Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
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-...
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.
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).
https://mda.maryland.gov/Documents/HANDBOOK%20130%20Examinat...
Practically-speaking, stores have at least as long as it takes for an inspector to come out to the physical location. So, yes, it's a bit of a loophole, but I imagine that if you're mispricing as a matter of course and getting hit with complaints and constant inspections, you're probably going to eventually get fined (unless you're paying off inspectors). Store operations are usually designed to catch mistakes, as half the job is making sure items are stocked and labeled correctly. (I think most stores would prefer to transition to essentially local warehouses that delivered to customers from online orders, so that they wouldn't have to deal with any of this, but then they'd lose out on impulse purchases.)
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”).
(That being said, even though I think it's a silly rule, it just seems to exist to annoy alcoholics who can't plan ahead. I'm not an alcoholic, and I rarely consume alcohol before noon, so I just laugh at people who whine about this law.)
I live in Massachusetts, the bluest of blue states, and we still have special laws about Alcohol on Sunday. According to Gemini, Logan airport can't start serving until 10 a.m. (Because in Massachusetts, we don't want you getting drunk on the way to your Unitarian or interfaith Sunday service after you get off of your red-eye flight.)
You can also try reading https://www.mass.gov/guides/working-on-sundays-and-holidays-... if you have the time.
yes there are, but the anti happy hour laws are only from the 1970-80s, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, raise the drinking age campaigns.
the previous round of laws like that were from the Temperance, Prohibition, lifting of Prohibition periods.
then before that, yes the Puritan Blue Laws.
it's aimed at not encouraging consumption which is slightly different. you can have a "hungry hour" where you entice people with food bargains and sell them alcohol, but you can't have a "happy hour" where you entice people with alcohol bargains.
it is also in keeping with other laws intended to create a competitive/collusion free market (not saying the crafting of those laws was not influenced by incumbents trying to maintain their share)
> 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.
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.
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.
I think part of the appeal when everything was a dollar was so that people would know exactly how much it would be when they went to check out. Then they could manage a little bit of money with precision.
For staples that's definitely sensible but surely there are also times where you need one-off items where any extra amount would just be waste?
And yes there are times when some cannot always afford bigger quantities. But we’re not talking about 50 pound bags at Costco here; The price per pound for a ten pound bag of something at Walmart vs a six ouncer at DT is substantial.
With your focus on calories per dollar, do you also get supplements? Which ones and where?
Why are you so focused on this?
Having a large home is a prerequisite for shopping at Costco.
We would preinstall office on say 80% of the door buster laptops for something like $29. Most people used office so they’d pay it. Occasionally some people didn’t want it so they’d buy a bare laptop.
If all the bare laptops had been sold, we’d remove office from one of the preinstalled laptops. Then we’d take the box and send it back to the inventory guys to process and get credit back from the vendor. As part of that process we were supposed to verify to Microsoft that the product wasn’t installed on any machines.
So they weren’t tracking keys, but the manager wasn’t doing it to spite the OP, he was just doing what the vendor asked for.
Other customers are complaining about the checkout delay the store created, so I'm not worried about what they think.
They do follow up with serial offenders.
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.
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.
The type of Private Equity that most here are referring to is the type that buys up existing businesses, squeezes as much money as possible out of them, and throws their desecrated corpses in the gutter. These "investors" are a blight on society, this activity should be criminalized, they should be in prison.
But there are a lot of well-meaning investors who do great things for society that also get stuck with the same label.
I would argue that moribund businesses who maintain a competitive moat but are otherwise extremely unproductive and inefficient are the real blight on society. If PE firms can liquidate those businesses and open up the market while freeing up capital for more productive investment then I fully support them.
I would love to hear some counterexamples though. Productive and innovative businesses with really solid fundamentals (balance sheets) that were acquired and dismantled by PE.
It's not uncommon in the fast food business to be breaking even or losing money on all aspects of the business while the true value of the company, its real estate portfolio, steadily grows. The fact that investors decided they wanted to cash out should be a surprise to no one.
[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/91129776/what-really-killed-red-...
You have way too much (unneeded) limiting qualifications. In Netherlands PE have bought loads of companies, then put the acquisition price as a loan on the balance sheet. Plus then sold the assets, made the company then lease those assets. Then those companies often went bankrupt as the leasing prices increased crazily.
> I would argue that moribund businesses who maintain a competitive moat but are otherwise extremely unproductive and inefficient are the real blight on society.
The companies I've cited weren't "extremely unproductive and inefficient". Businesses can be profitable and healthy without all the qualifications you think they need.
And this type of PE represents a very small minority of what is actually considered "Private Equity". The vast majority of PE deals are about growth. This small minority of asset stripping PE groups gets the most headlines though.
Source: my firm works with ~400 PE firms.
Is anyone better off if elderly care becomes too expensive to offer at scale?
2: ???
3: "too expensive to offer at scale"
When PE salvages a failing enterprise, it's increasing the overall value of that enterprise, even if that means selling off parts that still have value. Those parts are made available to others at prices lower than they otherwise would have had to pay.
Wealth concentration flows from impediments to competition. There is no shortage of PE firms competing for these opportunities.
JoAnn drove all the medium-sized fabric stores out and left us with nothing.
At-home sewing has been declining since I've been alive, and it was just barely hanging on when I was a kid. The demographics simply cannot support these stores in most locations outside of hyper-dense cities.
Not to mention the folks who shop for fabric tend to be some of the most cost-conscious consumers around. They are more or less the prototype of a customer who will go to a B&M store and then price match on-line,.
I'm honestly surprised even Jo-anne survived as long as it did.
Even on HN playing the role of PE apologist is not going to fly ...
A lot of the negative reaction to them seems to me to be mostly emotional. They'll dismantle a business that holds a lot of nostalgic value for people, even though it's long since ceased to be a viable and productive company. But it wasn't their fault that the business was in that situation in the first place! Years of mismanagement and neglect or perhaps disruption from a competitor left the business in zombie-like state. PE came along and put it out of its misery rather than allow it to slowly crumble while depreciating the value of its illiquid assets.
Mine specifically stems from PE buying up all but one 24x7 emergency vets in a 20 miles radius from me. All of them were thriving businesses. There is only one remaining non PE ones has its days numbered. After monopolizing the emergency vet market, they shut down a few locations, which previously acted as competition for each other, effectively cementing monopolies in those individual neighborhoods as well. Now, you pay $200 to just get your pet checked out and always have to wait anywhere between 6-8 hours in triage if your pet isn’t literally dying, because they are perpetually understaffed and there are no other options. They also recommend unnecessary tests and treatments, present them as “optional” but refuse to treat your pet if you don’t agree to their “optional” treatment plan.
Artists are a classic example. They generate huge positive externalities for a community while reaping almost none of the benefits for themselves. Artists get severely exploited by the economy for this!
To counteract this problem we need other ways of addressing the positive externalities. In the case of artists, this usually comes in the form of public (and private) patronage and endowments for the arts.
What also happens is, they take operating businesses with reasonable returns, buy up all it's supply chain or it's competitors to reduce costs or enable monopoly pricing, then load the company up with debt, squeezing it into a terrible company. That is the bad scenario which people object to.
An example: https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/28/5000-bats/#charnel-house
But seriously. Are there anyone who hasn't interacted with a business systematically enshittified in one form or another by PE?
Whatever legal and theoretical role they play in the economy does not match the actual, real role they are playing: PE firms are by and large, economic vampires. They have a well documented history of sucking the life out of a sector at the expense of workers and consumers alike
[0]: https://www.wired.com/story/megan-greenwell-bad-company-priv...
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/oct/10/slash-and-b...
[2]: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/10/private-eq...
[3]: https://doctorow.medium.com/the-long-bloody-lineage-of-priva...
/s?
Again, what's the basis of this? Half the people in this thread seem to take it for granted that PE is somehow "worse" than public companies, but can't seem to articulate why. The only legal difference between public companies and "private equity" is that the former has stricter reporting requirements and can be bought by non-accredited investors. There's nothing about "ostensibly, trying to make a good or provide a service" or whatever.
Eg: purchase a few mom&pop veterinarian business in some area. Squeeze the service rates, trim hours, reduce staff, add some debt. The PE investor gets cash out - the business is destroyed and the community loses a (critical? valuable?) service.
It's a common pattern. But not all PE is like this. Like "not all men" and "not all guns" - but enough that the pattern is easily associated - and disliked by many w/o the power to keep them out.
At least public companies have some diversity in ownership and agenda.
...as opposed to the average public company? An average company might have more "average joe" shareholders (almost by definition, because private equity is typically off limits to non-accredited investors), but outside of meme stocks, there's not enough of them to make a difference. The rest of the shareholders (eg. pension funds, insurance companies, endowments, family offices) can be assumed to behave like ruthless capitalists chasing the highest returns, regardless of whether the company is public or not.
Right but they are seeking the highest returns as equity holders typically, usually through things like stock buybacks.
Private equity firms have much more devious ways of looting the companies, like management fees, acquiring other portfolio companies, and various other tricks.
If you’ve ever seen the Goodfellas scene where they bust out the nightclub, that’s quite literally their business model.
"looting the companies" is non-nonsensical when they also own it. It's like saying a scrap yard is "looting" the cars it bought by taking out the valuable parts to resell or whatever. The rest of the stuff might make sense in the context of the LPs getting screwed over, but not in the context of portfolio companies that they own.
Think of this like an oil well. If you pump off all the gas, you depressurize the reservoir and can never get the oil. You need to slow your production to get the oil first, but private equity is happy to skim the cream and leave the milk to spoil.
This is simply untrue. A typical PE firm creates a GP fund using LPs money. This GP fund typically does a management buyout (which means 50.1% of more) of several companies using a mix of equity (e.g. GPs capital) and debt (banking lenders). So by every definition of the word, they absolutely own the company.
Looting the companies is accomplished by stacking up debt and then giving themselves the money. Occasionally there are a few variations like looting a pension fund or taking a high quality product and making it horrible and selling that until people notice.
It’s literally their business model, it’s happened thousands of times and is a very clear fixture of the modern American business climate.
If you don’t know this it’s because you aren’t looking or it’s in your interest to say you don’t know this.
It's literally not. It happens to be the business model for a subsection of private equity (usually large cap) and its the one that gets most headlines. There are roughly ~5,000 M&A events per year (often involving PE) and yet you'll hear about 5~10 at most cases where the company gets loaded with debt and stripped of assets. The large plurality of PE groups are buy and hold for 4~7 years and are largely focused on EBITDA expansion.
> If you don’t know this it’s because you aren’t looking or it’s in your interest to say you don’t know this.
No offense, but you clearly don't know what you're talking about.
* If a company controlled by PE goes bankrupt, shareholders (PE) likely make a profit * But if a publicly listed company goes bankrupt, shareholders lose their money
In other words, PEs almost never lose money, so they could extract the last bit of a company, even more short sighted than shareholders of a public company
That's not necessarily a bad thing, or sign of anything sinister. If a business is failing, and you buy it for pennies on the dollar, and despite your best efforts it still goes under, so you liquidate it, you can still turn a profit if the price you paid is lower than what you got from liquidating it. That's not bad, because private equity (or anyone else, for that matter) isn't expected to operate as a charity. The only reason they're willing to stump up the cash to buy the business in the first place is the expectation that they'll make money. It's also not bad for the original owners either, because the fact that they hold to PE rather than someone else, or liquidating it, suggests that the PE offered a better deal than either.
>But if a publicly listed company goes bankrupt, shareholders lose their money
Often times yes, but sometimes not, eg. hertz.
Citation needed.
This isn't remotely true. Plenty of private equity investments go bust before they can pay themselves back. And plenty of public company investors milked a company for interest payments or dividends into the ground.
> PEs almost never lose money
Private equity funds regularly lose money. Usually to lenders.
You're complaining about leverage in general. Probably not private equity per se.
There is a legal requirement for directors of public companies to act in the financial interests of all shareholders. In practice, and according to precedent, this means long term viability of the company, in other words, a sustained profitable business.
There is no such requirement for a private company. In practice (esp. recent history), this means private equity firms acquire successful businesses to "mine them" of their wealth - capitalizing their assets for personal gain, and leaving nothing left.
The question for public companies isn't how many retail vs institutional investors they have, it's whether an investor can make a claim about a breach of fiduciary duty. It's patently false to say that the institutional investors (who yes, do have more sway) aren't interested in the company acting in their financial interests.
All that means is that controlling shareholders can't use the company as a piggy bank and raid it to fund their other ventures. It doesn't mean the business has to be "sustainable" or whatever. In fact, it's perfectly legal for the board to sell to a "vulture" PE firm that will sell the business off for parts, as long as the sale price is good enough.
Selling off a public company like that is generally not trivial and is not surprise sprung on shareholders.
This is a constant source of litigation in public and private companies alike. A recent prominent case on the public side was National Amusements constantly fucking up the sale of Paramount if it didn't have special goodies for Shari Redstone.
> Selling off a public company like that is generally not trivial and is not surprise sprung on shareholders
Merger law is largely state corporate law. If you have a Delaware C corporation, you're operating under more or less the same merger rules irrespective of how your stock is traded.
What may be misleading some folks is that in a private company, these deliberations are typically covered by NDAs. In public companies, it happens in the open. With private companies, someone needs to get pissed off enough to sue. Herego the understandable availability bias.
To drive home how misleading this purported delineation is, consider that some of the largest private equity managers (e.g. Blackstone and KKR) are themselves publicly traded.
Private equity has tons of issues. Tons. In some industries (e.g. healthcare) it shouldn’t exist. But this tripe about public companies having duties to shareholders which private companies don’t is nonsense.
Instead they had to give “goodies” personally to Trump in the form of a $15 million bribe…
More of an in addition to than instead.
Yes, you're getting it now.
> It doesn't mean the business has to be "sustainable" or whatever. In fact, it's perfectly legal for the board to sell to a "vulture" PE firm that will sell the business off for parts, as long as the sale price is good enough.
As discussed elsewhere in this thread - the sale itself is required to maximally benefit the shareholders.
No, there isn't.
The whole point of Revlon duties is that they trigger "in certain limited circumstances indicating that the 'sale' or 'break-up' of the company is inevitable" [1]. Outside those conditions, "the singular responsibility of the board" is not "to maximize immediate stockholder value by securing the highest price available."
> There is no such requirement for a private company
Are you thinking of minority rights? These vary based on whether a company is closely held or not [2], not whether it's public or private.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revlon%2C_Inc._v._MacAndrews_%....
[2] https://millerlawpc.com/rights-minority-shareholders-private...
It's well established over hundreds of years of case law that directors of public companies have to act in good faith to benefit the company (and therefore, the shareholders).
Weird cherry pick.
It’s an exception that proves the rule. In that specific case, what you’re saying applies. In all others, it does not.
> It's well established over hundreds of years of case law
Where are you getting this from?
> directors of public companies have to act in good faith to benefit the company (and therefore, the shareholders)
Where did you get that this only applies to public companies? What you’re describing is basic English and Delaware corporate law.
Also, there is a massive difference between “all shareholders” and “the shareholders”. And nothing about public companies says they can’t be structured in a way that sometimes undermines some shareholders. This comes up most commonly when different shares have different voting or blocking rights. But it’s also fundamental to the intent behind B Corps, publicly traded or not.
I seriously doubt you're operating sincerely in this thread, given your ability to cite Revlon. But on the off chance, start here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.
> And nothing about public companies says they can’t be structured in a way that sometimes undermines some shareholders.
See above.
I know about the topic and can correctly cite sources, herego I'm operating insincerely?
> start here [1]
You're citing a 1919 Michigan state court decision concerning the Ford Motor Company. Ford went public in 1956 [2]. The sole source you've cited is about a then-private company from over 100 years ago.
You said "there is a legal requirement for directors of public companies to act in the financial interests of all shareholders." That is wrong. It's doubly wrong in the context of public versus private companies, given it applies to all business corporations.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.
[2] https://www.fool.com/investing/2019/01/16/63-years-later-wha...
> You said "there is a legal requirement for directors of public companies to act in the financial interests of all shareholders." That is wrong. It's doubly wrong in the context of public versus private companies, given it applies to all business corporations.
Wouldn't that mean my statement is incomplete, not "doubly wrong", if it applies to all businesses, not just public ones?
Similarly, cherry picking sources that support narrow scenarios tangential to the discussion (Revlon) is not sincere.
By this point it's clear your religious grasp on the distinction between public and private companies will not be shaken. I'll continue living in reality, where in fact directors of private companies do act against the interests of the company itself (and in practice are still in accordance with the law), paying themselves off and leaving an insolvent heap. I'm honestly shocked regarding your insistence that public and private companies are the same in this matter; I can only assume that you already have, or stand to, gain from such a private endeavor, and this is causing a cognitive dissonance that is at fault for the vomit you've spewed above. Good day.
Probably a good time to note that you’re posting this comment on a website created by a private equity firm for promotional purposes.
I think it’s useful to point out that Silcon Valley is a rapaciously predatory and financialized business climate precisely because because they spend so much time and money on PR to convince everyone otherwise.
Apple is not going to sell off all of its real estate into separate company, force the other half to rent it and then sell off the rental holdings. Even when it was almost bankrupt it didn’t “shut down the company and give the money back to shareholders”.
The former is a standard PE play. I’ve been part of the “roll up small companies and enshittify them and go public” playbook. I was the lead architect at the parent company designing the software system that integrated the disparate systems of the target companies.
Funny enough I worked for a startup that I loved in 2018-2020 and only left because a job at BigTech fell into my lap. After leaving BigTech in 2023, the company that acquired the startup I worked for (a PE backed acquire and enshittify company) offered me a job as the architect to consolidate their systems based on a referral. I booed out after having a lot of discussions with their internal management and one with a representative from their investor.
It’s hell being under the thumb of a PE companies management (not the internal management) they second guess everything and the level they were hiring me for, I would have dealt with the PE investors representatives directly
Many private companies are growth businesses. On the opposite side, private equity targets businesses which are stable, but not growing or declining. PE looks for products which have high cost to switch or products with no alternatives.
So when private equity buys the business they extract money in 3 ways: - Raise their prices. This is similar to the public companies, but they do it more aggressively, because their customers don't have a choice. For reference see, what VMWare did after it was bought by Broadcom (Broadcom is a public company which acts as a private equity). - Reduce costs, via layoffs and cutting smaller products. Also done by public companies, but the difference here is the magnitude. It is quite common for Private equity owned companies to have several years of 20% layoffs, until the original workers are completely replaced by workers in cheaper locations. Or not replaced at all which leads to a worse service. - And finally the third way a private equity extracts money from the acquired company by providing "services". Employees from the PE company are elected on the board of directors of the acquired company. A PE executive can become a CEO of an acquired company. PE companies have satellite companies, which provide legal, administrative and financial services to their companies.
On top of that the acquired company has to pay the loan which was used to be acquired.
Why? Is there some code of conduct for public companies but not private ones?
No but there’s a difference between private companies and PE owned companies. PE model is very different from regular private companies, and it often involves extracting maximum profits at the expense of the company itself.
And as far as public companies go, shareholders will have to say something about the operation of the company if you start intentionally sinking it.
How does a PE company make money from that - unless who they sell it to is not saavu enough to realize it?
Not all PEs model. The ones you are referring to are often buying large businesses (like the infamous Toys R Us) load them with debt and strip their assets. 90% of the other PEs out there do not do this...in fact the opposite. They put capital on their balance sheet to grow.
There's a pattern of behavior, to be sure. The primary control on public companies is shareholder scrutiny. Gutting your company for short term gains, is not always popular. The more diverse the shareholder cohort, the less popular it tends to be.
Private companies don't mind it when they can literally start a new company with the assets from the old without the pesky plebian investors.
Ofc you know this.
Berkshire Hathaway is a PE fund with permanent capital.
Broadly speaking, making generalisatios about PE is almost impossible because it's an asset class which is, essentially, all non-public business. Instead, it's more useful to think about which element private equity touches you're specifically complaining about: capitalism in general, financial transparency, leverage and liability.
The quiet ones that simply run business well, don't make the news.
There are PE firms that specialize in rescuing distressed companies with potential and turning them around. In many cases not firing anyone and holding onto the form they acquired for a long time.
And don’t call themselves PE. They’re a diversified family business. Or a VC fund. Or whatever the fuck the Ellison’s are doing to Paramount.
It's more about Private Equity firms than private companies. The oversimplified TL;DR strategy for most PE firms is acquire, strip, pump, then dump (combined with all sorts of tax strategies). Most PE firms don't own the companies themselves, but act on behalf of investors and take a cut of the ultimate profits. So it's basically tons of short term thinking.
A huge wealth transfer in disguise providing capital to financial actors (not at last PE) that are usually not aligned with goals of regular employess: affordable housing and healtcare and reasonably safe jobs.
As Germany is on it's way to dismantle it's core of it's pay-as-you-go mandatory state pension insurance and shift towards private, and privat-by-proxy schemes via company pension plans. Europe might be also going that way some time in the near future, but without the comparably healthy demographics of the US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revenue_Act_of_1978
Funny that all those charts eventually go back to Carter allowing for 401k not, Reagan, though that reuse only happened later.
My bigger hunch here is supplying the capital markets with that much additional money was a mistake, that ultimately lead to the current guilded age and accelarated existing trends of in the productivity–pay gap, social stratification and wealth inequality, if not solely being responsible for it.
It seems outright impossible for most to compete with a economic reality where the accrued value of like a third of your and everyone else's paycheck is actively working against your net quality of living, when you're not in the top 1 to 10% where the capital gains are a still a net positive over the increased cost of housing and wage stagflation etc.
Greed is very high right now. And you can see that in the behavior of all types of companies. Historically when greed is high like this you eventually end up with a Lehman Bros or Enron situation that causes a painful market place correction.
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.
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
Under the existing legal and regulatory model, yes.
But what abusing that model long-term will eventually result in government-level change that effectively bans the existence of such exploits, wide-spread vigilantism, and/or some sort of collapse.
The endpoint of vigilantism and collapse is more economic opacity. Not less.
My personal view is companies with more than any of 1,000 employees, $10mm revenue or a $100mm valuation should have to file a simple annual disclosure showing the cap table ad balance sheet, a simple P/L, list of >5% beneficial owners and their auditor. But the path to that is through legislation in a complex, stable society.
And how are you going to calculate valuation for a closely held private company? In particular, how are you going to calculate it without making them do the thing you don't know if they're required to do without having the calculation already?
My thinking was it should be simple to produce. Maybe for revenue only you eliminate the balance sheet and maybe P/L or cap table requirements.
> how are you going to calculate valuation for a closely held private company?
I was thinking headline valuations, but you’re right. Skip valuation.
I'm not sure I understand your argument? Wages come out of revenue not income? So the $100k would go to the owners, but as captical gains not wages.
A thousand employees is a business on the scale of a mid-sized bank or companies like VeriSign or LendingTree or Iridium Communications. Companies with something like a billion dollars in revenue. $10M in revenue is a small business.
Maybe exempt pass-throughs?
You're using or. That means you don't need a low revenue number. You could use $10B because nearly all of the relevant companies would already be in on the basis of the number of employees regardless, so all you need is to catch the few outliers that manage to be major companies without hitting the employee threshold.
Out of curiosity, why $10bn versus $1bn?
After a couple of generations watching my government become increasingly captured by the lobbyists funding elections - I'm fairly skeptical that your optimistic assertion will come to pass.
Doubly so now that capture is rapidly accelerating into a hostile, fascist takeover.
I won't be your counterparty on that bet, you've already won:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/saradorn/2025/09/15/trump-wants...
One of the reasons cited? All the work it takes. Which is just an insane response. If your business is so poorly run and organized that reconciling things each quarter represents a disproportionate amount of effort, something is very wrong. It means you definitely don't know what's going on, because by definition you can't know, not outside those 4 times a year. In which case there's a reasonable chance the requirement to do so is the only thing that's kept it from going off the rails.
These standards are different than IRS reporting.
I don’t care about the GAAP depreciation guidelines when I’m deciding something if my own internal metrics show that I can get twice the useful life out of equipment
Not to mention, quarterly reports incentivize a company to focus on the current quarter instead of longer-term sustainability. Reporting twice a year doesn't solve all the above problems, but it sure would reduce them a little.
How to fix it: let shareholders be gradually bought out—much as slaveholders in Europe were—by (gasp) utility tokenholders. Think Shares in Disney Corp vs Disney Dollars. You transition from extractive shareholders to people who actually use and depend on the ecosystem. That eliminates the parasitic shareholder class that drives most of late-stage capitalist enshittification, rent extraction, and negative externalities.
For clarity, here are just some of those externalities that flow directly from quarterly-earnings-driven incentives:
destruction of ecosystems
deforestation and rainforest loss
collapse of fisheries and ocean systems
factory farming / industrialized animal suffering
desertification of farmland
strip mining and toxic waste dumping
privatization and depletion of freshwater
carbon emissions and climate destabilization
environmental injustice and poisoning of local communities
lobbying to block regulation and accountability
social media addiction design for engagement metrics
monopolization and killing off smaller competitors
offshoring, wage stagnation, and worker precarity
financialization of everything (housing, healthcare, education)
political capture to preserve the whole machine
The entire model of late-stage shareholding is flawed. Corporations exist because governments grant them charters. Government sets the rules for how shares work—and can change those rules. Buying shares is not like buying bonds. Shares are residual claims with far higher risk. So we can absolutely add another risk: that shareholders may be gradually bought out and the institution wound down, the same way the FDR administration forced private gold holders into a buyout under the Gold Reserve Act.
That was far more authoritarian, because gold is a physical asset you own in self-custody. Shares, on the other hand, only exist because a third-party company continues to operate in ways that profit you. That dependency already implies higher risk. Therefore, we can add the additional risk of a structured, government-mandated transition away from extractive shareholder capitalism—just like Europe did when ending slavery. And let's be honest: late-stage financialized shareholding has been a blight on the planet.
And none of this is historically radical. Before the modern era, the idea that shareholders should dominate everything simply didn’t exist.
Pre-1960s:For much of the 20th century, a broader "stakeholder theory" was the norm. Management balanced employees, customers, suppliers, and communities—not just shareholders.
1960s:The turn began with Milton Friedman’s argument that a company’s only responsibility is maximizing shareholder profits (1970 NYT Magazine). 1980s:Shareholder primacy took over.
Hostile takeovers forced boards into short-termism.
Executive compensation was tied tightly to stock price.
Financialization embedded all of this into corporate DNA.
If that ideology got us enshittification, ecological collapse, and a sociopathic corporate culture, then yes, we can fix it the same way other harmful institutions were fixed: buy the incumbents out and transition to a saner governance model.
In fact, staking your shares and getting a perpetual flow of utility tokens, or selling the shares, could be a good compromise. But the shares would cease to confer voting power or dividends. The dividends would be paid out in the utility token itself. So the utility tokens might get devalued if there are too many of them, or they could be burned as transaction fees for instance, reducing their supply. There are a ton of possibilities.
Reinterpreting shares as something like a bond with a yield in the ecosystem's own currency makes things much more sustainable. Yes, the shareholders would still want the ecosystem's growth to outpace the token issuance, but also, they could just increase the fees' burn rate of tokens. But that's like extracting rents. So yes, I think eventually, shares should simply get less and less dividends over time. Look at the Miracle of Worgl and their currency undergoing demurrage, for instance.
In the ideal scenario, though, new companies would have no IPO ever, only ICO of utility tokens. Just make IPOs almost impossible to do from a regulatory point of view. It's becoming rare anyway. This would mean that early shareholders would get their returns by staking shares and receiving utility tokens which they sell to ecosystem participants (so they're incentivized to help grow the entire ecosystem, refer new customers etc.) And eventually, the market cap of the shares is totally phased out due to demurrage and the utility tokens is all that remains.
As a result, you totally ignore the very real problems that get bigger and bigger due to late-stage shareholder capitalism, and call it a "failed attempt to manifest" the problems.
So if you want to sell tokenization as not being stocks/shares by another name, tell me how you're changing the fundamentals. I buy into ventures to say, get dividends, or knowing I'll lose money, but hoping to see something manifest that I want to see that may not be profitable yet, but I want to be a part of. How does your change to tokens differ at all, from me buying shares of stock?
If you can't provide an answer to that, I continue to stand by my original statement. Unless, of course, you're being a proponent of a public database of beneficial ownership of all legal fictions. In which case you might get some interest out of me, but I guarantee you'll run into other forms of Dead on Arrival until you fix/address the whole problem around said database basically provides a map for targeting all of the top centralizations of capital, which none of those individuals will probably be okay with being the case to the degree it will be prevented through buying out political clout.
This would return closer to the model where you invest into a business because you believe in it.
Monopolies, lack of transparency, lack of competition, regulatory capture, failure to price in externalities are what allows this to happen.
And these failure modes are allowed to persist due to lobbying, normalised corruption, and the desire for a small/weak government.
The latter is useful for corporations, as it limits regulation, which is the main way these failure modes are supposed to be managed. Yes, too much/bad regulation is detrimental, but so is no/weak regulation.
The more baffling thing is that the modal American voter supports lax regulation and pro-corporate rules at their own personal expense.
The only difference with public companies is we actually have data about their finances.
The private companies are doing it all under wraps.
1. Investors who want to invest in companies with a growth story and want the company to grow bigger and be “successful” enough to exit either via an acquisition or the public market. But often times these days, just to pawn off to the greater fool.
https://medium.com/@Arakunrin/the-post-ipo-performance-of-y-...
2. Investors who want to go in and make the company worse and do enough value extraction for short term gains. The canonical case is when a restaurant chain owns its own real estate. They split off the restaurant from the underlying real estate and make the restaurant pay rent that goes up. The restaurant flounders and the real estate holdings increase in value.
And another strategy is to acquire companies in your vertical, roll them all up, fire redundant staff and integrate systems and then exit. Of course you enshitify the smaller once independent mom and pop systems in the process.
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...
The unlock, which these papers don't understand, is the extractive nature of P/E that is hidden.
A few clues: 1. A .5%-1% increase in prices is meaningful (Overall industry prices rise after buyouts, but again the price increase is on average very modest.) Retails margins routinely are measured in fractions of percentage points (bps). As an example, even if overall hospital prices stayed similar, P/E firms have been caught jacking up prices on people who need it most. Research on "Surprise Billing" in emergency rooms spiked immediately after PE firms took over staffing groups. Are you surprised?
2. Equity multiples are "effectively" a form of stealing from retail / pension plans: this is where the real 'theft' happens (if you want to call it that). If you reraterevenue from 6x (private) to 15-20x, someone is now paying 2-3x more per dollar to have that company in society. The key is the P/E OWNERS reap that value, so even if there are no job cuts, the wealth being created aggregates 'money supply' to the owners. This has downstream impacts on inflation.
3. Independent of aggregate effects - local effects are quite devastating. This is not P/E's fault, but closing down plants can kill towns for good. The question here is ownership - a family feels some tie to the community to attempt to help their friends and neighbors. P/E absolutely destroys this tie - the subtle but measurable effects compound.
Finally, even if you like P/E as a VEHICLE (which - I would argue it hasn't been a 'good' ones since like the late 90s), you can't ignore the fact that it's returns have largely been eaten by fees.
You're right to say that P/E is just playing the market. That doesn't mean that its impact on society has been good - the entire reason we're in the current political and economic situation we are today are by following the 'laws of the market' which have hollowed out the middle class and created a pretty large affordability crisis despite the world having achieved record levels of wealth.
The transfer from 'doers' to 'owners' has been a net negative for American society, and one of the primary reasons we don't 'build' things anymore - it's just not capitally "efficient"
“During the last 10 years PE on average did not outperform the public markets in aggregate” [1]. (Individual firms overperform, some of them consistently.)
> even if you like P/E as a VEHICLE (which - I would argue it hasn't been a 'good' ones since like the late 90s), you can't ignore the fact that it's returns have largely been eaten by fees
Yup! Though nitpick: we often stop calling it PE when it works. VC is PE. So are Berkshire Hathaway and founder-led “take private” transactions.
> transfer from 'doers' to 'owners' has been a net negative for American society
PE is often an exit vehicle for small builders. Particularly in the space that deals with SBA loans.
[1] https://www.hbs.edu/ris/Publication%20Files/24-066_cc5a53f4-...
> VC returns as an asset class (outside of a handful of firms) have underperformed in the past 20 years. I don't even count it here.
> PE as an exit for small builders Agree. But again, it's the builders who have built over multiple decades who profit (great!) one time. The employees - typically - don't. Search can help this (because searchers are usually more dependent on employees) so this is a good example of "micro-PE" being generically better than larger scale PE.
You added a bunch of stuff in front which isn’t substantiated as being an effect of private equity or unique to it.
Most complaints about PE tend to boil down to complaints about, in the extreme, private ownership, and in the specific, leverage or non-local control. Those are legitimate complaints that attach to PE. But not necessarily. And in some cases, not in most cases.
> it's the builders who have built over multiple decades who profit (great!) one time
Sure. They get the multiple. They can now build more.
The PE complaints are mostly unsophisticated from 'the community' but actually have a very reasonable underpinning - as discussed above.
Finally for builders - this is great. Probably the single best application - but again, cost benefit I'm pretty sure it's not only economic drag, but social drag as well.
Again - the asset class has expanded massively. It's due a reckoning - curious how many firms are actually solvent were they required to sell their holdings in market.
IRR comparisons admittedly get a little fuzzy since the lack of liquidity and pegging values is difficult.
You're also correct to say that VC is a subset of PE, technically speaking, colloquially it's not really. If you put VC into the whole mix, then yes the asset class sucks versus the public market. PE is often synonymous with an MBO.
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...
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.
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.
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.
Like, if AI collapses, everyone's gonna sell Treasuries to cover losses as they are super liquid (mostly), but the PE assets can pretend that they're still worth whatever, thus reducing margin calls.
PE is generally bad, but their LP's are not entirely stupid and the ability to mark to imagination is worth a bunch of money sometimes.
> - The overwhelming majority of PEs lose money.
What? No. Read the report:
"Buyout funds continue to outperform public markets in all regions across time horizons longer than five years"
> - Annualized return of PE in UK has been 2.1%, this doesn't even match parking money in short-term bonds.
Once again, read the report.
> 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.
I sold my business to PE and I profited nicely. So I'm not sure what you're concluding here...
Take the parent's post with a grain of salt.
For VC we know there is an edge, but that edge belongs predominantly to the top 4.
I'm concluding that investors thinking that giving their money to a PE fund hoping to have anywhere near the diversification and returns of a simple global market ETF are in for a rude awakening.
Of course you profited nicely, it's who puts the money in the private fund that won't have any chance of beating a very simple global ETF buying your businesses.
And gains in those highly unregulated and illiquid markets (that have insane fees) are what they are: virtual.
In any case I ain't reading a 68 page report, and have no patience for yet another pointless pitch about PE, everything there was to say about PE can be found in this very simple summary by Ben Felix:
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?
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”.
I love Costco (I practically grew up at Costco as a kid), but their ICP is not the kind of person who shops at Dollar General or is on SNAP - it's very much targeted at the 50th percentile income bracket and above [0].
And this is why PE has taken over the dollar market segment - because it's a trash business that no one else wants to service over the long term. PE is basically the last resort if a business cannot raise capital from traditional avenues, and leadership and investors want to exit. For y'all graybeards think of "Sam Vimes Boots theory".
Mine Safety Disclosures did a great overview on Costco's operating model a couple years ago [1].
[0] - https://www.businessinsider.com/how-costco-sams-club-shopper...
[1] - https://minesafetydisclosures.com/blog/2018/6/18/costco
They could care less about the bottom 50% of the market.
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.
But it'd be awful if my best shopping option was 15mi away.
At this point I’d love to see a conversation about price points and convenience of a Japanese conbini as compared to a Japanese supermarket on HN. Far less politicized and denigrated I would hope.
In much of the rural US, 15mi away is having your good shopping close by. A lot of areas make due with their "best shopping option" being well more than 15mi away.
It's worth it, because my only neighbor is about 1/4 mile away, and he's the most reliable person I've ever met.
I don't lock my doors, the keys are in all my trucks.
We do have thieves, who are small and furry, and make off with my figs and tomatoes.
I don't miss your shopping rich area. It's a chore I suffer through.
Anyway, DG can save me about an hour of driving vs Walmart or the normal grocery.
Having a small nearby connivance store and not getting scammed is an option. If the ability to get beer and hot dogs buns without having to drive to a larger more distant store is really worth the higher prices customers are getting fraudulently charged at the register, then these stores can just stop lying to customers and post the accurate prices.
If the laws were meaningfully enforced this is exactly what would happen. These stores would either comply with the law and stop committing fraud or they would be shut down, their CEOs would be sent to prison, and competitors willing to follow the law would step in to fill the need the market has for a small shop that sells beer and buns to rake in that profit for themselves.
I have no stock in the firm, this is just lazy feel god torch wielding here.
Here’s Target getting popped all the same: https://www.newsobserver.com/news/business/article289980944....
If Target (or whatever the hell a Sheetz is) were ripping off their customers to the same extent that these dollar stores have been doing it then they should also face meaningful consequences for that.
Last Week Tonight did an episode on them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4QGOHahiVM
Responding to a comment about dollar stores preying on the poor with, “that’s why I shop at Costco” is… a choice.
It really is a luxury that a ton of people can't afford.
Oh, yeah. Cities. Cars are expensive when you live in a 100 sq. ft. box.
Perhaps that's what is causing problems?
The Venn diagram between people who shop at dollar stores and people who shop at Costco isn't empty.
At minimum that's everyone on a normal paycheck, paid every two weeks. There are situations where someone couldn't get together a few days' pay at once, but that's a tiny fraction of situations.
And the means to store most food is a two foot square of space in a room somewhere. And then most of the rest fits in the empty fridge space you already have.
And there are deals there that can be useful for your wallet right away. This isn't something where you have to put up a ton of money for months before you benefit.
The biggest issue is probably that costco isn't easy to get to.
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.
So yes, Costco does make most of its profit by ensuring customers are happy and continue to renew their memberships every year.
This is financially illiterate because you're mixing revenue ("membership fees") with profit ("net operating income"). While it might be tempting to assume that membership fees is pure profit for them, it's not, because people only buy memberships because they're useful for something (ie. shopping at their stores). Therefore you can't strip that out from the other costs associated with operating a chain of warehouses.
I much prefer this to stores that are happy to burn customers, never expecting to see them again.
You think dollar general is making $37.9B (in 2023) of annual revenue from one-off customers? Unless you're operating a tourist trap, or some sort of business that people only need a few times in their lifetimes (eg. real estate agents), most businesses rely on repeat customers.
I have money to buy in bulk, care about quality, and am willing to make longer trips to stock up. The membership is trivial relative to annual groceries.
I think think the target market for dollar stores is the opposite
Seeing people in BMWs at the Aldi parking lot. Strange country.
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.
Does it really? Who says this, and who believes it?
> 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.
You'd have to be incredibly naive to interpret that as "poverty relief".
Being able to understand what those results mean is the important part.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/03/customers-pa...
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.
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.
The businesses were originally just exploiting a gap in the market, but then PE realized that they could just buy out these local monopolies.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
I can't say how effective they are at remediating small figure issues, but no company wants to hear from them regardless.
Which is all to say, for some things, the US also has consumer protection and it's great when it works.
[^1]: Apparently only Apple sells unlocked iPhones. iPhones purchased at other retailers carrier-lock themselves at activation. At least on Verizon they're supposed to automatically unlock after 60 days. When that doesn't happen, you get stuck in Verizon's mindless customer support swamp[^2,^3].
[^2]: https://old.reddit.com/r/Bestbuy/comments/17ae8l2/verizon_sa...
[^3]: https://old.reddit.com/r/Bestbuy/comments/1buemp5/why_is_it_...
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.
Realistically no store is going chase after the customer for that, but that doesn't mean the average shopper is going to risk arrest/banned (for what the store essentially sees as shoplifting) to send a $2 message over the price difference. And all of this assumes your novel legal theory is actually correct.
https://www.nyc.gov/site/dca/consumers/10-things-consumer.pa...
Similar laws exist at the state level in NY, in other NY counties, and in several other states and subdivisions of other states across the country.
In that case, the higher charge is clearly illegal (no novel theory needed), so standard contract law theory could consider the terms of the buyer's offer to purchase to be the terms of the invitation to treat in the absence of legal contrary terms offered at checkout. I guess it's possible that the court would say that the store never agreed to sell the item at all by demanding an illegal price instead of being considered to have accepted the buyer's offer on the posted terms, but there's only so much tolerance a judge would have for that kind of defense by the store - after all, it's very likely that the customer would have an unjust enrichment claim against the store for the amount of the overcharge if they were to pay the illegal higher price, and that wouldn't be true if the illegal contract term were valid.
The precise answer may vary by state based on judicial precedents about illegal terms in contractual counteroffers following an offer to buy made pursuant to an invitation to treat.
None of this is practical for almost any chain dollar store overpricing victim to pursue, but I am just talking theoretically here.
This is a fundamental misunderstanding of how the legal system works, at least for common law ones. When cops "enforce" the law, like arresting someone or towing a car, they're only allowed to do it because there's some immediate need. In the former case, it's because having a criminal roaming around the streets is a danger to society, and in the latter case because the car is blocking traffic and needs to be removed. In both cases you still need a judge to ruled that the person actually shoplifted or parked illegally. None of these factors apply in a dispute over pricing, and it's not the police's job to strongarm the shopkeeper to accept the lower-marked price. Indeed, in the two examples, there are often cases where no actions are taken at all, for instance issuing a summons instead of arresting someone, or issuing a ticket instead of towing a car.
Not at all true. They can enforce the law because there's a law being violated, not because there's an immediate need for the enforcement.
> In the former case, it's because having a criminal roaming around the streets is a danger to society, and in the latter case because the car is blocking traffic and needs to be removed.
There are so many cases where cops can arrest someone who isn't being a danger to society in any way, like someone who illegally crossed the border into the US (a criminal misdemeanor) and is otherwise fully law-abiding. Or for an example under state law, a cop arresting someone who is intentionally underpaying state income tax (criminal tax evasion) has no immediate need to take that person into custody before conviction but is 100% allowed to do so if probable cause exists, at least until the initial bail hearing.
> In both cases you still need a judge to ruled that the person actually shoplifted or parked illegally.
Not before a cop gets involved, no. The judge comes after the cop.
> None of these factors apply in a dispute over pricing, and it's not the police's job to strongarm the shopkeeper to accept the lower-marked price. Indeed, in the two examples, there are often cases where no actions are taken at all, for instance issuing a summons instead of arresting someone, or issuing a ticket instead of towing a car.
This has nothing to do with strongarming the shopkeeper to accept a lower-marked price in the sense of an ordinary pricing dispute between private parties, it's about enforcing state or local laws that regulate this in cases where a shop is violating applicable laws.
It is true that many of these laws only allow administrative fines in response to complaints or inspections, not anything as proactive as I was describing. The theoretical viability of my idea of simply leaving with the item after paying the legal maximum price at the cash register and involving the cops if stopped actually depends on state contract law, and likely specifically its judicial precedents: if that state would view the buyer's offer to buy at the shelf price as accepted on the terms of the store's invitation to treat since the counteroffer from the cash register's scanner was illegal, then title transfers to the buyer at the time of payment and an attempt to stop them from leaving would be a crime that the cops could in theory be called for. If the state would view the buyer's offer to buy be rejected even though the counteroffer was itself illegal, then yeah the only available enforcement is the administrative complaint / inspection / fine procedure and the buyer never gains title to the property. I expect this legal conclusion would vary from one state to another.
I think we all agree that this theoretical option is very rarely practical, and I'm not pretending otherwise.
Does only committing a "criminal misdemeanor" somehow exempt you from arrest?
>Or for an example under state law, a cop arresting someone who is intentionally underpaying state income tax (criminal tax evasion) has no immediate need to take that person into custody before conviction but is 100% allowed to do so if probable cause exists, at least until the initial bail hearing.
Right, because arresting people who refuses to show up to court is needed for the justice system to work at all. Otherwise people can just shirk their court dates and never face judgement. There's plenty of other reasons to arrest people besides the two examples I provided, they're not supposed to be exhaustive.
>This has nothing to do with strongarming the shopkeeper to accept a lower-marked price in the sense of an ordinary pricing dispute between private parties, it's about enforcing state or local laws that regulate this in cases where a shop is violating applicable laws.
This makes as much sense as calling in the cops to report health code violations.
It does not - and that's exactly my point! Cops are allowed to arrest that criminal even though there's no immediate need to arrest them. So, immediate need is not a prerequisite to cops arresting someone.
> Right, because arresting people who refuses to show up to court is needed for the justice system to work at all. Otherwise people can just shirk their court dates and never face judgement. There's plenty of other reasons to arrest people besides the two examples I provided, they're not supposed to be exhaustive.
Yes, but cops are also free to arrest people who they are confident will show up to court, if there's probable cause that they've committed a crime. Again, the point of that example was that immediate need is not required before a cop can arrest someone.
> This makes as much sense as calling in the cops to report health code violations.
I agree that it would be best if there were a separate agency that could respond on the spot for this type of issue, other than the regular police department and other than a slow administrative complaint/inspection process which doesn't lead to enough of a fine for stores to change their processes.
But I was discussing the possibility of the sale completing according to the law and the store trying to stop the customer from leaving with their purchase because they didn't pay the illegal overcharge. That would indeed by a crime attempted or committed by the store, assuming the law considers the sale to have been completed, and that is indeed something within the scope of what cops can handle.
To use your health code analogy: sure, in general, administrative complaints are the way to handle health code violations. But what do you call it if a restaurant worker sees something which they know or reasonably should know is toxic to humans spill into a customer's order, and then they serve it to the customer anyway without a warning? Yes, that's a crime as well as a health code violation. There are plenty of cases where cops can legitimately be involved in things that can also be handled administratively. Whether or not cops are likely to respond in useful or timely ways is a completely separate question from what the law allows.
(Tangent: Cops also quite often handle administrative fines of even smaller magnitude than what we're discussing here, but usually when the aggrieved party is the government and the wrongdoer is a random individual, like issuing non-criminal $60-100 fines for not paying a public transit fare of a couple of dollars. It's rare for them to do it when the aggrieved party is a random individual and the wrongdoer is a business.)
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...
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?
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.
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.
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.)
Is there another law that can get them for repeat abuse.
Anyway no, shareholders care about much more than simple profits.
I ask because I've never invested in a company that wasn't very profitable. I'm trying to find out besides intense insider information why someone would. (I'm not VC clearly, just a retail investor.)
If they didn't, everyone would be invested in the single most profitable company on the market, which they're not.
There are unprofitable companies people are perfectly willing to buy.
Growth, absolute revenue, rates of rates of change are all relevant depending on what you care about.
For example, as an owner, I can be paid a bonus, or not. Crumbs, I can be paid a salary or not. If I want profits high, I simply take a low salary and no bonus. Or vice versa if I want profits low.
But that's the tip of the iceberg. Buying an asset this year, depreciated over the next 5, means higher profit this year, and 4 years of lower profit.
Marketing expenses this year, benefits next year, and so on. Drop the head count to juice profits for a couple years, raise head count to drop it, and do on.
Profits are the easiest thing to manipulate and hence the worst metric for fines. Which is why you see Europe use Revenue (not profit) as the measure for some fines.
Insurers are margin-capped, but wouldn't you know it once you own a PBM and the providers, you can make revenue, holdings, pricing power, and market share rise arbitrarily while never producing a profit beyond the cap.
I’m all for limited liability corporations, but if there is a smoking gun that shows you intentionally engaged in criminal activity, that should pierce the liability shield.
And last time I checked, you don't get to just say "oopsie woopsies, I only accidentally committed fraud of a mass scale exclusively in a way that benefits me for a prolonged period of time that would obviously show up on books and intentionally hid it until caught" and get out of punishment.
If I break the law, I get arrested. Or am I allowed to "accidentally" try to carry out a new PC from Best Buy several times in a row?
> do you honestly believe a senior exec at a company specially said to charge the customer more than what the price on the shelf says
Yes. I 100% believe that a policy from management of a retail chain owned by PE would say “charge the till price not the sticker price”, and also separately “our policy is to ensure all prices are consistent by doing a price audit of every stickered item once per 6 months”. All that does is allegedly ensure they’re not ripping people off two days a year.
Like, imagine if your bank randomly took a few percent extra off each transaction. Someone would get in a lot of trouble for that, and at a certain point “we’re not doing fraud, we’re just staggeringly incompetent” won’t cut it.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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...
I would be curious to see how often it's the other way around, e.g. they undercharge a customer.
It is possible that I am wrong about this.
The first think I thought of was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Pinto#Fuel_system_fires,_...
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?
If something is mislabeled you get (one of) free, and all the rest at the lower price. (And you see a worker skurry off to fix it immediately.)
And here's a shock, mislabelling is vanishingly rare... seems it can be done if desired...
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.
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.
Dollar stores target grocery stores margin products, to drive them out of business.
In my hometown, we had a grocery, but it closed in the earl 90s. They didn't get another on until the lat 00s. It was open a few years, had bare shelves most of the time and convenience store level prices when they did have something. In the late 10s, a Dollar General opened... so far, it has remained open, has much better prices than the previous attempts, and is generally much better stocked. The town hasn't grown in that time. But Dollar General is existing where no one had managed to survive before.
We'll see how it goes long term.
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.
In other words, regulatory capture at its finest, over the backs of the poorest in the country.
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.
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.
No, in this case the shop is legitimately offering an item for sale, and then forgetting to change the price they are offering it at. It's quite disingenuous for a shop to put up signs, and then act like those numbers aren't legally binding, while the real prices are hidden away in a database somewhere. If they want to have their database be the authoritative copy pricing information, then they can just not put up price signs to begin with.
This one really does vary by jurisdiction, but no, grocery stores generally must display prices by law.
Such places are likely to have more proactive regulations against price discrepancies well, rather than common law "freedom".
Still I can imagine a few ways for a store to post prices without being in the territory of forming binding offers - keep stock only accessible to employees, post obnoxious signs everywhere stating that the prices are for informational purposes and that no offer is implied, require membership for entry with appropriate terms, etc.
Or rather than continuing to run the complexity treadmill trying to escape regulation, stores can just accept that they're bound by laws that were settled quite some time ago, and that their business includes making offers to sell items.
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?
One reason it works this way is that treating displayed items as an offer to sell would leave it unclear to whom the offer to sell would be made. Clearly each item on display can only be sold to one of the many shoppers who sees it, so they can't all be offered the sale. There are several other reasons too, like different customers being offered different terms of sale based on loyalty program membership, promotions, student or senior discounts, etc.
Here is the Wikipedia summary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invitation_to_treat
As the article says, the term in various US jurisdictions may be slightly different, like invitation to bargain, but the basic concept is the same. (I'm ignoring Louisiana entirely, which has a completely different legal tradition not derived from English common law.)
If the price on the shelf were an offer to sell, then you would be contractually obliged to buy everything you picked up. The offer comes instead from when you pass it to the cashier, which is why I'm saying for the third time on this thread, if you don't like that price walk out and leave the goods at the checkout...see if they find it more fun to put all your goods back, or put the correct prices on the shelf! If a group of people did this at every till the store would be effectively closed.
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.
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.
Because the current country's idea of fines against egregious business practices mainly amounts to a 5% fine of the profit they defrauded those against.
It turns a punatative action into a "cost of doing business". Look at right now with Dollar General - 25% of their goods are priced higher at register, defrauding people. And what can be done? Leave. Because many states are completely ineffectual in strongly attacking this.
And although North Carolina caps inspection fines to $5k, how many times were they even inspected? And were any fines even submitted?
My guess is no.
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!
No, they have no actual interest in saving the government money, especially if it comes at the cost of enforcing regulations on corporations.
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.
It is all these Karen memes that ruined complaining about being screwed over by corparate interests.
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.
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
- 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…
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?
[All the major grocery retailers] are signatories to the voluntary code of practice for computerised checkout systems in supermarkets. Generally, this means that if an item is scanned at the checkout at a higher price than it says on the shelf or as advertised, a customer is entitled to receive the first item free and all multiples of the same item at the lower price.
https://www.choice.com.au/shopping/consumer-rights-and-advic...
This practice not just matches price (dang, you caught us out this time), but incentivises minimising errors (oops, our bad, have it for free).
As for enforcement, ACCC recently took Microsoft to Federal Court for hiding Copilot pricing shenanigans, as discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45721682
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.
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.
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.
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.)
video if you're curious: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4QGOHahiVM
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.
The reality is a small business owner does not have the time or wherewithal to negotiate large contracts across hundreds or thousands of brands. They may nail SKU's and quantities better than a Wal-Mart or Dollar General, but at the price of higher costs and lower selection.
You don't really see large scale backlash in communities against these stores for this reason - buying branded at a reasonable price point is foundational for a good quality of life in modern society.
Most people vote with their feet, and are happy with the tradeoff.
I'm not an expert on the topic, but I don't think it's a reach to think that they might have engineered this situation.
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.
Another thing many grocery chains do is list a price that is only for folks who sign up for the stores tracking program, rather than the price that folk who don't want to jump through whoops and sing the song and dance pay. (They put that price in the fine print).
we don’t complain that the per unit cost at target is higher than at costco
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.)
My wife attended a political protest, and said she noticed signs made from my employer's shipping boxes.
Sometimes the sign-makers are artistically inclined, and may have access to better materials.
The most memorable example was at the political demonstrations (and counter-demonstrations) leading up to the Massachusetts constitutional convention that legalized gay marriage. For the State House one I photographed (learning photojournalism on the side), the anti-gay-marriage people were mostly bused in, including a pair of angry-looking old nuns in black full habit, and handed out the same ugly stock sign. (There's an obvious joke that they couldn't find a graphic designer who was sympathetic to the anti-gay cause.) Separated from them, across a street was a huge counter-protest, with an ocean of all sorts of creative, colorful, and positive handmaid signs, held by generally good-natured and thoughtful looking people.
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.
in action.
Also dollar stores carry produce just grocery at least largest ones do like dollar general. They are designed to compete against grocery stores and wallmart’s neighborhood markets.
https://substack.perfectunion.us/p/dollar-stores-are-killing...
Carrying cost of produce does not add up. If produce is going bad at that spoilage rate the store management fucked up and didn’t order the correct amount of product for the location. You can’t wish your way into a product mix.
Nothing was stopping grocery stores from identifying this need. Pretending your customer base is more affluent than it is sounds like a quick way to go out of business to me.
Perhaps the rural grocers are not carrying the appropriate product mix for their current (new?) customer base, and are overvaluing customer service?
I don't like it - but I also spend time in rural communities and see why these places beat the local grocers. They offer better value for the dollar. Often they are indeed cheaper on a unit cost basis, much less overall per transaction.
It's sort of like folks screeching about "food deserts" in urban communities I've lived in, thus enacting laws forcing fresh produce be carried by the local convenience stores. That produce simply rotted on the shelves since - surprise! - the local business owners knew their customer base better than a bunch of do-gooder ivory tower academics did.
You can make some strong cases for Walmart putting Main Street rural America out of business using predatory pricing schemes and the like. It's a lot more difficult for dollar stores.
You shouldn't say "screeching" if you want to be taken seriously, it makes you sound shallow and dismissive, incapable of understanding how your narrow outlook is not applicable in some situations.
Please, take even the most basic efforts to understand what people are talking about here instead of forcing me to shove information down your throat like you haven't learned how to use an internet search yet. You don't need my help, and nothing I can say will be more convincing than your own personal research.
Does the consumer not have all of the information available to them to make the comparison of the per unit cost between a dollar general and a local grocery?
> When dollar store chains open, it almost always cuts into the sales of local businesses. At first glance, it might seem like this is simply the nature of competition. But dollar stores use their hefty market muscle to make it virtually impossible for other businesses to successfully compete. With plenty of cash from shareholders and institutional investors, chain dollar stores have the resources to lose money indefinitely in a community until their competitors have folded.
> For many businesses, losing even a small percentage of sales can put the business at risk of failure. There are many types of businesses whose products overlap with chain dollar stores and that are therefore vulnerable, including hardware, small appliances, toys, reading materials, greeting cards, and health and beauty supplies. With dollar stores averaging around 10,000 square feet in size and sales of around $260/square foot, a typical Dollar General captures over $2 million in sales every year — and those sales are likely coming out of the cash registers of businesses already there.1
> This is an enormous problem for grocery stores in particular, which have razor-thin profit margins. Cutting into a grocery store’s sales even a small bit can endanger its survival. Food is what customers buy most often in dollar stores,2 making dollar stores a clear threat to grocery store survival or creation. And grocery stores’ profit margins are higher on items other than fresh produce — things like processed, prepackaged food and snacks — which is the bulk of the food that dollar stores sell. Peeling off just enough sales of packaged food can send a grocery store into the red.
> There are many examples of grocery stores that closed when a dollar store opened nearby...
https://www.yelp.com/search?find_desc=Dollar+Stores&find_loc...
Median home price - $700K
There are a lot of times you want smaller packages.
Sometimes it is more about the upfront cost and/or resulting storage space needed, than pure price efficiency.
Let's play with Tide, and with Kroger and Dollar General just because those are the two retailers that are near to me. We'll do biggest and smallest, and start with the smallest.
---
The smallest bottle of original Tide that the Dollar General near me has is 34 ounces for $6.00: $0.1765 per ounce.
The Kroger near me has a similar, but lesser, bottle as their smallest offering: 32 ounce bottles for $5.99: $0.1872 per ounce.
Dollar General wins on smallest.
---
The biggest bottle of Tide at Dollar General is 115 ounces; regularly, $16.95 ($0.147 per ounce). On sale for $15.95 ($0.139 per ounce). With a $4-off digital coupon, $11.95 ($0.104 per ounce).
At Kroger: 132 ounces for $19.99 ($0.151 per ounce). (With a $5-off-of-$25 digital coupon if I feel like giving Proctor & Gamble even more of my money in one transaction.)
Dollar General also wins at biggest. They win at regular price, and today they also win at sale price.
shrug
---
Convenience also has a cost. For instance: I ran out of cat food on Christmas Day. Everything nearby was closed except for a Circle K, so I walked over there to see what they had. And they had cat food (of course they did). I bought the smallest container of Purina dry cat food I've ever seen for ~$9.
That was a lot of money for such a small amount of cat food, but I was happy to pay it. They had the right product in the right place at the right time. (And most importantly, the cat was happy.)
It’s so bizarre to me. At some point someone needs to do an in-depth expose on how this spice monopoly happened.
And we need more local co-op grocery stores like Berkeley Bowl, the Davis Co-op, and ATX Wheatsville.
They slowly morphed into bougie health nut/conspiracy hippie stores during my lifetime. Closest thing I've found to what I remember them being are food service stores which tend to require a business tax ID to buy from.
I can do without the "health/wellness" aisle of mystery fluid bottles almost entirely. Whole Paycheck Foods and a lot of independent grocers also have this fad and it's depressing that borderline Miracle Mineral Solution nonsense is allowed through under-regulated "supplement" exceptions. More power to those who benefit from ever-so-slightly-helpful / placebo vitamins-supplements but it seems like mostly from snake oil of a century ago.
Anyhow, there are/were more decent grocers. Like Lundari's 30 years ago in the SF Bay Area. The status quo isn't the only available option.
Yup. Outback Steakhouse is worse than a fast food store like McDonald's, it's an expensive not fast food store.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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...
- 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?
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.
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.
Two neighboring dollar stores just went out of business in a town I commute through. The culprit? A new Harp's grocery store a block away.
The only thing keeping it afloat is literally balloons I feel. Walmart doesn’t sell helium inflated ones.
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.
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.)
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.
Did you read the article? Charging what's actually on the price tag is the first thing that's the difference.
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.
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.)
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.
The main thing keeping the local dollar stores alive is the death of Party City as far as I can tell.
Well, there’s your problem.
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?
> 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.
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.
ROI on payday loans for lenders is typically very high and their main issue is usually regulation that limits the volume they can transact. ROI on dollar stores is very low because the margin is low, costs are high, and inventory turns is relatively low. For example, Dollar General's inventory turns are half Walmart, that means that to continue operating they need to charge higher prices (the margin).
Low margins aren't an indicator of anything. They are a component of financial return in addition to capital. One does not make sense without the other. In high frequency trading, they are making 1/100000th of a percent on a trade, that is a very high return business if you can do this millions of times a day. Similarly, if I run a housebuilder then I need a 20% margin because I am going to be turning over my inventory across multiple years. If you take out industries with intellectual IP and the secular shift in margin due to taxation changes, ROI across industries is relatively stable...because margins don't matter. What is a good indicator of customers exploitation is if ROI is high. For dollar stores, shareholders are getting exploited, not customers (look at DG/DLTR share price, this is with a secular upturn in multiples, if you take out unit growth which is inherently limited the financial performance is non-existent).
This is wrong because quarterly reporting normalizes for expenses in same period
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.
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.
“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?
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.
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
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 ...
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.
Expecting physical reality to synchronously conform to a policy in an information system is pretty silly.
And when the mismatch tends to be in the stores favor, then maybe it isn’t silly but malicious.
If corporate had to wait until every store signaled "all clear" on paper tags, most retail businesses would go bankrupt in record time. The margins are not fat enough to run things this slowly.
Real profit margin. Achieved through deceit. This is vilainy.
The company owning both Dollar General and the sister real estate would report consolidated income.
If you're saying there's a secret arm's length relationship between a dollar store chain and a real estate holding, structured just to trick the public into thinking low cost retail is low margin, I'm afraid that is not true.
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.
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.
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.
They'd leverage it as if it was an allowance and stay just below that rate.
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.
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!
Let me guess, the mobile app provides discounts…?
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.
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?
But, once inside, an offer is made through the pricetag and accepted the sale is final. Before payment, before ... The whole point of price tags is making an offer. So if you are inside the store, take the good, and accept the sale at the price on the tag, obviously a court will rule both sides are in agreement about the sale and price at that point (NOT at the cash register) and that's that.
Additionally, money legislation makes cash the universal cop-out. You can always choose to settle a debt through cash. And that debt is what's on the price tag, the offer that was accepted, nothing else. In other words, the cashier and the manager, hell the CEO comes down and refuses? Give them cash and walk out with the goods. Perfectly legal thing to do. The sale was already final, and this settles the debt. Done and done.
This is why messing with price tags in stores is such a serious offense.
This goes pretty far in law. You can actually go to the IRS, ask to pay with cash money, and they'll let you pay your tax bill cash. Cash is the universal cop-out.
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?
While I wish that that were how things worked, unfortunately, the US legal system disagrees [0].
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invitation_to_treat#Case_law
> A display of goods for sale in a shop window or within a shop is an invitation to treat, as in the Boots case, a leading case concerning supermarkets. The shop owner is thus not obliged to sell the goods, even if signage such as "special offer" accompanies the display. […] If a shop mistakenly displays an item for sale at a very low price it is not obliged to sell it for that amount.
In the US, local laws generally side with the consumer and legally entitle you to the displayed price. There are also federal laws from the FTC act against deceptive pricing.
See some US state laws here: https://www.nist.gov/pml/owm/us-retail-pricing-laws-and-regu...
a few summaries from https://www.braincorp.com/resources/the-price-must-be-right-...:
>Michigan requires a bonus of 10 times the overcharge amount.
New Jersey’s Retail Pricing Laws mandate that most retail stores clearly mark the total selling price on most items offered for sale. Retailers must also verify the accuracy of their checkout scanners and may face fines of $50-$100 per violation for noncompliance.
Connecticut law requires stores to charge the lowest of the advertised, posted, or labeled price for an item. Customers who are overcharged are entitled to a refund of the overcharge or $20, whichever is greater
And they can. Just bring it up to the cashier or managers attention, and voila, they adjust the price. Please let me know if you have had a different experience.
I have watched countless people shop with a calculator or pen/pad to make sure they stay on budget. It is not hard.
If you've ever shopped at dollar stores they are often understaffed with a long line, no self-checkout, and a single cashier on duty if at all. If you argue about pricing you will hold everyone up in line, maybe get dirty looks and possibly wait an hour for someone with the authority to come and clear it up. Another person in this thread also mentioned that they got screamed at and chased out of the store for "causing a problem": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46182451
Yes, mistakes happen; yes, people get over charged. But to imply people are shamed for asking to correct the error just seems...odd.
One note about asking for a refund/price adjustment. Occasionally the store workers forget to pull the sale prices off the shelf when the sale is over. In these situations, the manager/workers are appreciative since they can pull the sticker that was left on by accident. Just my experience...
> I have watched countless people shop with a calculator or pen/pad to make sure they stay on budget. It is not hard.
Yes, this is exactly what I am talking about. Both of those things are straightforwardly doing extra work using your own time and resources. I generally spot check my receipts and do a rough mental tally, but if I had to turn that paranoia to max because some store was continually trying to defraud me, then I would likely stop going there.
If a store refused to adjust a fraudulent charge or honor an offered price, then I would keep escalating the issue and not back down. This too requires resources of having the time to argue, reading as someone who will not simply be browbeaten, plus deescalation and being able to communicate clearly if they call the police, etc.
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…)
It’s the same BS when Meta and others say they can’t moderate posts because there’s too many.
It makes sense they’re all switching to e-ink tags though, probably saves a ton in labor and the occasional mistake.
That's also why messing with price stickers is a crime.
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.
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.
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).
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...
Even with paper tags, the store can't get someone to change the price while you're waiting at the cashier for a "manager" to show up?
And no, it's not possible to compete as a startup against Walmart or any other of the corporate giants (and not just in retail, it's valid across industries) - alone because the sheer scale of Walmart allows them to extort insanely cheap pricing out of vendors. Walmart can sell for far cheaper than any mom and pop store can acquire.
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.
You can't go to some small store and see them consistently deliver better prices.
"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.
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).
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.
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.
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...
> 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.
"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.
Seems to me that failing any inspection is bad. 4300 in three years and in half the country is clearly a lot. That’s almost four failed inspections per day, double the number of mass shootings (which is also too high and even one is bad).
Also, the paragraphs immediately following what you quoted provide more context. Over 50% error rate is obviously a lot, as is failing 28 inspections in a row.
> The article's thesis is that these stores are uniquely bad.
Is it? Seems to me the thesis of the article is how this broken system is punishing poor people even further: “As the cost of living soars across America, the customers bearing the burden are those who can least afford it”. Which parts specifically make you believe that the thesis of the article is that these stores are uniquely bad?
inconvenience aside, are buses so expensive that you wouldn't save any money by going to a different store?
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.
There is no default price.
I'd love to see a citation on that, since I think you're mistaken -- there's plenty of things that are still a dollar, mostly stuff like packages of napkins or plastic cups, cards and other sundries.
(What was extensively covered was that they were no longer a "everything is a dollar" store.)
_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.
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.
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.
In the EU and UK, shame still motivates better behaviour.
Every single problem the USA has comes down to the fact that shame, in the USA, stopped functioning in the late 1970s.
Hobbes arguments can rationalize any Nash Equilibrium.
Of course this could be offered. But, no one wants to do it because it's a thankless job. And if you're going to do a thankless job, you'd probably rather get paid a lot of money to do it than very little
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.
Yes, I guess well capitalize companies could offer unrealistically low prices, but on the other hand, any kind of co-op or community driven organization has the benefit of not needing the margins. Dollar store investors are there to make a buck, if their capital isn't getting reasonable returns will ultimately exit the business and move somewhere else.
Cooperatives distribute the losses but it is still a money pit.
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.
Yes, lots of businesses have thin margins. But the law (such as contract law and the laws against consumer fraud, which are implicated here) sets the things that a business can’t economize on in order to meet those margins. It’s the same as food safety: restaurants also run really thin margins, but they’re not allowed to store the meat on the counter because refrigeration is too expensive. If they do that, they get shut down by the health inspector.
Businesses “should” comply with consumer fraud laws for the same reason they “should” comply with health codes.
https://www.reddit.com/r/DollarTree/comments/1ndmniz/downloa...
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.
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.
I'm fairly certain the error rate for all those shops is less than 5%.
2) They’re in more convenient locations - often on the drive home already - and are smaller so are faster to get in and out of when you’re hurrying to or from work.
3) If you’re _not_ working, they’re probably cheaper to _get to_, especially if you can’t drive, because they’re closer.
I’m not as up in arms about this as some - in some respects this is just a new iteration of the corner store or bodega, which have always been a little more expensive than supermarkets (and often a little disorganized…) - but it is the truth.
While the typical viewpoint is that "poor people" shop there, that's actually somewhat of a misnomer.
Most dollar stores in the US are located in rural locations, and in part because a lot of rural population is also "lower income" they get the appearance of "only the poor shop there". But the part the folks who label the stores as "for the poor" often overlook is the "ruralness" aspect. That dollar store might only be a five to ten minute drive away to grab something, meanwhile the Walmart or Target or other, that likely has the better deal (the 128oz of Tide for 9.99 vs the 8oz of Tide for $1.50) is a forty-five minute drive away one way. So couple 1.5 hours round trip commute, plus fuel costs for that 1.5 hours, and you start to see why folks would more likely shop at the dollar store vs. the store that actually gives them the better deal overall.
That's partly the "magic" of the dollar stores for corporate. They sprout up like weeds in rural areas much like Starbucks sprout up on every corner in cities. And they capture sales largely because by sprouting up like weeds, they are a shorter round-trip drive to grab sometime (esp. to grab those one or two things you forgot last weekend when you /did/ make the 1.5 hour round trip drive to go to the nearest Walmart for the better deals). These store's sales largely come from the 7-11/Starbucks method in the city: convenience.
And couple the above with the fact that in rural USA, there is effectively zero public transportation and very little in the form of uber/cab companies, and so if one does not have a car, one may be stuck shopping at the dollar store 5-10 minutes away even if one knows the stores are gouging.
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.
They _know_ buying a small bottle of dish detergent is more expensive per oz, but buying in bulk would require a 15-16 week lead across all their purchase categories.
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.
We don't bother remembering it because we're in a high-enough trust society where that burden shouldn't be necessary.