—often caused by price data synchronization issues. I am actively working to resolve them.

veunes5• 8 months ago

If a business model only works as long as customers don't notice the real price, then the model itself is fundamentally broken

BrenBarn2• 8 months ago

But North Carolina law caps penalties at $5,000 per inspection, offering retailers little incentive to fix the problem

This is a huge problem with all manner of laws in the US. We are not willing to insist that fees be limited only by their ability to prevent the prohibited behavior. Fines should continually escalate, if necessary until the offender is bankrupted, at which point their assets are taken. If Dollar Tree keeps doing this, the fines should eventually reach into the hundreds of millions of dollars, even the billions. Such penalties should also apply to company executives and board members who are responsible for the company's overall conduct.

JumpCrisscross20• 8 months ago

It looks like North Carolina’s previous Weights & Measures law was entirely criminal. So in 1991 they added civil powers, but curtailed the fines.

The solution here appears to be less in raising the civil fine and more in criminally investigating, to start with, the store manager [1].

[1] https://www.ncleg.gov/enactedlegislation/statutes/html/bycha... § 81A-30.1

dpkirchner• 8 months ago

I'm not convinced that anything short of prison for executives and board members would be enough.

francisofascii• 8 months ago

The article metions Family Dollar and Dollar General. Dollar Tree is a different company.

BrenBarn2• 8 months ago

Oops, true, that was a thinko on my part.

LanceH• 8 months ago

Lots and lots of articles written about 23% of 300 items -- at one store? Every store?

What's the actual extent of the problem?

There have been way too many articles and videos at this point to keep pointing at the same small data set.

I've personally never experienced an overcharge, and at 1 in 5, it should have happened by now.

Is this a one store thing, or a regional thing, or should I just put those thoughts on hold and rage blindly?

valbaca3• 8 months ago

You didn't read far enough:

Dollar General stores have failed more than 4,300 government price-accuracy inspections in 23 states since January 2022, a Guardian review found. Family Dollar stores have failed more than 2,100 price inspections in 20 states over the same time span, the review found.
Among these thousands of failed inspections, some of the biggest flops include a 76% error rate in October 2022 at a Dollar General in Hamilton, Ohio; a 68% error rate in February 2023 at a Family Dollar in Bound Brook, New Jersey; and a 58% error rate three months ago at a Family Dollar in Lorain, Ohio.
Many of the stores that failed state or local government checks were repeat violators. A Family Dollar in Provo, Utah, flunked 28 inspections in a row – failures that included a 48% overcharge rate in May 2024 and a 12% overcharge rate in October 2025.
The Guardian’s examination of inspection failures by the two chains was based on record requests to 45 states and more than 140 counties and cities in New York, Ohio and California, along with court documents and public databases.

stevenjgarner3• 8 months ago

It is important to understand that Dollar General and Family Dollar serve thousands of flyover communities where there are no Walmart stores or other viable market access. Dollar General has stated that it can generate profits in communities with fewer than 1,000 homes. Walmart generally requires a much larger population base for its stores.

Dollar General is the largest retailer in the US by number of locations, with over 20,000 stores across 48 states. Family Dollar operates over 8,200 stores. Walmart's U.S. store count is significantly smaller (around 4,700 U.S. Walmart stores and 600 Sam's Clubs as of 2024).

Dollar stores are frequently found at the heart of "food deserts," which are often rural communities located more than 10 miles from a grocery store selling fresh produce—a gap often created when a community is too small to maintain a supermarket or attract a retailer like Walmart.

stevenjgarner3• 8 months ago

I am not an attorney, but given that Dollar General and Family Dollar are highly likely to serve a much larger percentage of SNAP-eligible customers, isn't there a far more serious FEDERAL crime being perpetrated here of retailer abuse and fraud in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), often referred to as food stamp fraud? That is, if the SNAP customers have no other means of purchasing food (living in a food desert), and the retailer is intentionally charging more for food items, isn't the retailer committing fraud against the US government? Federal criminal prosecution of SNAP violations could result in fines up to $250,00 and imprisonment up to 20 years. More significant consequences than otherwise being reported here.

veunes5• 8 months ago

This is the tension that makes the whole situation so hard to fix

stevenjgarner3• 8 months ago

Would you be willing to elaborate?

raptor999• 8 months ago

So you are saying that Dollar Generals tend to open in areas where there isn't already a store that sells anything like food or otherwise? So would people in that "food desert" be better off without Dollar General opening a store? Because the only way I see that is feasible is if you only compare the reality of this situation to the fantasy ideal that isn't reality at all.

josh_p• 8 months ago

When I worked grocery retail when I was a teen 20ish years ago, any time a customer disputed the price of something during checkout, we’d have someone check the shelf and find the display tag. If the price was lower as the customer suggested, we’d always give them the item at the price listed on the display tag. An employee usually just missed that tag during price change day.

It’s so foreign to me that any retail place would defer to “the computer” if display price and database price were out of sync.

Even young-me understood the idea of “oh yeah, our bad, have it at the lower price” and the potential for legal action if we did otherwise.

biddit• 8 months ago

You need to think like an owner/operator to understand why you would defer to the system.

It’s to prevent employees from stealing. To “defer to the tag” requires a manual price override of some sort, which becomes an abuse vector.

ssl-35• 8 months ago

Yeah, that "computer error" explanation is bullshit, probably rooted in a combination of CYA and narcissism.

When I worked in retail, we only had one database of pricing. The shelf tag and sign printers, the registers, the whatevers -- they all used that same database. If a shelf tag was printed at the same instant that an item was rung up, then they'd have had the same exact price.

There's mechanism for the prices to deviate.

(And yeah, pricing errors still happen at least because people are people. We make mistakes. We forget shit. We can even convince ourselves that we did a thing even if we didn't. We err. Even if we're absolutely honest with ourselves and others, we can run out of fucks to give. It's all part of our condition.

But of course: When a price was posted wrong then we fixed it once it was brought to our attention. The customer got the price that was posted, and the posting was changed.

For my own purposes, I had a habit of pulling the incorrect price tags and taking them with me back to the register; I'd just give them to whatever manager when they would show up with the key that was required for precise price adjustments and get back to doing whatever it is that my primary job was at the moment...which, if I were handling a register, meant something other than printing shelf tags.)

shepherdjerred3• 8 months ago

These stores often only have 1-2 employees working at a given time.

video if you're curious: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4QGOHahiVM

panny• 8 months ago

Do any of you actually shop at Family Dollar? I do. They're cheaper on a lot of stuff. A box of Cinnamon Toast Crunch is $2 less than the same box at the grocery store in town. I bought a pair of shoes there for $4. They weren't stylish, but lasted longer than the last pair of Nikes I purchased.

Yeah, sometimes the sale price posted on the shelf is no longer applicable. Either the employees don't feel like they are paid enough to be vigilant or maybe they're too overworked to keep up. Whatever the case, you just learn to keep an eye on the checkout, or alternately ask for a price check on it before the cashier starts ringing merch. The second approach is more polite and the cashiers appreciate that.

The same thing commonly happens at the grocery store, and other stores I shop at too. It's not unique to Family Dollar or Dollar General. But I will note, at the Family Dollar, the cashiers will often say "This is on sale now, but it's not posted yet. That whole shelf is discount." And they will give me a better price than what I was expecting to pay. They have to manually adjust the price to give that discount to me a lot of times. Grocery cashiers just scan as quickly as they can and don't check.

So while all the yuppies who never step into dollar stores are acting hyperoffended about this story, I think the story is unfairly targeting the dollar stores. Apparently saving money gives some people here the "ick" but the employees there are only human. A lot of times, lower paid humans. Cut 'em some slack.

ssl-35• 8 months ago

I shop at Family Dollar sometimes, and also Dollar General and (shock, horror) even Dollar Tree.

I shop at these places because I am very cheap, and these places are also often (not always, but often) very cheap and the selection is usually pretty good, for the size.

And before someone else blames math for my perception: I can math. I can also remember prices between the shelf and/or the website and the register, and between different stores. (I've been cheap for a very long time. One cannot succeed at being cheap without honing these kinds of skills.)

The shelves at these places aren't beautifully-faced. The lighting is shit -- lowest-bidder, lacking design coherence, and either too bright or too dim. The music, if it exists, is usually a Bluetooth speaker playing from an employee's phone or a single pair of thrift store speakers from a 1990s Aiwa mini system [sometimes, even fancy-style with one on each side of the building] with some local radio station or other playing. There's usually large delivery carts sitting around in the already-narrow aisles with fresh inventory that the 1 or 2 employees who might be present sometimes get time to stock a bit of.

And that's... that's all just fine.

I don't want to pay for beautifully-faced shelves, good lighting, and a professionally-installed overhead PA system that plays professionally-programmed musical selections in a professional manner. I don't want to pay for shelves that are magically stocked in the wee hours of the morning by a dedicated team of professional stockpeople.

Like, seriously: I'm not that proud. My goal is to save money; shopping for inexpensive canned beans and a gallon of milk from some factory farm does not have to be an enriching, transcendent experience.

So when I have need to buy stuff, and there's a Family Dollar across the street from the office and Dollar General is around the corner from my house? I cheerfully stop in and give them my money.

The employees are almost unilaterally very polite and helpful. They know the entire store's products very well, even if the price tags aren't always up-to-date. It's a good, quick, cheap place to shop for good cheap stuff.

(I see comments here that read like "I only shop at Whole Foods. I went to an Aldi once and turned right around and walked out" and all I can think of are callously demeaning phrases like "You blithering, sheltered, classist snob. It may be possible for a person to bring even less relevancy to this discussion, but I cannot presently imagine how that would be possible."

But I usually try to keep that kind of phrasing to myself.)

jefftk4• 8 months ago

Red Baron frozen pizzas, listed on the shelf at $5, rang up at $7.65. Bounty paper towels, shelf price $10.99, rang up at $15.50.

This very rarely happens in MA, because when it does the store has to give you the item for $10 off, including if that makes it free. And they have to post a sign at the register explaining the law, which means when you're invoking it all you need to do is point at the sign.

https://www.mass.gov/info-details/consumer-pricing-accuracy-...

underlipton2• 8 months ago

It's different in different states. In Maryland, once a complaint is filed with the relevant authority, the store has a certain number of days to correct pricing. Most retailers will give you the misprice if it's clearly their fault in not changing the tags, as a matter of policy.

The confusion around this law is quite frustrating, though. Quite a few customers think they're entitled to not just prices on tags that haven't been updated, but prices for what are clearly entirely different products.

hedora2• 8 months ago

Is it a certain number of days to fix all the mispriced items?

If not, there’s an obvious loophole here. Misprice intentionally, then stop purchasing the item from your distributor if you get called on it, rotating in some similar thing. Later, bring it back with a different sku, or mispriced at some other level.

This would work well for dollar stores, which are optimized to spread in / sustain food/retail deserts.

The store is often literally the only option in town. The wouldn’t even need to sell excess warehouse inventory at the advertised price, since they could just shift supply to another state (or county/store, depending on how poorly the law is worded).

coin• 8 months ago

Michigan in the 90s had a similar rule. Customer gets 10x the overcharge (up to $5 max). I can guarantee you they fixed the price immediately.

Where I live there’s no such rule I can tell you no one is correcting the price when I point out that I got overcharged (they usually shrug with “it does that sometimes”).

jimmydddd2• 8 months ago

"It does that sometimes." I guess for some reason the minimum wage cashier was not fully invested in maximizing the customer experience.

technothrasher• 8 months ago

Note that this law is only for certain products. We would have people at the liquor store I used to own point out mislabeling occasionally and claim we owed them the $10 difference from this law. While we tried to work with customers when we made a pricing error, not only does the accuracy law not apply to alcoholic beverages, but it would often be illegal for us to offer the customer the mistaken price. Alcohol retailers in MA are not legally allowed to sell their products for less than they purchased them.

Cyclone_• 8 months ago

That's probably aimed at reducing consumption.

guelo• 8 months ago

Is alcohol the only exception?

burkaman• 8 months ago

Is this a recent law? I lived most of my life in MA and I've never heard of this, and never noticed one of those signs.

zahlman2• 8 months ago

... American "dollar stores" have items in the first place at $10+? I thought it was already amusing when Dollarama reached the $5 CAD threshold.

sgerenser2• 8 months ago

Family Dollar and Dollar General (the subjects of this piece) are not traditional “dollar stores” (and haven’t been in a long time) despite having Dollar in the name. They’re just discount stores, like a smaller Wal-Mart. Dollar Tree, on the other hand, had long been a traditional dollar store where most items are priced at a dollar. However after pandemic-induced inflation they have mostly changed to a $1.25-$1.50 price point and now have a number of items marked above that as well.

b3lvedere4• 8 months ago

Once i had a very amusing discusson with a store that sold laptops.

I wanted to purchase a laptop at the advertised price. The sales person told me i was in luck, because all their laptops came preinstalled with Microsoft Office for a little extra money. I told him politely i did not want to buy Microsoft Office, even for such little extra money. I just wanted the laptop.

Semi-flabbergasted he told me this was not possible, because all the laptops had Office pre-installed. I told him i did not care and wanted to buy the laptop for the adverstised price.

After 15 minutes of discussion, some manager came frustrated what the problem was. I pointed to the price tag and told him i wanted to buy the laptop for that price exactly and if that was possible. It was, but it would require uninstalling Office, which took them another 15 minutes.

So i waited for another 15 minutes so they could remove Office. Back at home i powered on the laptop, popped in a usb disk and removed every partition that its harddisk ever had and started a nice fresh install without any bloatware.

cbdevidal2• 8 months ago

The irony is even though Dollar Tree prices are honest because they all are the same $1.25 (excluding the new “More Choices” $3-5 items) they’re still ripping you off. I always shop on a per-unit basis e.g. dollars per pound or cents per ounce, since that’s how I actually eat food. I need a certain amount of calories and a certain quantity of food to survive, and the less I pay per unit, the lower overall cost. On a per-unit basis, DT is almost always the most expensive store around, because quantities are so small!

There are of course exceptions; I can recall not long ago for example buying a pound of Himalayan sea salt for a dollar. That was a solid deal, and I haven’t seen it since.

But generally speaking, if you want to save money, don’t go to Dollar Tree.

crazygringo2• 8 months ago

That's actually fascinating, because they surely weren't tracking the actual Office license keys, and getting their money back. The manager literally uninstalled Office just to spite you. That's super funny! Especially since it made zero difference to you in the end.

greenavocado• 8 months ago

Was this in the US? I never purchased computers from people in a storefront.

dylan6043• 8 months ago

I was really waiting for this to be a Windows bloatware where Linux laptops are cheaper since there's no unnecessary Microsoft license at all. So you are principled in not wanting to use Office, but unprincipled enough to go ahead and use Windows?? That's a bold position on HN. Linux or death!!!!

knowitnone32• 8 months ago

but you re-installed Windows which is the definition of bloatware and malware.

calmworm• 8 months ago

They do this same type of thing at car dealerships everywhere. Some pre-installed dealer add-on they just tack onto the total. Annoying.

mvc2• 8 months ago

How long has this been the law? I lived in Boston for a while and don't remember this.

jefftk4• 8 months ago

I remember it from at least 2014, and wrote about it in 2019: https://www.jefftk.com/p/ma-price-accuracy-law

tadzikpk• 8 months ago

I live in MA and wish that this were true, but do you have data / evidence to support that it rarely happens? Also, I don't know if you have tried to get your $10, but it's not like the sign is always obvious and every time I've tried, it's not like the cashier says "oops" and gives you the thing for free - they call a manager, the manager argues with you, other customers complain about the checkout delay you've created... there's social pressure there so I can understand why customers would not do this even when they can.

stronglikedan• 8 months ago

other customers complain about the checkout delay you've created

Other customers are complaining about the checkout delay the store created, so I'm not worried about what they think.

micromacrofoot• 8 months ago

If this happens you can file a consumer complaint with the attorney general's office... https://www.mass.gov/how-to/file-a-consumer-complaint

They do follow up with serial offenders.

jefftk4• 8 months ago

I've done this many times, and it usually takes about 5min (which sounds short, but isn't really that short). There is social pressure, but it's even stronger on the store than it is on you as a customer.

knowitnone32• 8 months ago

so if I find one that is has the wrong price and get $10 off, I could potentially "buy" all of them for free?

fy20• 8 months ago

Right, as a UK tabloid I'm surprised they didn't mention that the UK has similar laws. If you are overcharged you can ask for a refund, and the store has to honour it:

https://www.citizensadvice.org.uk/consumer/somethings-gone-w...

In the 00s I worked for a supermarket that would always honour the price on the label if you pointed out an error (we'd then remove the label with the error).

We had teams that would regularly check all the labels to make sure they are not out of date. Nowadays many stores where I live now use e-paper displays that update automatically.

cocainemonster• 8 months ago

that would involve paying for a bus ride. “I don’t have money like that,”

inconvenience aside, are buses so expensive that you wouldn't save any money by going to a different store?

epsteingpt5• 8 months ago

While most comments will be negative toward Dollar General, in many areas Dollar General or Family Dollar or Dollar Tree are the only places you can get access and distribution to a wide range of products and brands in areas which are otherwise underserved.

You can dislike it, but they've evolved and expanded in part because they are very good at serving these areas profitably, where other businesses aren't.

People wanting bank branches and grocery stores and brunch spots here clearly have never lived or worked in many of these areas. The reality of theft, low spend, and employees - though not universal - is hard to fathom if you're not trying to 'run' the business. Good will does not pay your suppliers or rent.

garbagewoman2• 8 months ago

Did you ever consider that they might have caused this situation?

qeternity4• 8 months ago

It would help people to consider your point if you made even a modest attempt to explain and justify what you mean.

limagnolia5• 8 months ago

I have overall had good experiences with Dollar General, but mis-pricing items like this is completely unacceptable. This article is very damaging to their brand to me. Even though I haven't experienced it myself.

antonymoose5• 8 months ago

Keep in mind this happens in all industries to varying degrees and causes.

I once worked as a cashier at “The Fresh Market” chain, a higher end, higher income store. We had this issue all day every day. I couldn’t go a shift without having to call over the manager for two or three price corrections. The root-cause was our incompetent stoner stock-boy would leave up discounted sale signs up for days and even weeks after the time had passed. Despite his bad work ethic he worked there for years because help was just that hard to come by. Nothing ultimately malicious by corporate but the end result looks suspicious as can be.

websiteapi• 8 months ago

in 2025 I'm surprised you can't just scan everything on your phone yourself and get the up-to-date price. are there laws stating things must be a posted price? seems easier for everyone to have something you can scan that show you the latest price, or auto updating tags.

Ylpertnodi2• 8 months ago

Auto-updating tags can be incorrect, too.

asd• 8 months ago

Looks like Dollar Tree just rolled out a feature where you can do a price check on items by using their App.

https://www.reddit.com/r/DollarTree/comments/1ndmniz/downloa...

jhawk28• 8 months ago

They are attributing malice/greed to what is more likely just incompetence compounded by inflation. The employees most likely haven't updated the pricing on the shelves. If you have ever been in a DG or DT, you can see that the inventory is generally a mess and just put everywhere. There is one or two people up at the front. They don't have as many people stocking shelves as a grocery store to keep the inventory in order.

mr_windfrog• 8 months ago

If the goal is to fix the behavior instead of just documenting it, the penalties need to escalate with repeat violations. The first mismatch can be treated as an honest mistake. But when the third or fourth inspection still shows the same pattern, the fine shouldn't be the same $5k: it should jump sharply. At some point the cost of ignoring the problem has to exceed the profit from letting it continue.

Right now the incentive structure is backwards. As long as the downside is fixed and small, large retailers will keep treating it as business-as-usual. A tiered system tied to repeated violations would at least push them toward actually fixing the issue, instead of just shrugging it off every time they get caught.

raptor999• 8 months ago

Right on.

If the goal is to fix student grades instead of just documenting it, the points counted off need to escalate with repeated incorrect answers. The first incorrect answer can be treated as an honest mistake. But when the third or fourth quiz still shows the same incorrect answers, the grade shouldn't be the same C; it should decline sharply. At some point the cost of ignoring the problem has to exceed the points from letting it continue.

You just solved education!

fat_cantor• 8 months ago

I noticed my local wal mart doing this, not on every product, but more than one. I had hoped it was an honest mistake until it happened on my next visit. I told an associate about it, left my groceries, and I haven't been back. It's wild to think that a few decades ago they accepted returns of any product based on trust, no questions asked, regardless of whether you had a receipt.

tdeck• 8 months ago

If you live in Seattle and you find items are rung up for the wrong price, I highly recommend reporting it to the city. I did this once and was shocked that they promptly sent someone out to check the store and issue a citation. The inspector who emailed me was very polite and professional as well. It's rare to have something like this taken seriously and to have the enforcement properly funded.

Unfortunately I don't remember which form I filled out but I believe it was this one

https://www.seattle.gov/your-rights-as-a-customer/file-a-com...

daft_pink• 8 months ago

It seems fairly obvious that a small store cannot really compete with massive giants like Walmart that invested in electronic interchange formats, logistics and negotiate huge volumes with customers to get to the absolute lowest price.

You can't go to some small store and see them consistently deliver better prices.

ChuckMcM• 8 months ago

From the article -- But North Carolina law caps penalties at $5,000 per inspection, offering retailers little incentive to fix the problem. “Sometimes it is cheaper to pay the fines,” said Chad Parker, who runs the agency’s weights-and-measures program.

This is what I think of as the 'give us a story to tell the people because we're okay with business doing this' rule. Too often the local (or state, or even federal) government is aware of bad actors but fails to act in a way that would actually cure the problem. It is a remarkably persistent form of corruption in many liberal democracies (not just the USA).

Jackson__• 8 months ago

This once again shows that idiocracy was an overly optimistic movie.

jimnotgym3• 8 months ago

Time for direct action. Record the prices of a trolley full of goods. When a price rings up incorrectly, state loudly that you are not agreeing to that higher price scam and walk out, abandoning your goods at the checkout.

It would be best if a dozen of you went together and so closing all the checkout lanes.

Call a local journalist to come with you.

EGreg5• 8 months ago

Both Family Dollar and Dollar General declined interview requests and did not answer detailed lists of questions from the Guardian. Instead, both sent the Guardian brief statements.

“At Family Dollar, we take customer trust seriously and are committed to ensuring pricing accuracy across our stores,” the company said. “We are currently reviewing the concerns raised and working to better understand any potential discrepancies. We continue to be focused on providing a consistent and transparent shopping experience.”

Dollar General said it was “committed to providing customers with accurate prices on items purchased in our stores, and we are disappointed any time we fail to deliver on this commitment”. In one court case in Ohio, Dollar General’s lawyers argued that “it is virtually impossible for a retailer to match shelf pricing and scanned pricing 100% of the time for all items. Perfection in this regard is neither plausible nor expected under the law.”

They make it sound like isolated incidents. Someone should keep following up on statements like that until they are fixed, or refer them to a DA. No?

Furthermore, what about "false advertising" laws?

Ylpertnodi2• 8 months ago

“it is virtually impossible for a retailer to match shelf pricing and scanned pricing 100% of the time for all items. Perfection in this regard is neither plausible nor expected under the law.”

I don’t knnow about 'expected', but 'not plausible' is up to the company to get their shit together. My spouse works in retail - nobody has time on the shop floor to change label prices all day. Some prices change by a few cents, and then a week later, they change again. If annyone complains, they get the scan-at-the-register price, and then the particular area in question gets a very quick emergency team sent in to re-do all the physical tags.

EGreg5• 7 months ago

Why not let people scan QR codes like restaurants do for menus?

soanvig2• 8 months ago

Dollar General’s lawyers argued that “it is virtually impossible for a retailer to match shelf pricing and scanned pricing 100% of the time for all items. Perfection in this regard is neither plausible nor expected under the law.”

Can you explain to me how USA is called civilized? How somebody can say things like that, and how a shop is even allowed to have an error margin

unwind• 8 months ago

The article touches on this:

All told, 69 of the 300 items came up higher at the register: a 23% error rate that exceeded the state’s limit by more than tenfold.

This implies that an error rate of perhaps 2% would be legal. I haven't checked, but I guess Europe has something similar even though I'm quite certain that retailers have to sell things at the posted price if there's a mistake.

Part of the problem seems to be that the maximum fine (at least in the state in the article) is "too low", so retailers don't have an incentive to keep price tags correct since they profit from the error and even if they're fined it's still better (economically) for them to charge more than the price tag. I wonder how much lobbying has happened to keep fines low ...

entuno• 8 months ago

The interesting question would be how many products came in lower, but sadly the article doesn't include that.

If 23% were higher and 23% were lower then you could make a reasonable argument that it's just incompetence from the store.

But if 23% are higher and none are lower, then that looks a lot more like malice - because the odds of you happening to have a 23% error rate than just happens to always work out in the retailer's favour are basically zero.

bob10292• 8 months ago

I worked in retail for a few years. A very large part of my job was simply keeping physical paper price tags in sync with the database. Minimum wage employees in a back office manually keying in UPCs, etc. The claim is extremely accurate in my experience.

Expecting physical reality to synchronously conform to a policy in an information system is pretty silly.

wodenokoto• 8 months ago

You have it backwards. Building a flexible system and constantly changing pricing database without regard to how to physically update prices in the store is the silly thing.

And when the mismatch tends to be in the stores favor, then maybe it isn’t silly but malicious.

nasmorn• 8 months ago

In Austria the retailer simply has to honor their lowest labeled price. Only clear and obvious errors like if the price would be just cents instead of euros are exempt

agumonkey2• 8 months ago

It seems that we're in a phase where most parts of society is distorting reality to extract value from others. I don't know if it's a usual step in human groups cycles but it's worrisome.

brettermeier• 8 months ago

I never heard of something like this happening in Europe. Do we simply have better control and regulations?

rsynnott3• 8 months ago

In Ireland, knowingly charging more than th display price is a criminal offence; the fake sales mentioned in the article are also illegal, though I’m not sure if that one’s criminal or civil. I expect it’s similar elsewhere.

_Prosecution_ is often more of an effective threat for companies than summary fines, as judges will tend to throw the book at repeat offenders.

Also, the nature of US urbanisation might be a factor. If you can get to more stores easily it’s harder for them to screw your; you will just go elsewhere.

I tend to do my shopping in small batches when walking home from work, and have a decent short term memory for numbers. I don’t remember _ever_ being overcharged by the likes of Tesco/Lidl/whatever. Very occasionally by small shops.

avsteele2• 8 months ago

Article Context-free raw #'s, no comparisons to traditional grocery stores AFAIK. Dad journalism.

You should not update on this article unless you have some outside knowledge of the industry.

I had AI look into it, it found a national report found that dollar stores had pricing errors at about twice (3.5%) the rate of traditional supermarkets (1.7%) but lower than convenience stores (4.9%).

https://cdn.ncwm.com/userfiles/files/Resources/Price%20Verif...

latexr2• 8 months ago

I’m having a hard time parsing your comment.

Article Context-free raw #'s

What does this mean?

no comparisons to traditional grocery stores AFAIK.

So? The article is very specific from the beginning it was an investigation on two specific chains. That different stores may also do it does not invalidate the point.

Dad journalism

Did you mean “bad journalism”, or is “dad journalism” a term with meaning (like “armchair psychologist”)? B and D aren’t that close on a typical QWERTY, but maybe it was a wrong autocorrect?

You should not update on this article

Also here. I’m guessing “update” was meant to be a different word? I don’t understand what you mean.

(…) a national report found that (…)

Which is useful information, but (again) does nothing for the article’s point. Because other stores do it, it doesn’t mean it’s not worth reporting that these ones do too. The article isn’t saying these are the only chains engaging the the practice. Furthermore, the point matters because the people who need to frequent dollar stores are the ones who are already cash strapped.

The article goes deeper than just presenting some numbers, it argues for why exactly this matters, why it happens, and why it isn’t being fixed.

avsteele2• 8 months ago

Article Context-free raw #'s

"Dollar General stores have failed more than 4,300 government price-accuracy inspections in 23 states since January 2022" Is this a lot or a little? There no context for national chain

Dad journalism

"Bad" Typo, sorry

You should not update on this article

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_inference

(…) a national report found that (…)

The article's thesis is that these stores are uniquely bad. Whether or not this is correct necessarily depends on a comparison with other stores.

veunes5• 8 months ago

The saddest part is the feedback loop

ratelimitsteve• 8 months ago

dollar tree seems to have found a new way to do this which may or may not be legal. Everything is priced at "$1.25 unless otherwise marked" but the markings don't actually tell you the price, only that it's not the $1.25 default price. There are price checkers throughout the store, but unless you're stopping and prescanning all of your stuff there's no actual way to know what you'll be paying until you get to the register. My partner is a regular there for cheap craft supplies and has seen what essentially amounts to dynamic pricing there, with the price varying up and down on the same item week by week.

vlucas• 8 months ago

Stores like Dollar General and Family Dollar are not cheap dollar stores. They are convenience stores. And convenience stores always charge more... for the... convenience of not having to make a longer trip to a larger store. Price mis-labeling aside, the premise of the article is wrong.

SirMaster• 8 months ago

Am I the only one who checks their receipt after checking out from grocery or department store shopping?

tlogan• 8 months ago

This is definitely illegal in California: California Business and Professions Code Section 12024.2 BPC. It can result up to one year in jail.

I’m not sure how this article is true but seems like as a push to pass a similar law in North Carolina and New Jersey.

raydev2• 8 months ago

The article is about Dollar General and Family Dollar, which are not "dollar stores" in the sense that the average person means.

anonu• 8 months ago

They overcharge also via providing low quality products that seem comparable to name brands. Like the loosely wrapped toilet paper roles that have a fraction of what a normal roll has.

valbaca3• 8 months ago

Dollar General said it was “committed to providing customers with accurate prices on items purchased in our stores, and we are disappointed any time we fail to deliver on this commitment”. In one court case in Ohio, Dollar General’s lawyers argued that “it is virtually impossible for a retailer to match shelf pricing and scanned pricing 100% of the time for all items. Perfection in this regard is neither plausible nor expected under the law.”

LOVE LOVE putting what their PR says right next to what their lawyers say in court.

We absolutely need this more in this kind of reporting of late-stage capitalism.

Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

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