19 ms·

Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

• JSR_FDED 11mo ago
  23% of items are rung up at a higher amount at the register than what it says on the shelf, yet North Carolina law caps penalties at $5,000 per inspection, offering retailers little incentive to fix the problem. In other words, regulatory capture at its finest, over the backs of the poorest in the country.
  • estimator7292 11mo ago
    [flagged]
    • brettermeier 11mo ago
      It really is... God I'm glad I don't have to live there.
  • itsdrewmiller 11mo ago
    It’s not regulatory capture unless the regulatory body itself is controlled by shady grocers. This is just garden variety insufficient regulation. Although if they inspected every day it would probably still be profitable for the state.
    • lowbloodsugar 11mo ago
      The rich own congress. At this point, it's all regulatory capture.
      • raw_anon_1111 11mo ago
        While I agree, for the most part this comes under state regulations. Especially red states are always trying to cut taxes and the government at the cost of not having enough inspectors.
  • gessha 11mo ago
    What this calls for is an Amazon-style optimization of inspections. Given X inspectors and Y locations, what is the most optimal routing to optimize for coverage and penalty collection?
    • mindslight 11mo ago
      Amazon-style optimization? You mean they send three different inspectors to the same store on the same day, each scanning one third of the necessary items for the audit?
    • burnt-resistor 11mo ago
      Offtopic, but I made the mistake once of buying groceries from Amazon and they instead sold me a package of cheddar cheese that was completely blue from mold. Some "quality" inspections they got going don't bode well for public-private "partnerships" that outsource essential government functions to a corrupt third-party that's likely to be owned by a craptastic private equity hedge fund.
      • adamsb6 11mo ago
        The error rate is nonzero, but in my experience Amazon will make it right with little friction. A short chat is almost always enough, no labyrinthine phone trees or escalations.
        • rootusrootus 11mo ago
          Last time I had to contact Amazon the chat option was no longer anywhere to be found. I gave up and actually called. They were nice enough on the phone but it was a good reminder of how much Amazon’s customer service has degraded.
        • PopePompus 11mo ago
          Yes, but all problems with tainted food are not as visually obvious as mold. After some bad surprises, I've decided to never eat anything I ordered from Amazon.
    • 11mo ago
  • burnt-resistor 11mo ago
    I don't know NC law. Does it have an "invitation to treat" practice there where prices marked are a customer relations issue rather than a legally-binding offer? To attain change, enough people have to: 1. Correctly identify the source of their misery, because it ain't [insert scapegoats]. 2. Find others who agree with them. 3. Make a plan for effective countering of 1. 4. Use intestinal fortitude and endure temporary setbacks to achieve 3. to overcome 1. 5. Prevent 1. from ever happening again structurally, culturally, and through vigilant participation. The 0th problem is the political operating system is captured by criminals and power has centralized grotesquely in ways that defeat the fundamental function of separation of powers. All elected officials corrupted by lobbyist bribes need to face accountability and have a code of ethics and integrity, because continuing down this path is the road to ruin.
    • dmurray 11mo ago
      I don't think the laws of the specific jurisdiction matter. In every US jurisdiction, the prices aren't completely legally binding (what if the previous customer changed the price tag?). In ~every US jurisdiction, if you systematically show one price but charge customers another, that's an offence. So intent matters. What would decide an individual case is not the exact characterisation of the laws on the books, but how sympathetic a regulator or a judge is to the supermarket's claim that these things just happen sometimes.
      • mindslight 11mo ago
        If another customer changed the price tag, that would be in the same category as if a person unaffiliated with the store said "I'll give you a deal on this item for $10", then pocketed the money while you walked out with the (still not yours) item. This doesn't really have any bearing on whether the owner of a store putting up a sign with a specific price for a specific item that a customer can directly take possession of constitutes a binding offer.
        • dmurray 11mo ago
          Sure, but it's in the same category as the owner putting up a sign by mistake, or omitting to update a sign by mistake. Or more realistically, an employee of the owner putting up a sign even though the owner had instructed him to put up a different sign.
  • progval 11mo ago
    Regulatory capture is when a large company encourages stronger regulations that small competitors cannot afford to satisfy. Here the issue is regulation that is too weak, not too strong.
    • thfuran 11mo ago
      No, that’s just one form of regulatory capture. If this legislation is a result of lobbying from retailers opposing imposing meaningful fines, particularly if the state of things before its adoption was that penalties from failed inspections were often higher, then this is regulatory capture.
  • mystraline 11mo ago
    > yet North Carolina law caps penalties at $5,000 per inspection So, have every agent in the state inspect them. Fine 5k. Immediately inspect again, different goods. Fine another 5k. Keep doing it opening hours. Treat them like an inspection money piñata until they fix their ways. State gets a big pile of money to do better, and massive fines at 5k a pop for a few weeks punish the company and their bottom line.
    • pixl97 11mo ago
      I mean, more like someone elected and really high up in the state government calls the inspection office and tells them to stop, or everyone at the inspection office will get fired, since said elected person cares far more about getting reelected then the people that they should be representing.
    • phil21 11mo ago
      Why are we taking this whole “the $5k fine is nothing” thing at face value? A long time ago I used to help manage a couple retail stores. A $5k random expense would have put that location into the red for the month. Perhaps not the volume of a dollar store chain, but certainly not small either. I have a feeling that if the $5k fines were basically guaranteed to happen with some regularity you’d see this cleaned up pretty quickly with local management replaced ASAP if not. Enforcement doesn’t have to be over the top abusive with the goal to put a location out of business overnight. Especially in already underserved communities. Like everything to do with humans there simply needs to be consistent, reliable, and timely consequences to form a reliable and immediate feedback loop for behavior. If a store makes it an actual policy to eat these fines then the fine amount needs adjusting. From everything in this article though the problem is simply it’s worth the gamble they don’t happen at all.
      • mystraline 11mo ago
        > Why are we taking this whole “the $5k fine is nothing” thing at face value? 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.
  • amarant 11mo ago
    Say what you will about the EU, but they figured out how to scale corporate fines correctly: max 10% of owning entities annual income.
    • sneak 11mo ago
      Why are fines capped?
      • j-bos 11mo ago
        Maybe it's like unlimited PTO, without a cap nobody actually uses it.
      • soanvig 11mo ago
        I think because it's 10% income before cost deduction
  • deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]
  • fencepost 11mo ago
    Depending on how much independence the inspectors have they could probably turn a heck of a profit per inspector (thus being able to argue their continued existence to the legislature). Could an inspector manage two per day? If you figure the full cost of each inspector is $150,000/year but dedicated ones could do 8 inspections at $5k each per week, there's well over $1 million/year per inspector (assuming not all inspections would be the full fine, there's travel costs per inspector, inspectors would have to spend some office/court time, etc. that would bring it down from the potential maximum of ~$1,800,000 each factoring in vacation and holidays). Even Republicans could get behind it! "We're reducing the direct budget of the department, but authorizing it to hire additional inspectors in order to bring in additional revenue that can be utilized to bring the budget to or above its current levels." It's a cost reduction measure!
    • thfuran 11mo ago
      >Even Republicans could get behind it! No, they have no actual interest in saving the government money, especially if it comes at the cost of enforcing regulations on corporations.
    • bux93 11mo ago
      There's precedent for this; the Federal False Claims Act lets you sue on behalf of the government if you spot someone defrauding a federal program (in this case, perhaps if they take SNAP?). If your suit is succesful you get 15%-30% of the recovery for your troubles. There are "private attorney general" rules on the books at a state level too. I think it's kind of elegant, we can all see that inspections are understaffed, but non-compliance is often not that hard to spot and document. I'd propost that employees should have some whistleblower protection (and relief from NDAs and such) for building dossiers with supporting documentation of criminal fraud. These provision are called "qui tam" from "qui tam pro domino rege quam pro se ipso in hac parte sequitur", or “who sues in this matter both for the king and for himself.” I think they suit well with the US's history of bounty hunting, much like class action suits.
  • apparent 11mo ago
    Seems like it actually creates an incentive to go big or go home. If you're already going to be busted and hit with the maximum fine, might as well have even larger mispricings, so you come out ahead after the fine is taken into account.
  • rightbyte 11mo ago
    > little incentive to fix the problem. It is all these Karen memes that ruined complaining about being screwed over by corparate interests.
• nlh 11mo ago
  “In one court case in Ohio, Dollar General’s lawyers argued that “it is virtually impossible for a retailer to match shelf pricing and scanned pricing 100% of the time for all items. Perfection in this regard is neither plausible nor expected under the law.”” Sorry—-what? Isn’t that one of the fundamental basic jobs to be done and expectations of a retailer? You put physical things on display for sale, you mark prices on them, and you sell them. When the prices change, you send one of your employees to the appropriate shelves and you change the tag. When on earth did we get into a world where that absolutely fundamental most basic task is now too burdensome to do with accuracy?
  • tokai 11mo ago
    Just make the sticker price legally binding and this issue would be solved with almost perfect precision.
    • mindslight 11mo ago
      The sticker price is legally binding - it constitutes an offer, and the cash register surreptitiously charging a higher price from what the customer has agreed to constitutes fraud. The problem is that asserting your rights takes time, resources, and energy that people shopping at these stores generally do not have. The people that would have the ability to push back instead just use their resources to move on and shop somewhere else that isn't immediately abusing them.
      • gucci-on-fleek 11mo ago
        > The sticker price is legally binding, as it constitutes an offer 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invitation_to_treat#Case_law
        • dymk 11mo ago
          That’s about ads, not sticker price on the shelf, and about a lack of obligation to sell at that price. It does not say that it’s alright to lie and charge a different price at the register.
• 1123581321 11mo ago
  This is poor behavior by the stores. The solution will be conversion to eink shelf labels that sync like registers do. Realistically, the fines will not be increased to the point where increasing store staffing and training is cheaper. I don’t know where Dollar General is in this process, but many other c-stores and grocery stores have implemented digital labels. Digital labels come with the temptation to experiment with more dynamic pricing which would also make it harder to shop on a budget. However, high staffing or fines also increases prices. I wish we had better retail in more of the United States, especially needier areas.
  • morkalork 11mo ago
    I am convinced the wallmarts in Canada are doing dynamic with the eink price tags. I was in the same location twice in a week to pick up snacks for a gathering and the price of chips were 50% more on the Friday vs earlier in the week.
    • netsharc 11mo ago
      Huh, with eInk prices, how do customers prove "Wait, the price on the shelf was different!", the store can just change the price as they go to double-check. As a customer you can take a picture of the price, but then it'll be an argument of "This picture is old/doctored/AI". Of course the chances of this sort of scam happening are probably not that high, but hey, considering the country is rotting more and more, from the top...
      • gruez 11mo ago
        >Huh, with eInk prices, how do customers prove "Wait, the price on the shelf was different!", the store can just change the price as they go to double-check. 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?
      • otterley 11mo ago
        This is what discovery is for. Changing e-ink tags has an audit trail associated with it.
• iinnPP 11mo ago
  This happens at Walmart Canada all the time. The policy there is to slash 10$ off shelf price (or free for anything 10 or less). Since COVID, Walmart has stopped having immediate fixes of the problem. Since 2020, I have accumulated about $1200 in free merchandise using the above. Almost always food.
  • paulcole 11mo ago
    Publix in the southeast US will give you anything that rings up wrong for free. I shopped there for 20+ years and only remember getting a handful of things free.
  • bombcar 11mo ago
    The disastrous Target Canada (iirc) was similar; obviously nobody cared at all.
  • zahlman 11mo ago
    I'm in Toronto and I've never had anything ring up incorrectly at Wal-Mart. I can't recall ever having anything ring up incorrectly anywhere else, either. There have maybe been a couple of times where a sale price didn't apply to all the SKUs I thought it did.
• modzu 11mo ago
  what's the point of this hit piece? isnt that frying pan with a sticker price of $10 and rung up at $12 still $50 anywhere else?
  • paulcole 11mo ago
    Is it a hit piece if it’s true lol?
  • jrmg 11mo ago
    I don’t think this is true. Even if pricing in the shelves is accurate, in my experience Dollar General is typically a little more expensive than a normal mid-range supermarket (or e.g. Amazon) for most things.
    • modzu 11mo ago
      then why do poor people shop there? is the idea dollar general is strategically misleading them to see prices advertised lower than a normal supermarket but in fact they are higher? i didn't think the article was making that strong of a claim at all. it seemed more like, operations are minimal and staffing short (which in theory enables lower prices) and they linked the staffing issue with simply just not being on top of updating price changes on the shelves
      • jrmg 11mo ago
        1) Misleading advertising? Yes. Obviously this is true if you accept both that their prices are generally higher, and that they’re advertising low prices. 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.
      • pilotneko 11mo ago
• analog8374 11mo ago
  Happened to me yesterday. Haagendaz ice cream. $4 on the shelf, $5 at the register.
  • spwa4 11mo ago
    If it says $4 on the shelf and you pay $4 at the register and walk out with the goods, that's a 100% legal sale and not theft. Not even if it was a mistake on the part of some employee (and it's not the employee's fault either, by the way)
    • masfuerte 11mo ago
      It literally is the employee's fault but they are not legally liable for it.
      • spwa4 11mo ago
        An employee is generally only liable if they purposefully sabotage their employer's business. So a mistake doesn't cut it.
        • potato3732842 11mo ago
          And that's effectively an impossibly high bar in the typical mundane cases though.
    • gruez 11mo ago
      >If it says $4 on the shelf and you pay $4 at the register and walk out with the goods, that's a 100% legal sale and not theft. Source? What happens if somebody stuck a $1 sticker on a ps5? Does that mean you can walk out paying $1 for it, even if the cashier corrects you? What if it's not something absurd but a plausible good deal, like $50 off?
    • mminer237 11mo ago
      The store is under no legal obligation to sell it to you, just like you're not obligated to buy it for that price. Depending on the situation, that might be false advertising they could get in trouble for, and obviously you're not committing a crime if you don't know the real price, but if someone says "oops, that's a mistake", and you take it anyway and give less money, that is theft in most states.
• firefax 11mo ago
  I had a clerk flip out on me a while back at a Dollar Tree because I wanted a charge for a dollar -- it rang up as 1.25. They rolled their eyes and told me not everything is a dollar, and I maintained that absent pricing stickers indicating otherwise, the default is a dollar. When I pointed out another way to look at it is it's a twenty five percent price discrepancy, someone came out of an office and literally screamed at me and chased me out of the store for "causing a problem", telling me that if I'm going to cause problems, so will she. I wasn't cursing or yelling, just calmly making the points I made above as the employees took a dive bar approach to customer service... It doesn't surprise me at all that this kind of thing is intentional -- they're banking on you not walking out without the item having carried it to the checkout.
  • aimor 11mo ago
    "the default is a dollar" There is no default price.
    • firefax 11mo ago
      It's called "dollar tree" for a reason, historically prices were and are a dollar unless otherwise noted.
      • tokai 11mo ago
        They went up to $1.25 in '21 I think. It was extensively cover by the press.
        • firefax 11mo ago
          >They went up to $1.25 in '21 I think. It was extensively cover by the press. 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.)
• hamdingers 11mo ago
  Even if they accurately charged shelf prices, these places are still a ripoff targeting the vulnerable. The list price is low but the per-unit price is astronomical compared to grocery store prices.
  • throwaway98797 11mo ago
    time value of money we don’t complain that the per unit cost at target is higher than at costco
    • DangitBobby 11mo ago
      Because it's very rare that Target crowds out the only Costco that sells produce in a 20 mile radius leaving only boxed shit food for people to buy.
  • neilv 11mo ago
    The "dollar stores" vary. I've been able to find good deals on some things at Dollar Tree. Usually the good deals were a smaller quantity of a normal-quality brand-name item. I mostly avoid the substandard quality items. But even sometimes substandard is OK if, say, you want to make your political demonstration sign on white foamcore (much cheaper than the art supply store, and you don't care if it's smaller, thinner, or outgassing) rather than on an Amazon shipping box. There was a Family Dollar across from a large public housing project here, where I also went looking for deals, but the shelf prices looked like a convenience store. I didn't find out whether they were fraudulently charging even more at the register like this article describes. (I hope it closed because the residents knew there was an affordable Market Basket a 20-30 minute walk away, over the city line and train tracks, and they were able to get there and find the time for it.)
    • deleted 11mo ago
      [deleted]
    • analog31 11mo ago
      >>> rather than on an Amazon shipping box. My wife attended a political protest, and said she noticed signs made from my employer's shipping boxes.
• paulcole 11mo ago
  > North Carolina law caps penalties at $5,000 per inspection, offering retailers little incentive to fix the problem. “Sometimes it is cheaper to pay the fines,” said Chad Parker, who runs the agency’s weights-and-measures program. Well, there’s your problem.
• paultopia 11mo ago
  At a certain point we have to acknowledge that a huge share of our economy is just raw predation.
  • screenoridesagb 11mo ago
    [dead]
  • swatcoder 11mo ago
    We might also acknowledge that a pretty significant share of people do know that already and just shrug their shoulders to it, convinced that it's better to allow for that than do anything about it. There's been a lot of work put into distilling "free market" into its most radical interpretation, and lots of people just aren't open to bringing much nuance or pragmatism to bear upon it any more. Many lessons learned painfully in late 19th and early 20th century have been forgotten and the counterweight and containment policies that they earned now tend to get ignored or dismantled.
  • c-linkage 11mo ago
    Always has been.
    • _DeadFred_ 11mo ago
      It really wasn't this bad in the past on a whole. There were plenty of bad actors, but EVERY actor wasn't bad. Just look at food recipes American corporations feed to Americans, and their different recipes for Europe that look more like the American recipes circa the 1990s. Everything in America is optimised to the max permissible bad action.
      • exasperaited 11mo ago
        There is one overriding difference between US culture and European culture (and to a fading extent, British culture). 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.
• _fat_santa 11mo ago
  I experienced this first hand maybe a year ago when I randomly walked into a dollar general to get something, their prices often times are pretty close to the "regular" versions of the product, but packaged specifically for dollar stores. I get why people shop at them in rural places because that's the only shop within 10-20 miles but in cities it makes no sense. Had prices been 20-30% cheaper but in a smaller size it would still be a ripoff but an understandable one, but often times I saw products that were priced just 3-5% below their standard counterparts while giving you maybe 30%-50% of the product.
  • itsdrewmiller 11mo ago
    Every store has some stuff that is overpriced compared to peers and some stuff that is underpriced. Dollar stores make their money more on drastic understaffing (leading to the issue in the article) and national scale than they do on being a consistently worse value. They have the cheapest freeze dried strawberries by weight you can get anywhere other than making them yourself.
  • silisili 11mo ago
    Same. My city has a Walmart, Publix, Food Lion, Kroger, and Aldi. Yet they keep building dollar stores, I think there's now 5 within 10 miles of my house. They all seem to do decent traffic, which baffles me. The stores are a mess, items disheveled everywhere, and rare to see more than a single person working. Really depressing places, I cannot figure out their appeal.
    • bombcar 11mo ago
      People still think they’re getting. Deal. They’ll figure it out eventually. Same with goodwill selling clothes for at or above new prices, eventually the knowledge propagates. The main thing keeping the local dollar stores alive is the death of Party City as far as I can tell.
• parpfish 11mo ago
  an interesting contrast that i think about a lot: - in rural america, there are dollar stores everywhere that overcharge for small items. people treat them as a necessary evil and begrudgingly shop there. - in nyc, there are corner bodegas everywhere that overcharge for small items. they are generally seen as beloved neighborhood institutions. so... what's the difference? corporate owned vs family owned? length of time in community? presence of cute cat at the register?
  • inglor_cz 11mo ago
    Once upon a time I lived near the Prague city centre, and if the intent of such a corner shop is to rip off tourists and one-time visitors, the locals don't mind - at least as long as cheaper alternatives off the most notorious areas exist and are usable for them (Lidl etc.) Quite to the contrary, the locals are sometimes happy to have such overcharged options at hand, for example if they are throwing a party and find out that they are short on vodka+cigs, and it is 1 am and all the regular shops are closed.
  • thenewwazoo 11mo ago
    Bodegas charge you a little bit more because a real human owner accepts the risk of serving a small community in exchange for being part of that community, and you pay that extra in order to make their existence possible. Dollar Generals charge you a little bit more because a huge chain has driven out all the competition and you have no choice. The people who work there do not benefit from the extra you pay, and the owners are not members of the community.
    • IncreasePosts 11mo ago
      There was no competition in many places dollar stores operate. They moved into those places specifically because they were underserved by larger retailers.
      • sejje 11mo ago
        I agree, at least in my area. 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.
• ccamrobertson 11mo ago
  One simple solution here (and for all sorts of legislated fines and thresholds) would be to tie them to inflation; it looks like the fine of $5,000 dates to the early 90s.
• eudamoniac 11mo ago
  As someone who typically only enters a Whole Foods or a Home Depot for her retail experiences, the one time I entered a Dollar General, I was struck by how depressing it felt. I would never go back into one. Yes, I know how out of touch this sounds.
  • linsomniac 11mo ago
    I think that's deliberate: you walk into a dollar store and think "they aren't spending a dime on the shopping experience, so they must be passing that dime onto me."
    • raptor99 11mo ago
      Yes, yes of course. The leftover smell of homeless urine by the front door isn't real; it is only carefully calculated scents piped in by corporate dollar store yuppies to have you believe this is an authentic experience.
  • ghaff 11mo ago
    I have a very, very convenient Walmart including a pharmacy so I do go in from time to time especially for standardized purchases. But I don't really like it. And I poked my head into an adjacent Aldi once and retreated. Otherwise not really worth the headache.
    • CommenterPerson 11mo ago
      I shop at Walmart and Costco. The customers at the Costco appear much better off, but they seem much more arrogant and inconsiderate. They leave carts in the middle of the aisle, talk on phones with their families blocking the way, and so forth. Same behavior in the parking lots. Maybe it's because Costco is always packed. The shoppers at the Walmart definitely look less well off. They are much more respectful and considerate of others. I like shopping at the Walmart more.
      • bittercynic 11mo ago
• burnt-resistor 11mo ago
  Dollar stores are the new neighborhood "outlet stores" compared to outlet stores of yesteryear (remote locations for not much/any savings). They're actually glorified convenience stores while also not being proper substitutes for grocery stores in food deserts. Most US grocery stores are also now rip-offs like convenience stores were, while big box stores are somewhat savings stores now... f'kin' turbo inflation. I don't know about the feasibility of government grocery stores, but I'm pretty sure the entire food supply chain would benefit from massively changing to the employee-/customer-/supplier-owned co-op model and get megacorps and private equity out of the normalized deviancy of predatory money extraction for essential goods and services.
• danaris 11mo ago
  "The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. ... A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. ... But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet." "This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socio-economic unfairness." - Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms —— Dollar stores, even when they're actually giving you low prices (and not just charging $1 for 1 of something that you could get a 3-pack of for $2 elsewhere), are often selling lower-quality versions of the products they sell—sometimes versions specifically made for them, but without any visible difference in packaging.
  • phantasmish 11mo ago
    > are often selling lower-quality versions of the products they sell Clothes brands do this too. Clothes at the outlet store aren't the same as clothes at Dillards, what's stocked at a struggling Macy's in a relatively poor area may be different from what's available for the same brand at Macy's in Manhattan, and all that may not be the same as what's in their flagship stores. Sometimes they make it semi-obvious provided you learn their secret label language (Polo by Ralph Lauren, Chaps by Ralph Lauren, Ralph Lauren Purple Label, and about a half-dozen other major variants, for example). They do this so they can sell shit to unsophisticated consumers at a large mark-up for the name, riding on the reputation and clout of the good versions of what they sell (elsewhere, at even higher prices).
  • tialaramex 11mo ago
    Yes, being poor is expensive and people just don't seem to grok that Take energy. I'm not rich but I'm comfortable, my energy is paid for in an efficient way, I can shop around easily for the best rates for my lifestyle and so on. But if I had no money they'll fit a pay-per-use meter, they charge more money to fill that meter, if I can't fill it or forget to then the power goes out - and it's inconvenient to use it. Years ago now I had a dispute with the water utility. I refused to pay, so, they eventually concluded that fixing their error was too difficult so they just created a new account starting from zero and wrote off all the costs for the disputed period entirely. If I'd been poor, they'd have threatened to cut off the supply (they're only threatening, fortunately it's not actually legal here to cease supplying clean water to poor people like they're not even animals) and sent scary people to demand payment.
• absoluteunit1 11mo ago
  Dollarama Inc. stock price is up 273% in the last 5 years.
• potato3732842 11mo ago
  Listen, I know we all love to circle jerk about how dollar stores are evil, but you can walk into just about any regional chain supermarket and replicate the same exercise and get about the same results.
  • woodruffw 11mo ago
    Can you? I think the implicit counterclaim in TFA is that other supermarkets/stores don't fail state pricing inspections nearly as often. If you have evidence/articles showing that TFA has cherry-picked dollar stores for criticism, that would be helpful to share.
    • potato3732842 11mo ago
      I've got one local grocery store where the meat prices are sometimes off and another where it's the bakery. The fact that it seems to be confined to certain departments makes think it has a lot to do with the quantity and quality of labor being applied. And dollar stores being dollar stores they apply the cheapest and they apply it sparingly. Not that that excuses it but it at least explains it.
  • venturecruelty 11mo ago
    What a rude, dismissive comment about a very real issue affecting real people.
    • rtp4me 11mo ago
      Sorry, real people who are on a real (strict) budget pay attention to the price of goods when they shop. If you are really hurting from a $3 overcharge, chances are you pay very close attention to the register receipt and bring it to the store's attention. Regardless of income, my wife and I routinely scrutinize the register receipt. Force of habit.
  • stevenwliao 11mo ago
    I check prices on my reciepts. I shop at Costco, Walmart, 99 Ranch, Sprouts, and Trader Joe's. I'm fairly certain the error rate for all those shops is less than 5%.
• jmclnx 11mo ago
  I wish I could be surprised and I can see this happening in many places. This type of 'fraud' was predicted when we allowed the stores to stop marking items with the price. Many places were I shop, hardly any products are lined up with the price attached to the shelves, plus the descriptions of some items are confusing due to the multiple names for the same thing. Time to force stores to mark each item with the price once again.
• exasperaited 11mo ago
  Cash strapped, but also presumably more likely than the general population to be innumerate or have dyscalculia or dyslexia. It's the same bullshit that allows discount prices on Black Friday or during January sales to be completely misleading. In the UK we are much tougher on this kind of manipulative pricing, but you still find manipulative things, like being unable to find the price-per-100g on discounted items and "clubcard" items, or bulk buys that end up having higher unit costs and yet seem not to be errors.
• securingsincity 11mo ago
  Massachusetts has a quite prominent law against this. "When buying groceries—food and non-alcoholic beverages, pet food or supplies, disposable paper or plastic products, soap, household cleaners, laundry products, or light bulbs—you must be charged the lowest displayed price, whether on the sticker, scanner, website, or app. If the lowest price you saw for an item is $10 or less, and that lowest price is not what you were charged or not what appeared on the in-aisle price scanner, the first item should be FREE. If the lowest price you saw for an item is more than $10, and that lowest price is not what you were charged or not what appeared on the in-aisle price scanner, you should receive $10.00 off the first item." https://www.mass.gov/info-details/consumer-pricing-accuracy-information https://www.mass.gov/info-details/consumer-pricing-accuracy-... Not to say it's not happening in a Mass based Dollar Stores but you could be walking away with a lot of free stuff and it would be enough of a deterrent to stomp out the practice. I've had it happen at grocery stores usually at their suggesting.
  • kube-system 11mo ago
    I can’t help imagining that the likelihood of successfully arguing for a free product with a DG cashier is slim to none.
  • hippo22 11mo ago
    Unfortunately, this type of conflict can only be adjudicated by courts, which low-income people don't have the time and money for. You couldn't just walk out of the store with the items. You'd need to either: 1. Buy the items and sue. 2. Take the items without paying, likely get the police called on you, and defend yourself in criminal and civil court.
    • michaelmrose 11mo ago
      If you walk out and it goes to court you will surely lose. You may have started with the right to get it for nothing but you cannot realize that right by force. Self-help is almost always illegal in any case of disagreement between parties.
      • 11mo ago
• deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
• regera 11mo ago
  Dollar stores are private equity with a checkout lane. In 2025, Dollar Tree sold Family Dollar to a group of private-equity firms: Brigade Capital Management, Macellum Capital Management and Arkhouse Management Co. https://corporate.dollartree.com/news-media/press-releases/detail/288/dollar-tree-completes-sale-of-family-dollar-business-to 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.
  • antonvs 11mo ago
    > cosplaying as poverty relief Does it really? Who says this, and who believes it?
    • WarOnPrivacy 11mo ago
      >> cosplaying as poverty relief > Does it really? Who says this (search engine: 22 relevant results in 0.85s.) we’re here to provide affordable and convenient access to name brands, DG’s private brands, nutritious foods, household essentials and more. ref: https://www.dollargeneral.com/hereforwhatmatters https://www.dollargeneral.com/hereforwhatmatters
      • gruez 11mo ago
        >we’re here to provide affordable and convenient access [...] You'd have to be incredibly naive to interpret that as "poverty relief".
      • antonvs 11mo ago
        > search engine: 22 relevant results in 0.85s. Being able to understand what those results mean is the important part.
      • carlosjobim 11mo ago
        That's how every super market or grocery store in the entire world would describe their business.
• seizethecheese 11mo ago
  This comment section is full of allegations that dollar stores are predatory, yet when I look up their operating margins they are super low (4% for Dollar General, for example).
  • venturecruelty 11mo ago
    Just because your margins are low doesn't mean you still aren't screwing over poor people.
    • devilbunny 11mo ago
      It’s a bit like payday loans; they are a bad financial deal, but the alternative is no credit at all because the people who get them are high-risk borrowers and the costs associated with making and servicing a loan aren’t radically different for $500 or $50k. Being poor is tough. But the low margins are a pretty good indicator that the alternative to shady businesses is simply not having businesses at all.
      • skippyboxedhero 11mo ago
        There is a difference. 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).
• tgsovlerkhgsel 11mo ago
  > listed on the shelf at $5, rang up at $7.65. Bounty paper towels, shelf price $10.99, rang up at $15.50 I'm sure the US obsession with not putting the actual price (tax included) on the shelf helps a lot with this. I would notice quite quickly if a store would systematically overcharge me in Europe. It'd be much harder in the US where I expect the price on the shelf to not match the price at checkout.
  • venturecruelty 11mo ago
    Those prices aren't because of tax; even the highest sales tax wouldn't cause $10.99 paper towels to ring up as $15.50.
    • dotancohen 11mo ago
      Yes, but the US consumers are conditioned to see one price and pay a higher price. You and I might see +40% and think "that's too high a percentage". Others see +something and think "just like every other time". If they even look - I'm sure these items are often in a cart with many other items.
      • pwg 11mo ago
        The stores get away with it because even when ignoring the fact that tax is added after, few of the shoppers in these stores will remember the shelf price for a basket of 20+ items from the store. They might remember one or two, but they won't remember (and therefore will not notice) enough of the shelf prices to notice the systematic overcharge at the register. In reality, a good number of the shoppers likely don't remember any of the prices from the shelf tags, and will not be mentally summing up what the final price should be, so those shoppers won't notice the discrepancy at all.
        • JumpCrisscross 11mo ago
          > stores get away with it because even when ignoring the fact that tax is added after, few of the shoppers in these stores will remember the shelf price for a basket of 20+ items from the store We don't bother remembering it because we're in a high-enough trust society where that burden shouldn't be necessary.
• DangitBobby 11mo ago
  Have the fines pay out to customers that report and suddenly the issue is gone.
• cm2012 11mo ago
  Dollar stores have on average a 2% profit margin, just like grocery stores. They are not the villains here.
  • bjackman 11mo ago
    This is like cheating in a golf match against a professional and then saying "I got the same score as my opponent, I am not the villain here".
    • bombcar 11mo ago
      Especially since it’s advantageous to adjust suppliers that you own to maintain tiny margins (who owns the land they rent, for example)
      • 1123581321 11mo ago
        Subsidiary income would be included in a financial statement.
        • bombcar 11mo ago
          Not if the landlord is a side entity and not a subsidiary.
          • 1123581321 11mo ago
            You were talking about subsidiaries, though. 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.
    • sejje 11mo ago
      I don't think it is, so maybe you can help me draw the parallels.
• fencepost 11mo ago
  I believe Michigan has laws on the books that should be the model for this (the "Scanner law") - if you're overcharged at the register and the sale is completed, you have 30 days to get the price corrected plus ten times the amount of overcharge (between $1 and $5). Paying you the 'bonus' is optional, but if they don't do so you can file a suit for the greater of your actual damages or $250 (in small claims on your own or regular court which allows up to $300 in attorney fees). An alternative would be to force stores with mischarge rates exceeding a specified level to close until they've completed a full audit of all shelf prices in the store but in some areas that could cause significant local hardship.
  • nrhrjrjrjtntbt 11mo ago
    That is already ludicuously complex. Designed by Kafka so you give up.
  • cryptonym 11mo ago
    > force stores with mischarge rates exceeding a specified level to close They'd leverage it as if it was an allowance and stay just below that rate.
• cluckindan 11mo ago
  ”Dollar General argued that when customers create accounts – for example, by downloading the company’s mobile app – they agree to use arbitration to resolve disputes and forfeit the right to file class-action suits. The judge agreed.” Let me guess, the mobile app provides discounts…?
• itchingsphynx 11mo ago
  In Australia, according to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission: - Businesses must communicate clear and accurate prices prior to consumers booking, ordering or purchasing. They must not mislead consumers about their prices. - There are specific laws about how businesses must display their prices. - Businesses must display a total price that includes taxes, duties and all unavoidable or pre-selected extra fees. - If a business charges a surcharge for card payments, weekends or public holidays, it must follow the rules about displaying the surcharge. - If more than one price is displayed for an item, the business must charge the lowest price, or stop selling the item until the price is corrected. In practice, if the checkout price is more than listed price, many retailers give the item for free. It doesn’t stop dodgy constantly fluctuating ‘on sale’ pricing… https://www.accc.gov.au/business/pricing/price-displays https://www.accc.gov.au/business/pricing/price-displays
  • Full_Clark 11mo ago
    Requirements about surcharge notifications and displaying all-up prices are nice, but the gap here will still be about enforcement and not regulation. The core problem for dollar-store shoppers in the US is about getting the retailers to honor the sticker price, not whether the sticker price shows all state and local taxes. Is the Australian shopper protected simply by a stronger culture of adherence amongst retailers or is it because regulators inspect more often and take stronger action against failures?
    • motza 11mo ago
      I guess it might be a cultural thing? The shelf price is the binding price here in practice. If you get to the register at the supermarket and the price is higher, you can just let them know and they will send someone to check the price and match it.
      • itchingsphynx 11mo ago
        Yes, seems to be partly regulation and enforcement partly cultural in a voluntary code of conduct that tends towards benefit to the consumer. For example, [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-advice/your-rights/buying-guides/misleading-pricing 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).
• cs702 11mo ago
  > Red Baron frozen pizzas, listed on the shelf at $5, rang up at $7.65. Bounty paper towels, shelf price $10.99, rang up at $15.50. Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes, Stouffer’s frozen meatloaf, Sprite and Pepsi, ibuprofen, Klondike Minis – shoppers were overpaying for all of them. Pedigree puppy food, listed at $12.25, rang up at $14.75. Surely, now that this made the news, there will be an investigation into the fraudulent behavior of Dollar General and Family Dollar. Left unsaid is that both Dollar General and Family Dollar would become unprofitable if they stop tricking customers. (Both companies typically earn only 3-4% on sales.)
  • nrhrjrjrjtntbt 11mo ago
    It was investigated. They got fined $5k. 4 times. Is there another law that can get them for repeat abuse.
    • limagnolia 11mo ago
      Their attorney general could also sue them, as was done in several states mentioned- resulting in much larger settlements. Only the fines by the dept of weights and measures are limited.
  • jeltz 11mo ago
    It was investigated, the issue is that the fines are smaller than the profit. I would personally want to see things like this considered fraud and that it can result in prison sentences for executives and other people invovled in the decision making.
    • dawnerd 11mo ago
      Ya the problem needs to be a fine the first time, second time it’s fraud. Allow for honest mistakes. Punish for clearly defrauding customers. We really need jail time for execs making these decisions but that rarely happens.
    • teeray 11mo ago
      Corporate fines should all be percentages of profits.
• BrenBarn 11mo ago
  > But North Carolina law caps penalties at $5,000 per inspection, offering retailers little incentive to fix the problem This is a huge problem with all manner of laws in the US. We are not willing to insist that fees be limited only by their ability to prevent the prohibited behavior. Fines should continually escalate, if necessary until the offender is bankrupted, at which point their assets are taken. If Dollar Tree keeps doing this, the fines should eventually reach into the hundreds of millions of dollars, even the billions. Such penalties should also apply to company executives and board members who are responsible for the company's overall conduct.
  • JumpCrisscross 11mo ago
    It looks like North Carolina’s previous Weights & Measures law was entirely criminal. So in 1991 they added civil powers, but curtailed the fines. The solution here appears to be less in raising the civil fine and more in criminally investigating, to start with, the store manager [1]. [1] https://www.ncleg.gov/enactedlegislation/statutes/html/bychapter/chapter_81a.html#:~:text=%C2%A7%252081A-30.1%255C.,s.%25204%2528a%2529.%2529 https://www.ncleg.gov/enactedlegislation/statutes/html/bycha... § 81A-30.1
  • dpkirchner 11mo ago
    I'm not convinced that anything short of prison for executives and board members would be enough.
  • francisofascii 11mo ago
    The article metions Family Dollar and Dollar General. Dollar Tree is a different company.
    • BrenBarn 11mo ago
      Oops, true, that was a thinko on my part.
• LanceH 11mo ago
  Lots and lots of articles written about 23% of 300 items -- at one store? Every store? What's the actual extent of the problem? There have been way too many articles and videos at this point to keep pointing at the same small data set. I've personally never experienced an overcharge, and at 1 in 5, it should have happened by now. Is this a one store thing, or a regional thing, or should I just put those thoughts on hold and rage blindly?
  • valbaca 11mo ago
    You didn't read far enough: > Dollar General stores have failed more than 4,300 government price-accuracy inspections in 23 states since January 2022, a Guardian review found. Family Dollar stores have failed more than 2,100 price inspections in 20 states over the same time span, the review found. > Among these thousands of failed inspections, some of the biggest flops include a 76% error rate in October 2022 at a Dollar General in Hamilton, Ohio; a 68% error rate in February 2023 at a Family Dollar in Bound Brook, New Jersey; and a 58% error rate three months ago at a Family Dollar in Lorain, Ohio. > Many of the stores that failed state or local government checks were repeat violators. A Family Dollar in Provo, Utah, flunked 28 inspections in a row – failures that included a 48% overcharge rate in May 2024 and a 12% overcharge rate in October 2025. > The Guardian’s examination of inspection failures by the two chains was based on record requests to 45 states and more than 140 counties and cities in New York, Ohio and California, along with court documents and public databases.
• stevenjgarner 11mo ago
  It is important to understand that Dollar General and Family Dollar serve thousands of flyover communities where there are no Walmart stores or other viable market access. Dollar General has stated that it can generate profits in communities with fewer than 1,000 homes. Walmart generally requires a much larger population base for its stores. Dollar General is the largest retailer in the US by number of locations, with over 20,000 stores across 48 states. Family Dollar operates over 8,200 stores. Walmart's U.S. store count is significantly smaller (around 4,700 U.S. Walmart stores and 600 Sam's Clubs as of 2024). Dollar stores are frequently found at the heart of "food deserts," which are often rural communities located more than 10 miles from a grocery store selling fresh produce—a gap often created when a community is too small to maintain a supermarket or attract a retailer like Walmart.
  • stevenjgarner 11mo ago
    I am not an attorney, but given that Dollar General and Family Dollar are highly likely to serve a much larger percentage of SNAP-eligible customers, isn't there a far more serious FEDERAL crime being perpetrated here of retailer abuse and fraud in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), often referred to as food stamp fraud? That is, if the SNAP customers have no other means of purchasing food (living in a food desert), and the retailer is intentionally charging more for food items, isn't the retailer committing fraud against the US government? Federal criminal prosecution of SNAP violations could result in fines up to $250,00 and imprisonment up to 20 years. More significant consequences than otherwise being reported here.
  • veunes 11mo ago
    This is the tension that makes the whole situation so hard to fix
    • stevenjgarner 11mo ago
      Would you be willing to elaborate?
      • squigz 11mo ago
• josh_p 11mo ago
  When I worked grocery retail when I was a teen 20ish years ago, any time a customer disputed the price of something during checkout, we’d have someone check the shelf and find the display tag. If the price was lower as the customer suggested, we’d always give them the item at the price listed on the display tag. An employee usually just missed that tag during price change day. It’s so foreign to me that any retail place would defer to “the computer” if display price and database price were out of sync. Even young-me understood the idea of “oh yeah, our bad, have it at the lower price” and the potential for legal action if we did otherwise.
  • biddit 11mo ago
    You need to think like an owner/operator to understand why you would defer to the system. It’s to prevent employees from stealing. To “defer to the tag” requires a manual price override of some sort, which becomes an abuse vector.
  • ssl-3 11mo ago
    Yeah, that "computer error" explanation is bullshit, probably rooted in a combination of CYA and narcissism. When I worked in retail, we only had one database of pricing. The shelf tag and sign printers, the registers, the whatevers -- they all used that same database. If a shelf tag was printed at the same instant that an item was rung up, then they'd have had the same exact price. There's mechanism for the prices to deviate. (And yeah, pricing errors still happen at least because people are people. We make mistakes. We forget shit. We can even convince ourselves that we did a thing even if we didn't. We err. Even if we're absolutely honest with ourselves and others, we can run out of fucks to give. It's all part of our condition. But of course: When a price was posted wrong then we fixed it once it was brought to our attention. The customer got the price that was posted, and the posting was changed. For my own purposes, I had a habit of pulling the incorrect price tags and taking them with me back to the register; I'd just give them to whatever manager when they would show up with the key that was required for precise price adjustments and get back to doing whatever it is that my primary job was at the moment...which, if I were handling a register, meant something other than printing shelf tags.)
  • shepherdjerred 11mo ago
• panny 11mo ago
  Do any of you actually shop at Family Dollar? I do. They're cheaper on a lot of stuff. A box of Cinnamon Toast Crunch is $2 less than the same box at the grocery store in town. I bought a pair of shoes there for $4. They weren't stylish, but lasted longer than the last pair of Nikes I purchased. Yeah, sometimes the sale price posted on the shelf is no longer applicable. Either the employees don't feel like they are paid enough to be vigilant or maybe they're too overworked to keep up. Whatever the case, you just learn to keep an eye on the checkout, or alternately ask for a price check on it before the cashier starts ringing merch. The second approach is more polite and the cashiers appreciate that. The same thing commonly happens at the grocery store, and other stores I shop at too. It's not unique to Family Dollar or Dollar General. But I will note, at the Family Dollar, the cashiers will often say "This is on sale now, but it's not posted yet. That whole shelf is discount." And they will give me a better price than what I was expecting to pay. They have to manually adjust the price to give that discount to me a lot of times. Grocery cashiers just scan as quickly as they can and don't check. So while all the yuppies who never step into dollar stores are acting hyperoffended about this story, I think the story is unfairly targeting the dollar stores. Apparently saving money gives some people here the "ick" but the employees there are only human. A lot of times, lower paid humans. Cut 'em some slack.
  • ssl-3 11mo ago
    I shop at Family Dollar sometimes, and also Dollar General and (shock, horror) even Dollar Tree. I shop at these places because I am very cheap, and these places are also often (not always, but often) very cheap and the selection is usually pretty good, for the size. And before someone else blames math for my perception: I can math. I can also remember prices between the shelf and/or the website and the register, and between different stores. (I've been cheap for a very long time. One cannot succeed at being cheap without honing these kinds of skills.) The shelves at these places aren't beautifully-faced. The lighting is shit -- lowest-bidder, lacking design coherence, and either too bright or too dim. The music, if it exists, is usually a Bluetooth speaker playing from an employee's phone or a single pair of thrift store speakers from a 1990s Aiwa mini system [sometimes, even fancy-style with one on each side of the building] with some local radio station or other playing. There's usually large delivery carts sitting around in the already-narrow aisles with fresh inventory that the 1 or 2 employees who might be present sometimes get time to stock a bit of. And that's... that's all just fine. I don't want to pay for beautifully-faced shelves, good lighting, and a professionally-installed overhead PA system that plays professionally-programmed musical selections in a professional manner. I don't want to pay for shelves that are magically stocked in the wee hours of the morning by a dedicated team of professional stockpeople. Like, seriously: I'm not that proud. My goal is to save money; shopping for inexpensive canned beans and a gallon of milk from some factory farm does not have to be an enriching, transcendent experience. So when I have need to buy stuff, and there's a Family Dollar across the street from the office and Dollar General is around the corner from my house? I cheerfully stop in and give them my money. The employees are almost unilaterally very polite and helpful. They know the entire store's products very well, even if the price tags aren't always up-to-date. It's a good, quick, cheap place to shop for good cheap stuff. (I see comments here that read like "I only shop at Whole Foods. I went to an Aldi once and turned right around and walked out" and all I can think of are callously demeaning phrases like "You blithering, sheltered, classist snob. It may be possible for a person to bring even less relevancy to this discussion, but I cannot presently imagine how that would be possible." But I usually try to keep that kind of phrasing to myself.)
• jefftk 11mo ago
  > Red Baron frozen pizzas, listed on the shelf at $5, rang up at $7.65. Bounty paper towels, shelf price $10.99, rang up at $15.50. This very rarely happens in MA, because when it does the store has to give you the item for $10 off, including if that makes it free. And they have to post a sign at the register explaining the law, which means when you're invoking it all you need to do is point at the sign. https://www.mass.gov/info-details/consumer-pricing-accuracy-information https://www.mass.gov/info-details/consumer-pricing-accuracy-...
  • underlipton 11mo ago
    It's different in different states. In Maryland, once a complaint is filed with the relevant authority, the store has a certain number of days to correct pricing. Most retailers will give you the misprice if it's clearly their fault in not changing the tags, as a matter of policy. The confusion around this law is quite frustrating, though. Quite a few customers think they're entitled to not just prices on tags that haven't been updated, but prices for what are clearly entirely different products.
    • hedora 11mo ago
      Is it a certain number of days to fix all the mispriced items? If not, there’s an obvious loophole here. Misprice intentionally, then stop purchasing the item from your distributor if you get called on it, rotating in some similar thing. Later, bring it back with a different sku, or mispriced at some other level. This would work well for dollar stores, which are optimized to spread in / sustain food/retail deserts. The store is often literally the only option in town. The wouldn’t even need to sell excess warehouse inventory at the advertised price, since they could just shift supply to another state (or county/store, depending on how poorly the law is worded).
      • underlipton 11mo ago
        This seems to be the handbook for price complaint inspections following a complaint to the relevant authority (in this case, the Maryland Office of the Attorney General). https://mda.maryland.gov/Documents/HANDBOOK%20130%20Examination%20Procedure%20for%20Price%20Verification.pdf 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.)
• cocainemonster 11mo ago
  > that would involve paying for a bus ride. “I don’t have money like that,” inconvenience aside, are buses so expensive that you wouldn't save any money by going to a different store?
• epsteingpt 11mo ago
  While most comments will be negative toward Dollar General, in many areas Dollar General or Family Dollar or Dollar Tree are the only places you can get access and distribution to a wide range of products and brands in areas which are otherwise underserved. You can dislike it, but they've evolved and expanded in part because they are very good at serving these areas profitably, where other businesses aren't. People wanting bank branches and grocery stores and brunch spots here clearly have never lived or worked in many of these areas. The reality of theft, low spend, and employees - though not universal - is hard to fathom if you're not trying to 'run' the business. Good will does not pay your suppliers or rent.
  • garbagewoman 11mo ago
    Did you ever consider that they might have caused this situation?
    • qeternity 11mo ago
      It would help people to consider your point if you made even a modest attempt to explain and justify what you mean.
      • garbagewoman 11mo ago
        My point is not to explain how they caused it, its to point out that the commenter didn’t even mention the existence of that possibility
        • epsteingpt 11mo ago
          It's possible, just unlikely. 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.
• jhawk28 11mo ago
  They are attributing malice/greed to what is more likely just incompetence compounded by inflation. The employees most likely haven't updated the pricing on the shelves. If you have ever been in a DG or DT, you can see that the inventory is generally a mess and just put everywhere. There is one or two people up at the front. They don't have as many people stocking shelves as a grocery store to keep the inventory in order.
• websiteapi 11mo ago
  in 2025 I'm surprised you can't just scan everything on your phone yourself and get the up-to-date price. are there laws stating things must be a posted price? seems easier for everyone to have something you can scan that show you the latest price, or auto updating tags.
  • Ylpertnodi 11mo ago
    Auto-updating tags can be incorrect, too.
  • asd 11mo ago
    Looks like Dollar Tree just rolled out a feature where you can do a price check on items by using their App. https://www.reddit.com/r/DollarTree/comments/1ndmniz/download_the_dollar_tree_app/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DollarTree/comments/1ndmniz/downloa...
• mr_windfrog 11mo ago
  If the goal is to fix the behavior instead of just documenting it, the penalties need to escalate with repeat violations. The first mismatch can be treated as an honest mistake. But when the third or fourth inspection still shows the same pattern, the fine shouldn't be the same $5k: it should jump sharply. At some point the cost of ignoring the problem has to exceed the profit from letting it continue. Right now the incentive structure is backwards. As long as the downside is fixed and small, large retailers will keep treating it as business-as-usual. A tiered system tied to repeated violations would at least push them toward actually fixing the issue, instead of just shrugging it off every time they get caught.
  • raptor99 11mo ago
    Right on. If the goal is to fix student grades instead of just documenting it, the points counted off need to escalate with repeated incorrect answers. The first incorrect answer can be treated as an honest mistake. But when the third or fourth quiz still shows the same incorrect answers, the grade shouldn't be the same C; it should decline sharply. At some point the cost of ignoring the problem has to exceed the points from letting it continue. You just solved education!
• fat_cantor 11mo ago
  I noticed my local wal mart doing this, not on every product, but more than one. I had hoped it was an honest mistake until it happened on my next visit. I told an associate about it, left my groceries, and I haven't been back. It's wild to think that a few decades ago they accepted returns of any product based on trust, no questions asked, regardless of whether you had a receipt.
• tdeck 11mo ago
  If you live in Seattle and you find items are rung up for the wrong price, I highly recommend reporting it to the city. I did this once and was shocked that they promptly sent someone out to check the store and issue a citation. The inspector who emailed me was very polite and professional as well. It's rare to have something like this taken seriously and to have the enforcement properly funded. Unfortunately I don't remember which form I filled out but I believe it was this one https://www.seattle.gov/your-rights-as-a-customer/file-a-complaint/general-business-complaints https://www.seattle.gov/your-rights-as-a-customer/file-a-com...
• deleted 11mo ago
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• daft_pink 11mo ago
  It seems fairly obvious that a small store cannot really compete with massive giants like Walmart that invested in electronic interchange formats, logistics and negotiate huge volumes with customers to get to the absolute lowest price. You can't go to some small store and see them consistently deliver better prices.
• ChuckMcM 11mo ago
  From the article -- But North Carolina law caps penalties at $5,000 per inspection, offering retailers little incentive to fix the problem. “Sometimes it is cheaper to pay the fines,” said Chad Parker, who runs the agency’s weights-and-measures program. This is what I think of as the 'give us a story to tell the people because we're okay with business doing this' rule. Too often the local (or state, or even federal) government is aware of bad actors but fails to act in a way that would actually cure the problem. It is a remarkably persistent form of corruption in many liberal democracies (not just the USA).
• Jackson__ 11mo ago
  This once again shows that idiocracy was an overly optimistic movie.
• jimnotgym 11mo ago
  Time for direct action. Record the prices of a trolley full of goods. When a price rings up incorrectly, state loudly that you are not agreeing to that higher price scam and walk out, abandoning your goods at the checkout. It would be best if a dozen of you went together and so closing all the checkout lanes. Call a local journalist to come with you.
• EGreg 11mo ago
  Both Family Dollar and Dollar General declined interview requests and did not answer detailed lists of questions from the Guardian. Instead, both sent the Guardian brief statements. “At Family Dollar, we take customer trust seriously and are committed to ensuring pricing accuracy across our stores,” the company said. “We are currently reviewing the concerns raised and working to better understand any potential discrepancies. We continue to be focused on providing a consistent and transparent shopping experience.” Dollar General said it was “committed to providing customers with accurate prices on items purchased in our stores, and we are disappointed any time we fail to deliver on this commitment”. In one court case in Ohio, Dollar General’s lawyers argued that “it is virtually impossible for a retailer to match shelf pricing and scanned pricing 100% of the time for all items. Perfection in this regard is neither plausible nor expected under the law.” They make it sound like isolated incidents. Someone should keep following up on statements like that until they are fixed, or refer them to a DA. No? Furthermore, what about "false advertising" laws?
  • Ylpertnodi 11mo ago
    > “it is virtually impossible for a retailer to match shelf pricing and scanned pricing 100% of the time for all items. Perfection in this regard is neither plausible nor expected under the law.” I don’t knnow about 'expected', but 'not plausible' is up to the company to get their shit together. My spouse works in retail - nobody has time on the shop floor to change label prices all day. Some prices change by a few cents, and then a week later, they change again. If annyone complains, they get the scan-at-the-register price, and then the particular area in question gets a very quick emergency team sent in to re-do all the physical tags.
    • EGreg 11mo ago
      Why not let people scan QR codes like restaurants do for menus?
• soanvig 11mo ago
  > Dollar General’s lawyers argued that “it is virtually impossible for a retailer to match shelf pricing and scanned pricing 100% of the time for all items. Perfection in this regard is neither plausible nor expected under the law.” Can you explain to me how USA is called civilized? How somebody can say things like that, and how a shop is even allowed to have an error margin
  • unwind 11mo ago
    The article touches on this: All told, 69 of the 300 items came up higher at the register: a 23% error rate that exceeded the state’s limit by more than tenfold. This implies that an error rate of perhaps 2% would be legal. I haven't checked, but I guess Europe has something similar even though I'm quite certain that retailers have to sell things at the posted price if there's a mistake. Part of the problem seems to be that the maximum fine (at least in the state in the article) is "too low", so retailers don't have an incentive to keep price tags correct since they profit from the error and even if they're fined it's still better (economically) for them to charge more than the price tag. I wonder how much lobbying has happened to keep fines low ...
    • entuno 11mo ago
      The interesting question would be how many products came in lower, but sadly the article doesn't include that. If 23% were higher and 23% were lower then you could make a reasonable argument that it's just incompetence from the store. But if 23% are higher and none are lower, then that looks a lot more like malice - because the odds of you happening to have a 23% error rate than just happens to always work out in the retailer's favour are basically zero.
  • bob1029 11mo ago
    I worked in retail for a few years. A very large part of my job was simply keeping physical paper price tags in sync with the database. Minimum wage employees in a back office manually keying in UPCs, etc. The claim is extremely accurate in my experience. Expecting physical reality to synchronously conform to a policy in an information system is pretty silly.
• nasmorn 11mo ago
  In Austria the retailer simply has to honor their lowest labeled price. Only clear and obvious errors like if the price would be just cents instead of euros are exempt
• agumonkey 11mo ago
  It seems that we're in a phase where most parts of society is distorting reality to extract value from others. I don't know if it's a usual step in human groups cycles but it's worrisome.
• brettermeier 11mo ago
  I never heard of something like this happening in Europe. Do we simply have better control and regulations?
  • rsynnott 11mo ago
    In Ireland, knowingly charging more than th display price is a criminal offence; the fake sales mentioned in the article are also illegal, though I’m not sure if that one’s criminal or civil. I expect it’s similar elsewhere. _Prosecution_ is often more of an effective threat for companies than summary fines, as judges will tend to throw the book at repeat offenders. Also, the nature of US urbanisation might be a factor. If you can get to more stores easily it’s harder for them to screw your; you will just go elsewhere. I tend to do my shopping in small batches when walking home from work, and have a decent short term memory for numbers. I don’t remember _ever_ being overcharged by the likes of Tesco/Lidl/whatever. Very occasionally by small shops.
• kaluga 11mo ago
  [flagged]
• avsteele 11mo ago
  Article Context-free raw #'s, no comparisons to traditional grocery stores AFAIK. Dad journalism. You should not update on this article unless you have some outside knowledge of the industry. I had AI look into it, it found a national report found that dollar stores had pricing errors at about twice (3.5%) the rate of traditional supermarkets (1.7%) but lower than convenience stores (4.9%). https://cdn.ncwm.com/userfiles/files/Resources/Price%20Verification%20Survey/National%20Price%20Verification%20Report-Final.pdf https://cdn.ncwm.com/userfiles/files/Resources/Price%20Verif...
  • latexr 11mo ago
    I’m having a hard time parsing your comment. > Article Context-free raw #'s What does this mean? > no comparisons to traditional grocery stores AFAIK. So? The article is very specific from the beginning it was an investigation on two specific chains. That different stores may also do it does not invalidate the point. > Dad journalism Did you mean “bad journalism”, or is “dad journalism” a term with meaning (like “armchair psychologist”)? B and D aren’t that close on a typical QWERTY, but maybe it was a wrong autocorrect? > You should not update on this article Also here. I’m guessing “update” was meant to be a different word? I don’t understand what you mean. > (…) a national report found that (…) Which is useful information, but (again) does nothing for the article’s point. Because other stores do it, it doesn’t mean it’s not worth reporting that these ones do too. The article isn’t saying these are the only chains engaging the the practice. Furthermore, the point matters because the people who need to frequent dollar stores are the ones who are already cash strapped. The article goes deeper than just presenting some numbers, it argues for why exactly this matters, why it happens, and why it isn’t being fixed.
    • avsteele 11mo ago
      > Article Context-free raw #'s "Dollar General stores have failed more than 4,300 government price-accuracy inspections in 23 states since January 2022" Is this a lot or a little? There no context for national chain > Dad journalism "Bad" Typo, sorry > You should not update on this article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_inference 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.
• veunes 11mo ago
  The saddest part is the feedback loop
• ratelimitsteve 11mo ago
  dollar tree seems to have found a new way to do this which may or may not be legal. Everything is priced at "$1.25 unless otherwise marked" but the markings don't actually tell you the price, only that it's not the $1.25 default price. There are price checkers throughout the store, but unless you're stopping and prescanning all of your stuff there's no actual way to know what you'll be paying until you get to the register. My partner is a regular there for cheap craft supplies and has seen what essentially amounts to dynamic pricing there, with the price varying up and down on the same item week by week.
• vlucas 11mo ago
  Stores like Dollar General and Family Dollar are not cheap dollar stores. They are convenience stores. And convenience stores always charge more... for the... convenience of not having to make a longer trip to a larger store. Price mis-labeling aside, the premise of the article is wrong.
• SirMaster 11mo ago
  Am I the only one who checks their receipt after checking out from grocery or department store shopping?
• tlogan 11mo ago
  This is definitely illegal in California: California Business and Professions Code Section 12024.2 BPC. It can result up to one year in jail. I’m not sure how this article is true but seems like as a push to pass a similar law in North Carolina and New Jersey.
• raydev 11mo ago
  The article is about Dollar General and Family Dollar, which are not "dollar stores" in the sense that the average person means.
• anonu 11mo ago
  They overcharge also via providing low quality products that seem comparable to name brands. Like the loosely wrapped toilet paper roles that have a fraction of what a normal roll has.
• valbaca 11mo ago
  > Dollar General said it was “committed to providing customers with accurate prices on items purchased in our stores, and we are disappointed any time we fail to deliver on this commitment”. In one court case in Ohio, Dollar General’s lawyers argued that “it is virtually impossible for a retailer to match shelf pricing and scanned pricing 100% of the time for all items. Perfection in this regard is neither plausible nor expected under the law.” LOVE LOVE putting what their PR says right next to what their lawyers say in court. We absolutely need this more in this kind of reporting of late-stage capitalism.