That&#x27;s probably aimed at reducing consumption.

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

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

Michigan in the 90s had a similar rule. Customer gets 10x the overcharge (up to $5 max). I can guarantee you they fixed the price immediately.Where I live there’s no such rule I can tell you no one is correcting the price when I point out that I got overcharged (they usually shrug with “it does that sometimes”).

Is this a recent law? I lived most of my life in MA and I&#x27;ve never heard of this, and never noticed one of those signs.

Is it a certain number of days to fix all the mispriced items?If not, there’s an obvious loophole here. Misprice intentionally, then stop purchasing the item from your distributor if you get called on it, rotating in some similar thing. Later, bring it back with a different sku, or mispriced at some other level.This would work well for dollar stores, which are optimized to spread in &#x2F; sustain food&#x2F;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&#x2F;store, depending on how poorly the law is worded).

It&#x27;s different in different states. In Maryland, once a complaint is filed with the relevant authority, the store has a certain number of days to correct pricing. Most retailers will give you the misprice if it&#x27;s clearly their fault in not changing the tags, as a matter of policy.The confusion around this law is quite frustrating, though. Quite a few customers think they&#x27;re entitled to not just prices on tags that haven&#x27;t been updated, but prices for what are clearly entirely different products.

&gt; Red Baron frozen pizzas, listed on the shelf at $5, rang up at $7.65. Bounty paper towels, shelf price $10.99, rang up at $15.50.This very rarely happens in MA, because when it does the store has to give you the item for $10 off, including if that makes it free. And they have to post a sign at the register explaining the law, which means when you&#x27;re invoking it all you need to do is point at the sign.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mass.gov&#x2F;info-details&#x2F;consumer-pricing-accuracy-information" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mass.gov&#x2F;info-details&#x2F;consumer-pricing-accuracy-...</a>

&gt; Has private equity ever done anything good for anyone outside of the investors?If it&#x27;s not publicly traded, it&#x27;s super secure from any public accountability.And while I&#x27;m increasingly hostile toward the shareholder model, we do get one transparency breadcrumb from this (gov managed) contrivance: The Earnings CallEarnings Calls give us worthwhile amounts of internal information that we&#x27;d never get otherwise - info that often conflicts with public statements and reports to govs.Like CapEx expenditures&#x2F;forecast and the actual reasons that certain segments over&#x2F;underperform. It&#x27;s a solid way to catch corporations issuing bald-faced lies (for any press, public, gov that are paying attention).<pre><code> AT&amp;T PR: Net Neutrality is tanking our infra investment
 ATT&#x27;s EC: CapEx is high and that will continue
</code></pre>
I&#x27;ll bet 1 share that there are moves to get this admin to do away with the requirement.

I&#x27;m not sure why private equity is singled out here, when every time a public company does a bad (eg. Boeing), people crow about how public companies only care about juicing next quarter&#x27;s earnings.

&gt; Has private equity ever done anything good for anyone outside of the investors?Yes. Productivity typically goes up [1]. Its reputation for job cutting is overblown [2], as is its record on price increases [3]. And historically, it&#x27;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&#x27;re lead by a founder, in which case they&#x27;re &quot;take private&quot; 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&#x27;t seen great evidence they&#x27;re worse than other privately-owned hospitals with similar scale. The problem is hospitals probably shouldn&#x27;t be run for profit or on-locally. But because nobody in particular is defending private equity, that&#x27;s easier to attack.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hbs.edu&#x2F;faculty&#x2F;Pages&#x2F;item.aspx?num=67233" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hbs.edu&#x2F;faculty&#x2F;Pages&#x2F;item.aspx?num=67233</a>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jstor.org&#x2F;stable&#x2F;43495362" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jstor.org&#x2F;stable&#x2F;43495362</a>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;centers.tuck.dartmouth.edu&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;cpee&#x2F;files&#x2F;Is_Private_Equity_Good_for_Consumers.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;centers.tuck.dartmouth.edu&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;cpee&#x2F;files&#x2F;Is_Pri...</a>[4] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Early_history_of_private_equity#Origins_of_modern_private_equity" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Early_history_of_private_equit...</a>[5] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jamanetwork.com&#x2F;journals&#x2F;jama&#x2F;fullarticle&#x2F;2813379#google_vignette" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jamanetwork.com&#x2F;journals&#x2F;jama&#x2F;fullarticle&#x2F;2813379#go...</a>

Private equity are the crows of the economy. They pick off weak &#x2F; dysfunctional businesses and open space for fresh competition (or for other markets to open up).

If you have a pension, you&#x27;re an investor in PE. If you live in a country with a sovereign wealth fund, you&#x27;re a beneficiary of PE. If you&#x27;re connected to a school with an endowment, a lot of that money ends up in PE funds, and can fund lots of research and student resources.So ya, I&#x27;d agree the PE is rarely good for anyone but the investors, but you&#x27;d be surprised how many people are investors without realizing it.

In theory it helps people who have some sort of trade and just want to do that trade, focus on that, while the business experts from the PE firm handle the business side. Running a business is a skill, and people who want to sell some other skill often don&#x27;t have it as you can&#x27;t be good at everything.Are there other ways of addressing that gap, like hiring experts? Sure, but its not like PE is entirely evil.Keep in mind there is some selection bias here. You only hear about private equity when its being comic book evil. When things work out or its a non scummy PE company, you never hear about it.

It seems to offer interesting opportunities for young recent high level MBA&#x27;s.

If you&#x27;re a Dell customer, Michael Dell taking the company private again seems to have done wonders for them.

In general I have a pretty negative view of private equity. However I did see this awhile back that seems at least partially positive: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnbc.com&#x2F;2023&#x2F;07&#x2F;27&#x2F;private-equity-giant-kkrs-antidote-to-worker-discontent-employee-stock-ownership-programs.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnbc.com&#x2F;2023&#x2F;07&#x2F;27&#x2F;private-equity-giant-kkrs-an...</a>

&gt; Has private equity ever done anything good for anyone outside of the investors?This is a bit like asking if public equity has ever done anything good for anyone outside of its investors. It really depends on what is meant by &quot;anything good.&quot;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?<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wallstreetoasis.com&#x2F;forum&#x2F;private-equity&#x2F;the-leading-research-journal-for-the-operating-side-of-private-equity-covering" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wallstreetoasis.com&#x2F;forum&#x2F;private-equity&#x2F;the-lea...</a>

So I work in commercial real estate, obviously a large private equity influenced industry. I&#x27;ve worked in REPE and in other capacities.There&#x27;s degrees of PE. Some good, fine, and some worse.Take real estate development. It&#x27;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&#x27;t make money in LA, so there&#x27;s no capital available.Then you end up with &quot;affordable&quot; housing developers adding the only supply at $600-900k&#x2F;unit costs vs the market rate developer at $300-600k&#x2F;unit.----On the other hand, &quot;value add&quot; private equity is much more suspicious. It&#x27;s more cut throat, easier to end up in crony capitalist situations by operating with a &quot;cut expenses, provide less, make big bucks&quot; 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 (&quot;Mr. The Model is Always Right&quot;) too hard all night long.This is how we end up with old properties who get flipped 4x each being sold with &quot;upside the seller was too stupid to take advantage of&quot; 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 &quot;lipstick on the pig&quot; 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&#x27;ll make it harder to fundraise your next deal!This isn&#x27;t to say that &quot;value add&quot; is a dirty business. We certainly need to balance the incentive to modernize and renovate properties. An d developers overbuilding isn&#x27;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.

Not yet. Sometimes employees if they get second bite of the big apple. PE do well in capital-intensive sectors. I&#x27;m not sure if their playbook fits the real needs of dollar stores. Instead of focusing on things like debt and aggressive cost cuts, most customers just want fair prices, stocked shelves, clean stores, friendly cashiers and basic respect—things that PE firms often ignore. In DFW, I was surprised to see 1-2 person dollar stores!

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

Why is private equity different from any other form of organization? Publicly traded companies are even more addicted to getting revenue. Non-profits like universities may not have shareholders, but somehow the price of tuition keeps skyrocketing even faster than the prices at the dollar stores. And it&#x27;s not like the religious charities have been pure.

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

&gt; Dollar stores are private equity with a checkout lane.Dollar Tree and Dollar General are publicly traded.So Family Dollar might be the result of PE tactics, but the other two aren&#x27;t, and Dollar Tree sold Family Dollar because they saw it as under-performing.It&#x27;s actually sort of weird Dollar Tree couldn&#x27;t make it work. I know the dollar stores all have somewhat different businesses, but you&#x27;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.

Buying in bulk is about having the ability to both afford next week’s food this week and have the means to store it. Not to mention the annual subscription.Responding to a comment about dollar stores preying on the poor with, “that’s why I shop at Costco” is… a choice.

&gt;While other retailers try to get me to buy more stuffs, Costco try to make sure I&#x27;m satisfied enough that I&#x27;ll renew my yearly membership (their main profit source). The incentive structure aligns very well.This doesn&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;re still a for profit retail business.

And this is exactly why I only shop at Costco. While other retailers try to get me to buy more stuffs, Costco try to make sure I&#x27;m satisfied enough that I&#x27;ll renew my yearly membership (their main profit source). The incentive structure aligns very well.

I’ll bite…I live in a rural area with a Dollar General about a half mile from my neighborhood. For staples, it’s honestly fine. You want a 6 pack and some hot dog buns because you missed it in the Wal-Mart run the other day (15 miles away), it’s great!You’re not getting fleeced and if you are, the gas savings alone more than make up for it (0.65 per mile per the IRS.)For folks who depend on the local DG for, idk, clothes and household goods it might be much worse, I don’t shop for those there ever, but on staples it’ll do, especially given the density of stores compared to major chains.

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

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

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

Here&#x27;s how shitty of a business person I am: I had no idea that the poor were a &quot;market&quot; you could prey upon.Somehow I thought that if I presented a business plan that began, &quot;Our target audience are those living paycheck to paycheck…&quot; that I would be quickly shown the door.

&gt; They already run on a thin-staff, high-volume model.Like every other retail business not targeting the top 5%.And Dollar Tree and Dollar General are both publicly listed companies, not private equity.Dollar Tree sold Family Dollar for $1B 10 years after buying it for $8.5B, a pretty big loss. Dollar Tree’s market cap is $25B, so a pretty negligible part of the national dollar store business is “private equity”.

Then why doesn&#x27;t some other established brand open in the same area and undercut them?

&gt;&gt; cosplaying as poverty relief&gt; Does it really? Who says this(search engine: 22 relevant results in 0.85s.)<pre><code> we’re here to provide affordable and convenient access to name brands,
 DG’s private brands, nutritious foods, household essentials and more.
</code></pre>
ref: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dollargeneral.com&#x2F;hereforwhatmatters" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dollargeneral.com&#x2F;hereforwhatmatters</a>

&gt; cosplaying as poverty reliefDoes it really? Who says this, and who believes it?

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

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

&gt; The Netherlands is no class societyAmericans 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.&gt; Seeing people in BMWs at the Aldi parking lotThe least wealthy person on the list at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_Dutch_by_net_worth" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_Dutch_by_net_worth</a> 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.

Interesting. The Netherlands is no class society so rich or poor nobody has any goddamn shame to stand in line at the Action checkout if there&#x27;s a good sale to be had.Seeing people in BMWs at the Aldi parking lot. Strange country.

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

Dollar stores are private equity with a checkout lane.In 2025, Dollar Tree sold Family Dollar to a group of private-equity firms: Brigade Capital Management, Macellum Capital Management and Arkhouse Management Co.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;corporate.dollartree.com&#x2F;news-media&#x2F;press-releases&#x2F;detail&#x2F;288&#x2F;dollar-tree-completes-sale-of-family-dollar-business-to" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;corporate.dollartree.com&#x2F;news-media&#x2F;press-releases&#x2F;d...</a>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.

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

Corporate fines should all be percentages of profits.

You want prison sentences for execs if you were charged $1.50 for a can of corn instead of $1.45? Surely you can&#x27;t be serious.

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

Hanlon&#x27;s Razor is not relevant with large amounts of money at stake. in fact the complete opposite is the best approach: The more money that&#x27;s involved, the more you should suspect malice until it has been conclusively ruled out.

I would like to think incompetence as well, but when the problem is this widespread, IMHO it does point to a corporate issue...even if that&#x27;s simply leaving too many incompetent managers in charge. IMHO if you&#x27;re the manager and the part-time teenager didn&#x27;t finish updating all the shelf pricing, then it&#x27;s on you to finish before going home. But today too many people just don&#x27;t give a damn.My first job was in retail as well, going back to the days before scanners when every item item was ticketed individually. When something goes on sale you ticket it again, then tear off the sale price stub when the sale ends. Repeat as needed. Maybe that could be a suitable punishment, too? Force stores to abandon shelf pricing for a period of time until it hurts enough that they get their act in order?

As a company seeking to maximize profit, why would you fix this problem? It seems optimal to say &quot;it&#x27;s out of our control&quot; -- you get to overcharge customers, and you have a reasonable explanation if a lawsuit comes.I would be curious to see how often it&#x27;s the other way around, e.g. they undercharge a customer.

You&#x27;re applying that razor incorrectly. These dollar stores are run with a skeleton crew, where it&#x27;s impossible for the workers to keep the store in order, or to update the prices on the shelves. The prices of items at the register is managed centrally. They ensure resources exist to increase prices at the register and not on the shelves, and that&#x27;s misleading and fraudulent.This isn&#x27;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&#x27;s funny that it&#x27;s criminal when someone shoplifts from a dollar store, but knowingly showing one price and charging a higher price isn&#x27;t a crime. We need to start treating corporate theft as crimes, rather than as a cost of business.

Some people say it&#x27;s trickery, but when I apply the razor I find pricing errors more likely to be the result of stupidity than of malice.Having worked in retail myself, I understand that some days there just isn&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;t that way in Ohio.)[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ohioattorneygeneral.gov&#x2F;Media&#x2F;Newsletters&#x2F;Consumer-Advocate&#x2F;February-2024&#x2F;Dollar-General-settlement-brings-help-to-Ohioans" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ohioattorneygeneral.gov&#x2F;Media&#x2F;Newsletters&#x2F;Consum...</a>[2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.supermarketnews.com&#x2F;foodservice-retail&#x2F;ohio-ag-dollar-general-temporarily-closes-stores-to-fix-pricing-issues" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.supermarketnews.com&#x2F;foodservice-retail&#x2F;ohio-ag-d...</a>

&gt; everyone accepts both that the law will be enforced very unevenly, and that this kind of thing doesn&#x27;t get solved by the regular political processNobody agrees on that. TFA follows &quot;a state government inspector&quot; whose effectiveness is hampered solely by a &quot;North Carolina law&quot; which &quot;caps penalties at $5,000 per inspection.&quot; That law [1] doesn&#x27;t exist outside North Carolina.This is the first time I&#x27;m reading about this. We have a dollar store in my town. I&#x27;m curious to replicate this experiment myself and send the results into the local newspaper if the discrepancy is real.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ncleg.gov&#x2F;enactedlegislation&#x2F;statutes&#x2F;html&#x2F;bychapter&#x2F;chapter_81a.html#:~:text=%C2%A7%2081A-30.1%5C.,s.%204%28a%29.%29" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ncleg.gov&#x2F;enactedlegislation&#x2F;statutes&#x2F;html&#x2F;bycha...</a> § 81A-30.1

&gt; this kind of thing doesn&#x27;t get solved by the regular political process.Yeah it does. This is specifically the sort of thing that the FTC is in charge of addressing.That is ultimately controlled by who the president is. There is some funding problems with these enforcement agencies that forces them to pick and chose their battles. However, you&#x27;d be naive to think that there isn&#x27;t a significant difference from how Lina Khan ran things and how Andrew Ferguson runs things.

Keep in mind, this is also a state thing. I live on the NC&#x2F;SC&#x2F;GA border so I view news for all three daily.I routinely see this type of crime heavily policed and reported on in NC. Whereas my entire life is in coastal SC and never once in my life saw this repeated on or enforced.

This is very American: it&#x27;s illegal, but everyone accepts both that the law will be enforced very unevenly, and that this kind of thing doesn&#x27;t get solved by the regular political process. There&#x27;s no political consumer complaints culture, it&#x27;s seen as an individual matter.You couldn&#x27;t get away with this for as long in the UK as a retailer. Either the CMA or Trading Standards would deal with it.

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

It was investigated. They got fined $5k. 4 times.Is there another law that can get them for repeat abuse.

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

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

It&#x27;s worse than that. In many cases the dollar stores now get skus of items made for them that are &quot;cheaper&quot; than a sku in Walmart but for a more expensive unit price than Walmart as they shrink the product.

&gt;&gt; Red Baron frozen pizzas, listed on the shelf at $5, rang up at $7.65.The crazy thing is that even if it did ring up at the correct price it isn&#x27;t a good deal. It&#x27;s around $4.80-4.90 at Walmart and Target and others.

&gt; Left unsaid is that both Dollar General and Family Dollar would become unprofitable if they stop tricking customers. (Both companies typically earn only 3-4% on sales.)They could of course show the actual prices instead of tricking customers?If the margins are so low nobody else will be significantly cheaper anyway.

&gt; Red Baron frozen pizzas, listed on the shelf at $5, rang up at $7.65. Bounty paper towels, shelf price $10.99, rang up at $15.50. Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes, Stouffer’s frozen meatloaf, Sprite and Pepsi, ibuprofen, Klondike Minis – shoppers were overpaying for all of them. Pedigree puppy food, listed at $12.25, rang up at $14.75.Surely, now that this made the news, there will be an investigation into the fraudulent behavior of Dollar General and Family Dollar.Left unsaid is that both Dollar General and Family Dollar would become unprofitable if they stop tricking customers. (Both companies typically earn only 3-4% on sales.)

3. Point at the sign, which is posted at every register, and ask for your discount. If they say no you ask for the manager. I&#x27;ve done this several times, and never had an issue (but sometimes it takes a little while).

Theoretically there is a third option, stay in the store near the cash register and call the police to come deal with it on the spot before the purchase. The problem is that they probably won&#x27;t bother coming, and if they do, they won&#x27;t come quickly enough to make it worth waiting for them given the amount of money at stake.Edit: Yeah, I did say before the purchase, but I should have said after the purchase when they pay the legally correct price but the store accuses them of shoplifting and tries to detain them. And I know it&#x27;s often infeasibly hard to pay the legally correct price from a logistical perspective without the cashier&#x27;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&#x27;t guarantee ever getting the change. Anyway, I did list this option as (purely) theoretical and not as actually practical.

&gt; this type of conflict can only be adjudicated by courts, which low-income people don&#x27;t have the time and money forMassachusetts 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] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mass.gov&#x2F;how-to&#x2F;file-a-consumer-complaint" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mass.gov&#x2F;how-to&#x2F;file-a-consumer-complaint</a>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mass.gov&#x2F;orgs&#x2F;office-of-consumer-affairs-and-business-regulation" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mass.gov&#x2F;orgs&#x2F;office-of-consumer-affairs-and-bus...</a>

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

&gt; Unfortunately, this type of conflict can only be adjudicated by courts, which low-income people don&#x27;t have the time and money for.Here in Europe, we have consumer protection agencies. Get wronged? Shoot them off an email and they&#x27;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.

Unfortunately, this type of conflict can only be adjudicated by courts, which low-income people don&#x27;t have the time and money for. You couldn&#x27;t just walk out of the store with the items. You&#x27;d need to either:1. Buy the items and sue.2. Take the items without paying, likely get the police called on you, and defend yourself in criminal and civil court.

Not only that, but they post a sign about this at every register. (That must be required.) So you can point to the sign. I think a typical store manager would comply. Maybe I&#x27;m not cynical enough.

&gt; ...but in my experience, they&#x27;re perfectly capable of doing the right thingIt&#x27;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&#x27;t even take much, just a way for a cashier to flag an inconsistent price for someone at the back office.

Yup. My local Star Market was pretty bad about this, so I started paying close attention to prices on the shelf and at the register. Pretty soon I was taking home free items every shopping trip. (I also reported them to Inspectional Services when aisle scanners were broken or prices were particularly egregiously missing or wrong.)Some of the cashiers had to have it explained to them with much pointing to the sign that hangs on every register; others knew the drill and called a manager over right away.After about 6 months they started shaping up. Maybe the store manager got fed up, or maybe corporate stopped having them skimp on sticker hygiene.From the article:&gt; 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&#x27;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.

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

So this means I would get the app-only sale price, without using the app?While doing some research into state retail pricing laws a few years ago, I discovered how tough Massachusetts is, being one of the last holdouts mandating ticketing on all items, and only relenting in exchange for price scanners every so many aisles. Living in Pennsylvania and annoyed by stores tying their best prices to their apps, I fancifully emailed Elizabeth Warren, asking if she&#x27;d prod a friend in state government to consider a legislative end run around apps. I had no idea such a law really existed. &quot;First in the nation&quot; I expect. Wonder how long it&#x27;s been around?

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

Massachusetts has a quite prominent law against this.&quot;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.&quot;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mass.gov&#x2F;info-details&#x2F;consumer-pricing-accuracy-information" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mass.gov&#x2F;info-details&#x2F;consumer-pricing-accuracy-...</a>Not to say it&#x27;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&#x27;ve had it happen at grocery stores usually at their suggesting.

I am not an attorney, but given that Dollar General and Family Dollar are highly likely to serve a much larger percentage of SNAP-eligible customers, isn&#x27;t there a far more serious FEDERAL crime being perpetrated here of retailer abuse and fraud in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), often referred to as food stamp fraud? That is, if the SNAP customers have no other means of purchasing food (living in a food desert), and the retailer is intentionally charging more for food items, isn&#x27;t the retailer committing fraud against the US government? Federal criminal prosecution of SNAP violations could result in fines up to $250,00 and imprisonment up to 20 years. More significant consequences than otherwise being reported here.

It is important to understand that Dollar General and Family Dollar serve thousands of flyover communities where there are no Walmart stores or other viable market access. Dollar General has stated that it can generate profits in communities with fewer than 1,000 homes. Walmart generally requires a much larger population base for its stores.Dollar General is the largest retailer in the US by number of locations, with over 20,000 stores across 48 states. Family Dollar operates over 8,200 stores. Walmart&#x27;s U.S. store count is significantly smaller (around 4,700 U.S. Walmart stores and 600 Sam&#x27;s Clubs as of 2024).Dollar stores are frequently found at the heart of &quot;food deserts,&quot; 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.

From the article -- But North Carolina law caps penalties at $5,000 per inspection, offering retailers little incentive to fix the problem. “Sometimes it is cheaper to pay the fines,” said Chad Parker, who runs the agency’s weights-and-measures program.This is what I think of as the &#x27;give us a story to tell the people because we&#x27;re okay with business doing this&#x27; 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).

It looks like North Carolina’s previous Weights &amp; Measures law was entirely criminal. So in 1991 they added civil powers, but curtailed the fines.The solution here appears to be less in raising the civil fine and more in criminally investigating, to start with, the store manager [1].[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ncleg.gov&#x2F;enactedlegislation&#x2F;statutes&#x2F;html&#x2F;bychapter&#x2F;chapter_81a.html#:~:text=%C2%A7%252081A-30.1%255C.,s.%25204%2528a%2529.%2529" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ncleg.gov&#x2F;enactedlegislation&#x2F;statutes&#x2F;html&#x2F;bycha...</a> § 81A-30.1

I&#x27;m not convinced that anything short of prison for executives and board members would be enough.

&gt; But North Carolina law caps penalties at $5,000 per inspection, offering retailers little incentive to fix the problemThis 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&#x27;s overall conduct.

Regulators take tip offs and if one gets through, the enforcement action is usually pretty fast and strong.They also like doing this. The ACCC makes a huge deal out of parading their latest conquest in the media.Has its faults, the ACCCs dealings with telcos are especially terrible.I still have friends at an Applecare provider based in oz, and they had a big one where as a settlement with the ACCC over trying to have it both ways with consumer law, they agreed to provide repairs or replacements for like a decade of wrongfully denied hardware issues. Hushed it right up. It was in lieu of a public apology from memory. But my friends spent weeks calling back old customers, chasing new contact details etc, to try and get them all free replacements.

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

Yes, probably difficult to compare regulation and inspection.As for enforcement, ACCC recently took Microsoft to Federal Court for hiding Copilot pricing shenanigans, as discussed: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=45721682">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=45721682</a>

Requirements about surcharge notifications and displaying all-up prices are nice, but the gap here will still be about enforcement and not regulation. The core problem for dollar-store shoppers in the US is about getting the retailers to honor the sticker price, not whether the sticker price shows all state and local taxes.Is the Australian shopper protected simply by a stronger culture of adherence amongst retailers or is it because regulators inspect more often and take stronger action against failures?

In Australia, according to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission:- Businesses must communicate clear and accurate prices prior to consumers booking, ordering or purchasing. They must not mislead consumers about their prices.- There are specific laws about how businesses must display their prices.- Businesses must display a total price that includes taxes, duties and all unavoidable or pre-selected extra fees.- If a business charges a surcharge for card payments, weekends or public holidays, it must follow the rules about displaying the surcharge.- If more than one price is displayed for an item, the business must charge the lowest price, or stop selling the item until the price is corrected.In practice, if the checkout price is more than listed price, many retailers give the item for free. It doesn’t stop dodgy constantly fluctuating ‘on sale’ pricing…<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.accc.gov.au&#x2F;business&#x2F;pricing&#x2F;price-displays" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.accc.gov.au&#x2F;business&#x2F;pricing&#x2F;price-displays</a>

&gt;Even Republicans could get behind it!No, they have no actual interest in saving the government money, especially if it comes at the cost of enforcing regulations on corporations.

Depending on how much independence the inspectors have they could probably turn a heck of a profit per inspector (thus being able to argue their continued existence to the legislature).Could an inspector manage two per day? If you figure the full cost of each inspector is $150,000&#x2F;year but dedicated ones could do 8 inspections at $5k each per week, there&#x27;s well over $1 million&#x2F;year per inspector (assuming not all inspections would be the full fine, there&#x27;s travel costs per inspector, inspectors would have to spend some office&#x2F;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! &quot;We&#x27;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.&quot; It&#x27;s a cost reduction measure!

The rich own congress. At this point, it&#x27;s all regulatory capture.

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

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

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

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

Offtopic, but I made the mistake once of buying groceries from Amazon and they instead sold me a package of cheddar cheese that was completely blue from mold. Some &quot;quality&quot; inspections they got going don&#x27;t bode well for public-private &quot;partnerships&quot; that outsource essential government functions to a corrupt third-party that&#x27;s likely to be owned by a craptastic private equity hedge fund.

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

Seems like it actually creates an incentive to go big or go home. If you&#x27;re already going to be busted and hit with the maximum fine, might as well have even larger mispricings, so you come out ahead after the fine is taken into account.

Why are we taking this whole “the $5k fine is nothing” thing at face value?A long time ago I used to help manage a couple retail stores. A $5k random expense would have put that location into the red for the month. Perhaps not the volume of a dollar store chain, but certainly not small either.I have a feeling that if the $5k fines were basically guaranteed to happen with some regularity you’d see this cleaned up pretty quickly with local management replaced ASAP if not.Enforcement doesn’t have to be over the top abusive with the goal to put a location out of business overnight. Especially in already underserved communities. Like everything to do with humans there simply needs to be consistent, reliable, and timely consequences to form a reliable and immediate feedback loop for behavior.If a store makes it an actual policy to eat these fines then the fine amount needs adjusting. From everything in this article though the problem is simply it’s worth the gamble they don’t happen at all.

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

&gt; yet North Carolina law caps penalties at $5,000 per inspectionSo, 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.

I don&#x27;t think the laws of the specific jurisdiction matter. In every US jurisdiction, the prices aren&#x27;t completely legally binding (what if the previous customer changed the price tag?). In ~every US jurisdiction, if you systematically show one price but charge customers another, that&#x27;s an offence.So intent matters. What would decide an individual case is not the exact characterisation of the laws on the books, but how sympathetic a regulator or a judge is to the supermarket&#x27;s claim that these things just happen sometimes.

&gt; NC law. Does it have an &quot;invitation to treat&quot; practice [...] rather than a legally-binding offer?Are there any common-law jurisdictions in the world where having products on sale in a supermarket is not generally considered invitation to treat but as an offer to sell?

I don&#x27;t know NC law. Does it have an &quot;invitation to treat&quot; practice there where prices marked are a customer relations issue rather than a legally-binding offer?To attain change, enough people have to:1. Correctly identify the source of their misery, because it ain&#x27;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.

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

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

23% of items are rung up at a higher amount at the register than what it says on the shelf, yet North Carolina law caps penalties at $5,000 per inspection, offering retailers little incentive to fix the problem.In other words, regulatory capture at its finest, over the backs of the poorest in the country.

Speaking of travel, that&#x27;s why I go for them.If I&#x27;m going for a multi-day stay somewhere and I don&#x27;t want to deal with annoying mini bottles of hotel soap, I&#x27;ll just pop into a Dollar Whatsit for a small bottle of something suitable at my destination.

While that can be bad, sometimes you come out ahead after accounting for spoilage, time, and travel.Sometimes I pay higher unit prices at a dollar store intentionally because they offer smaller package sizes not offered elsewhere and I only need the smaller amount. I could get a much better unit price at another store but would waste the rest of the product.

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

&gt;&gt;&gt; rather than on an Amazon shipping box.My wife attended a political protest, and said she noticed signs made from my employer&#x27;s shipping boxes.

The &quot;dollar stores&quot; vary.I&#x27;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&#x27;t care if it&#x27;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&#x27;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.)

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

Saying it only targets the vulnerable because of high unit prices is like saying the local gas station is a rip off that only targets the vulnerable because prices are higher.I lived in a city that’s in North Metro Atlanta (Johns Creek) where the median household income was $160K. There was a Dollar General right by a Publix. People still went in the Dollar General for little things where the small packages that you could buy was feature and not a bug.We still stop by the dollar store for snacks sometimes because it is convenient just to get things to pack for a flight. It’s especially popular for tourists in Orlando where I live

Candy bars and soda sure whatever. Look at essentials. The dollar store near me charges $1.99 for 8oz of Tide, the Albertsons a single block further charges $9.99 for 84oz, the dollar store is over double the cost. It&#x27;s the same story with soap, cleaning products, etc. A tiny container for cheap feels like a deal if you can&#x27;t do the math, but it&#x27;s not. Feel free to &quot;test it yourself.&quot;I&#x27;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&#x27;t have a choice.

Spices might be the most universal ripoff anywhere in the US. You can get it so much cheaper either at ethnic stores, generic plastic bags at certain grocery stores in the ethnic aisles, or restaurant supply stores for spices that don’t have a short shelf life.It’s so bizarre to me. At some point someone needs to do an in-depth expose on how this spice monopoly happened.

Spices are pretty much universally horribly overpriced at grocery stores.

Have you ever been to a dollar store? Its much cheaper for the same items than a regular grocery store. Also not everyone needs a Costco sized tub of mayo. You test it yourself go by a standard sized candy bar at safeway&#x2F;alberstons and then at a dollar store. Bottle of coke. Birthday card. Better yet compare the cost spices. Try to buy bay leaves at regular grocery store for under $5.

Because it&#x27;s very rare that Target crowds out the only Costco that sells produce in a 20 mile radius leaving only boxed shit food for people to buy.

time value of moneywe don’t complain that the per unit cost at target is higher than at costco

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

&gt; The list price is low but the per-unit price is astronomical compared to grocery store prices.The problem is, so is material cost and handling effort. Say, a 2 liter bottle of soda compared to 10x 200 mL. Same amount of soda, but more handling required for stocking, inventory management (aka, make sure there is no soda expiring on the shelf) and finally scanning it over the cash register, and more packaging material.Larger units of anything will always be cheaper than small units.

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

Yup. Dollar General is worse than a convenience store like 7-11, it&#x27;s an expensive inconvenience store.And we need more local co-op grocery stores like Berkeley Bowl, the Davis Co-op, and ATX Wheatsville.

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

These stores often only have 1-2 employees working at a given time.video if you&#x27;re curious: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=p4QGOHahiVM" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=p4QGOHahiVM</a>

Yeah, that &quot;computer error&quot; explanation is bullshit, probably rooted in a combination of CYA and narcissism.When I worked in retail, we only had one database of pricing. The shelf tag and sign printers, the registers, the whatevers -- they all used that same database. If a shelf tag was printed at the same instant that an item was rung up, then they&#x27;d have had the same exact price.There&#x27;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&#x27;t. We err. Even if we&#x27;re absolutely honest with ourselves and others, we can run out of fucks to give. It&#x27;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&#x27;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.)

You need to think like an owner&#x2F;operator to understand why you would defer to the system.It’s to prevent employees from stealing. To “defer to the tag” requires a manual price override of some sort, which becomes an abuse vector.

When I worked grocery retail when I was a teen 20ish years ago, any time a customer disputed the price of something during checkout, we’d have someone check the shelf and find the display tag. If the price was lower as the customer suggested, we’d always give them the item at the price listed on the display tag. An employee usually just missed that tag during price change day.It’s so foreign to me that any retail place would defer to “the computer” if display price and database price were out of sync.Even young-me understood the idea of “oh yeah, our bad, have it at the lower price” and the potential for legal action if we did otherwise.

This article is about something subtly different than overcharging: it&#x27;s about consumers believing that they&#x27;re paying one amount (the list&#x2F;sticker price), and being charged a different amount (typically higher in the company&#x27;s favor) at checkout.In my experience, this doesn&#x27;t really happen with bodegas: they might be overpriced in the &quot;this is a bad deal for milk&quot; sense, but they don&#x27;t misrepresent their sticker prices to any degree that I&#x27;ve ever experienced.(But also, I don&#x27;t think bodegas do categorically overcharge in NYC. I think they&#x27;re about the same as grocery stores, i.e. there&#x27;s a large amount of internal variation in pricing because people generally don&#x27;t want to make multiple bodega pit stops just to save $2.00 on eggs.)

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

Bodegas charge you a little bit more because a real human owner accepts the risk of serving a small community in exchange for being part of that community, and you pay that extra in order to make their existence possible.Dollar Generals charge you a little bit more because a huge chain has driven out all the competition and you have no choice. The people who work there do not benefit from the extra you pay, and the owners are not members of the community.

Because in NYC I pass by tens of the bodegas on the way to work and I can shop at any one of them. I can also shop at Aldi’s, Trader Joe’s, Costco, what have you.You said it well yourself - “begrudgingly”. With so many options and price points, I don’t have to begrudgingly shop at bodegas. I do it happily if it serves my goal of getting a single can of Coke. If I want to get a whole stack of them, I’d happily get them at Costco. Options are great when you have them.

&gt;Hey, Starbucks charges $3.50 for a cookieNo, that&#x27;s not what the article is about.&quot;Starbucks has a sign saying the cookie is $3.50. You are charged $5 at the counter&quot;.That is the infraction here.

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

Minimum wage in NY is $15.50, in Kansas it&#x27;s $7.25. The overcharging in rural areas is not adjusted downward for lower wages. But I wouldn&#x27;t shop at a bodega and don&#x27;t find it virtuous there either.

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

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

Once upon a time I lived near the Prague city centre, and if the intent of such a corner shop is to rip off tourists and one-time visitors, the locals don&#x27;t mind - at least as long as cheaper alternatives off the most notorious areas exist and are usable for them (Lidl etc.)Quite to the contrary, the locals are sometimes happy to have such overcharged options at hand, for example if they are throwing a party and find out that they are short on vodka+cigs, and it is 1 am and all the regular shops are closed.

an interesting contrast that i think about a lot:- in rural america, there are dollar stores everywhere that overcharge for small items. people treat them as a necessary evil and begrudgingly shop there.- in nyc, there are corner bodegas everywhere that overcharge for small items. they are generally seen as beloved neighborhood institutions.so... what&#x27;s the difference? corporate owned vs family owned? length of time in community? presence of cute cat at the register?

I have overall had good experiences with Dollar General, but mis-pricing items like this is completely unacceptable. This article is very damaging to their brand to me. Even though I haven&#x27;t experienced it myself.

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

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

While most comments will be negative toward Dollar General, in many areas Dollar General or Family Dollar or Dollar Tree are the only places you can get access and distribution to a wide range of products and brands in areas which are otherwise underserved.You can dislike it, but they&#x27;ve evolved and expanded in part because they are very good at serving these areas profitably, where other businesses aren&#x27;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&#x27;re not trying to &#x27;run&#x27; the business. Good will does not pay your suppliers or rent.

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

People still think they’re getting. Deal. They’ll figure it out eventually. Same with goodwill selling clothes for at or above new prices, eventually the knowledge propagates.The main thing keeping the local dollar stores alive is the death of Party City as far as I can tell.

Same. My city has a Walmart, Publix, Food Lion, Kroger, and Aldi. Yet they keep building dollar stores, I think there&#x27;s now 5 within 10 miles of my house. They all seem to do decent traffic, which baffles me. The stores are a mess, items disheveled everywhere, and rare to see more than a single person working. Really depressing places, I cannot figure out their appeal.

I experienced this first hand maybe a year ago when I randomly walked into a dollar general to get something, their prices often times are pretty close to the &quot;regular&quot; versions of the product, but packaged specifically for dollar stores.I get why people shop at them in rural places because that&#x27;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.

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

I believe Michigan has laws on the books that should be the model for this (the &quot;Scanner law&quot;) - if you&#x27;re overcharged at the register and the sale is completed, you have 30 days to get the price corrected plus ten times the amount of overcharge (between $1 and $5). Paying you the &#x27;bonus&#x27; is optional, but if they don&#x27;t do so you can file a suit for the greater of your actual damages or $250 (in small claims on your own or regular court which allows up to $300 in attorney fees).An alternative would be to force stores with mischarge rates exceeding a specified level to close until they&#x27;ve completed a full audit of all shelf prices in the store but in some areas that could cause significant local hardship.

It seems fairly obvious that a small store cannot really compete with massive giants like Walmart that invested in electronic interchange formats, logistics and negotiate huge volumes with customers to get to the absolute lowest price.You can&#x27;t go to some small store and see them consistently deliver better prices.

If you live in Seattle and you find items are rung up for the wrong price, I highly recommend reporting it to the city. I did this once and was shocked that they promptly sent someone out to check the store and issue a citation. The inspector who emailed me was very polite and professional as well. It&#x27;s rare to have something like this taken seriously and to have the enforcement properly funded.Unfortunately I don&#x27;t remember which form I filled out but I believe it was this one<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.seattle.gov&#x2F;your-rights-as-a-customer&#x2F;file-a-complaint&#x2F;general-business-complaints" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.seattle.gov&#x2F;your-rights-as-a-customer&#x2F;file-a-com...</a>

I think that&#x27;s deliberate: you walk into a dollar store and think &quot;they aren&#x27;t spending a dime on the shopping experience, so they must be passing that dime onto me.&quot;

I shop at Walmart and Costco. The customers at the Costco appear much better off, but they seem much more arrogant and inconsiderate. They leave carts in the middle of the aisle, talk on phones with their families blocking the way, and so forth. Same behavior in the parking lots. Maybe it&#x27;s because Costco is always packed. The shoppers at the Walmart definitely look less well off. They are much more respectful and considerate of others. I like shopping at the Walmart more.

I have a very, very convenient Walmart including a pharmacy so I do go in from time to time especially for standardized purchases. But I don&#x27;t really like it. And I poked my head into an adjacent Aldi once and retreated. Otherwise not really worth the headache.

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

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

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

This happens at Walmart Canada all the time. The policy there is to slash 10$ off shelf price (or free for anything 10 or less).Since COVID, Walmart has stopped having immediate fixes of the problem.Since 2020, I have accumulated about $1200 in free merchandise using the above. Almost always food.

Lots and lots of articles written about 23% of 300 items -- at one store? Every store?What&#x27;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&#x27;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?

If the goal is to fix the behavior instead of just documenting it, the penalties need to escalate with repeat violations. The first mismatch can be treated as an honest mistake. But when the third or fourth inspection still shows the same pattern, the fine shouldn&#x27;t be the same $5k: it should jump sharply. At some point the cost of ignoring the problem has to exceed the profit from letting it continue.Right now the incentive structure is backwards. As long as the downside is fixed and small, large retailers will keep treating it as business-as-usual. A tiered system tied to repeated violations would at least push them toward actually fixing the issue, instead of just shrugging it off every time they get caught.

Their returns (margins are irrelevant) are usually lower than grocery stores. Large retailers will turn over their inventory tens of times a year, dollar stores won&#x27;t so the returns are typically lower.For some reason, left-wing journalists turn into law of one price zealots when confronted with this issue. The reality is that these locations have low-volume and stores everywhere are relatively expensive to run now. For some reason, journalists get angry at the company rather than people who control how much it costs stores to operate. I mean local governments in the US had no problem accepting Dollar General&#x27;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.

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

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

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

I don&#x27;t think it is, so maybe you can help me draw the parallels.

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

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

Not charging the best-advertised price is dishonest. It might also be in customers&#x27; best interest if the cost of keeping consistent price data on low-margin items costs more than whatever the inconsistency is. Or the answer might be that dollar stores sell too wide of a variety too cheaply on too low-margin product to play supermarket-style pricing games effectively.

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

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

It’s a bit like payday loans; they are a bad financial deal, but the alternative is no credit at all because the people who get them are high-risk borrowers and the costs associated with making and servicing a loan aren’t radically different for $500 or $50k.Being poor is tough. But the low margins are a pretty good indicator that the alternative to shady businesses is simply not having businesses at all.

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

Just because your margins are low doesn&#x27;t mean you still aren&#x27;t screwing over poor people.

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

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

I noticed my local wal mart doing this, not on every product, but more than one. I had hoped it was an honest mistake until it happened on my next visit. I told an associate about it, left my groceries, and I haven&#x27;t been back. It&#x27;s wild to think that a few decades ago they accepted returns of any product based on trust, no questions asked, regardless of whether you had a receipt.

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

&gt; that would involve paying for a bus ride. “I don’t have money like that,”inconvenience aside, are buses so expensive that you wouldn&#x27;t save any money by going to a different store?

I shop at Family Dollar sometimes, and also Dollar General and (shock, horror) even Dollar Tree.I shop at these places because I am very cheap, and these places are also often (not always, but often) very cheap and the selection is usually pretty good, for the size.And before someone else blames math for my perception: I can math. I can also remember prices between the shelf and&#x2F;or the website and the register, and between different stores. (I&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;s... that&#x27;s all just fine.I don&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;s products very well, even if the price tags aren&#x27;t always up-to-date. It&#x27;s a good, quick, cheap place to shop for good cheap stuff.(I see comments here that read like &quot;I only shop at Whole Foods. I went to an Aldi once and turned right around and walked out&quot; and all I can think of are callously demeaning phrases like &quot;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.&quot;But I usually try to keep that kind of phrasing to myself.)

Do any of you actually shop at Family Dollar? I do. They&#x27;re cheaper on a lot of stuff. A box of Cinnamon Toast Crunch is $2 less than the same box at the grocery store in town. I bought a pair of shoes there for $4. They weren&#x27;t stylish, but lasted longer than the last pair of Nikes I purchased.Yeah, sometimes the sale price posted on the shelf is no longer applicable. Either the employees don&#x27;t feel like they are paid enough to be vigilant or maybe they&#x27;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&#x27;s not unique to Family Dollar or Dollar General. But I will note, at the Family Dollar, the cashiers will often say &quot;This is on sale now, but it&#x27;s not posted yet. That whole shelf is discount.&quot; 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&#x27;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 &quot;ick&quot; but the employees there are only human. A lot of times, lower paid humans. Cut &#x27;em some slack.

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

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

Huh, with eInk prices, how do customers prove &quot;Wait, the price on the shelf was different!&quot;, the store can just change the price as they go to double-check. As a customer you can take a picture of the price, but then it&#x27;ll be an argument of &quot;This picture is old&#x2F;doctored&#x2F;AI&quot;.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...

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

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

They are attributing malice&#x2F;greed to what is more likely just incompetence compounded by inflation. The employees most likely haven&#x27;t updated the pricing on the shelves. If you have ever been in a DG or DT, you can see that the inventory is generally a mess and just put everywhere. There is one or two people up at the front. They don&#x27;t have as many people stocking shelves as a grocery store to keep the inventory in order.

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

I don&#x27;t think you would reasonably expect it to be close to 50&#x2F;50. Most price changes are increases and the mistake theory basically boils
down to the employees never updating the shelf tags. Which I think is an extremely plausible theory since the one employee at the store isn&#x27;t paid enough to bother. And who&#x27;s even going to check that they updated the tags? Dollar General isn&#x27;t shelling out money for that.There&#x27;s another kind of store that&#x27;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&#x2F;color mapping occasionally.

An easy test for this is how often the price at the register is higher vs lower than the marked price. If it&#x27;s close to 50%, then ok, it&#x27;s a mistake. But if it&#x27;s higher...

That&#x27;s because those stickers constitute an offer of sale for a given price. If a customer comes in, takes the item, throws down the cash to an employee and leaves, that&#x27;s a 100% bone fide legal sale.That&#x27;s also why messing with price stickers is a crime.

I used to work at Best Buy replacing pricing stickers before the store opened. We had a sheet of new stickers for changed prices every time and had to scan every sticker in the store to make sure they were all up to date.It makes sense they’re all switching to e-ink tags though, probably saves a ton in labor and the occasional mistake.

“Because of conditions of our own making, it is virtually impossible to comply with the law, thus we shouldn’t be held accountable to it.”It’s the same BS when Meta and others say they can’t moderate posts because there’s too many.

It’s virtually impossible for them because they’re not considering hiring more people to do it.Dollar General stores often run with one overworked staff member doing everything in the store, from stocking to working the register (which is why the register is unstaffed so much and you have roam the store to find someone to ring you up…)

The sticker price is legally binding - it constitutes an offer, and the cash register surreptitiously charging a higher price from what the customer has agreed to constitutes fraud. The problem is that asserting your rights takes time, resources, and energy that people shopping at these stores generally do not have. The people that would have the ability to push back instead just use their resources to move on and shop somewhere else that isn&#x27;t immediately abusing them.

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

Dollar General: &quot;people these days just don&#x27;t want to work (meaning, my clients don&#x27;t want to do that work or pay lazy genZers...)!&quot;

&gt; When on earth did we get into a world where that absolutely fundamental most basic task is now too burdensome to do with accuracy?It always has been this way since barcoded stock keeping units because of the problems identified by CAP Theorem [0]. Since the price data of an object must exist in two locations, shelf and checkout, the data is partitioned. It is also relatively expensive to update the shelf price since it depends on physical changes made by an unreliable human. Even if all stores used electronic price tags there will a very small lag, or a period in which prices are unavailable (or a period of unavailability like an overnight closure).It would be interesting to understand at what point of shelf&#x2F;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&#x27;t read a price from each item, leading to the CAP Theory problem of today.I suppose that the future will bring back something similar to individual price tags in the form of individual RFID pricing. This way each individual item on a shelf can be priced in a way that is readable by the buyer and the seller in the same manner.0. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;CAP_theorem" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;CAP_theorem</a>1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Pareto_efficiency" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Pareto_efficiency</a>

“In one court case in Ohio, Dollar General’s lawyers argued that “it is virtually impossible for a retailer to match shelf pricing and scanned pricing 100% of the time for all items. Perfection in this regard is neither plausible nor expected under the law.””Sorry—-what? Isn’t that one of the fundamental basic jobs to be done and expectations of a retailer? You put physical things on display for sale, you mark prices on them, and you sell them. When the prices change, you send one of your employees to the appropriate shelves and you change the tag.When on earth did we get into a world where that absolutely fundamental most basic task is now too burdensome to do with accuracy?

in 2025 I&#x27;m surprised you can&#x27;t just scan everything on your phone yourself and get the up-to-date price. are there laws stating things must be a posted price? seems easier for everyone to have something you can scan that show you the latest price, or auto updating tags.

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

It&#x27;s called &quot;dollar tree&quot; for a reason, historically prices were and are a dollar unless otherwise noted.

&quot;the default is a dollar&quot;There is no default price.

I had a clerk flip out on me a while back at a Dollar Tree because I wanted a charge for a dollar -- it rang up as 1.25. They rolled their eyes and told me not everything is a dollar, and I maintained that absent pricing stickers indicating otherwise, the default is a dollar. When I pointed out another way to look at it is it&#x27;s a twenty five percent price discrepancy, someone came out of an office and literally screamed at me and chased me out of the store for &quot;causing a problem&quot;, telling me that if I&#x27;m going to cause problems, so will she.I wasn&#x27;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&#x27;t surprise me at all that this kind of thing is intentional -- they&#x27;re banking on you not walking out without the item having carried it to the checkout.