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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,

• antonvs 10mo ago
  > cosplaying as poverty relief Does it really? Who says this, and who believes it?
  • WarOnPrivacy 10mo 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 10mo ago
      >we’re here to provide affordable and convenient access [...] You'd have to be incredibly naive to interpret that as "poverty relief".
    • antonvs 10mo ago
      > search engine: 22 relevant results in 0.85s. Being able to understand what those results mean is the important part.
    • carlosjobim 10mo ago
      That's how every super market or grocery store in the entire world would describe their business.
  • array_key_first 10mo ago
    I mean, it's in the name.
    • antonvs 10mo ago
      You’d have to explain why you believe that. Just because someone in poverty can afford to purchase items in the store, doesn’t mean it’s good value, i.e. it’s not necessarily providing relief from poverty. In fact, it’s the opposite. See e.g. “How the dollar-store industry overcharges cash-strapped customers while promising low prices”: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/03/customers-pay-more-rising-dollar-store-costs https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/03/customers-pa...
• calmbonsai 10mo ago
  Kudos! This is beautifully succinct, elegant, and accurate writing.
• sema4hacker 10mo ago
  Has private equity ever done anything good for anyone outside of the investors?
  • regera 10mo ago
    Not yet. Sometimes employees if they get second bite of the big apple. PE do well in capital-intensive sectors. I'm not sure if their playbook fits the real needs of dollar stores. Instead of focusing on things like debt and aggressive cost cuts, most customers just want fair prices, stocked shelves, clean stores, friendly cashiers and basic respect—things that PE firms often ignore. In DFW, I was surprised to see 1-2 person dollar stores!
  • eagleinparadise 10mo ago
    So I work in commercial real estate, obviously a large private equity influenced industry. I've worked in REPE and in other capacities. There's degrees of PE. Some good, fine, and some worse. Take real estate development. It's probably one of the suckiest businesses to be in. I know 3 developers who have committed suicide because when things go wrong, your entire life collapses (you put up all your assets in order to obtain construction loans). The litigation, brain damage, and risks are enormous. Increasingly, the payoff is awful (due to worsening legislation and NIMBYism and worse market condiditions) However, private equity in development I think is a good thing. When there are investors willing to put this money at risk, we get much needed construction of housing (see Austin, TX where rents are falling off a cliff due to over building). Now look at Los Angeles, which new permits are literally almost non-existent because LA is one of the most hostile places for developers. You can't make money in LA, so there's no capital available. Then you end up with "affordable" housing developers adding the only supply at $600-900k/unit costs vs the market rate developer at $300-600k/unit. ---- On the other hand, "value add" private equity is much more suspicious. It's more cut throat, easier to end up in crony capitalist situations by operating with a "cut expenses, provide less, make big bucks" model. The people in this world are the kind of guys who have never done anything hard with their hands other than gotten a sore thumb from pounding too hard on their keyboards to adjust their excel model ("Mr. The Model is Always Right") too hard all night long. This is how we end up with old properties who get flipped 4x each being sold with "upside the seller was too stupid to take advantage of" and ending up in situations where tenants get priced out due to private equity seeking infinite growing returns. Oh and by the way, every previous owner did "lipstick on the pig" jobs because why not try to save costs and make your levered IRR 16% instead of 12%? You cannot show that kind of return when you promised 18%... then it'll make it harder to fundraise your next deal! This isn't to say that "value add" is a dirty business. We certainly need to balance the incentive to modernize and renovate properties. An d developers overbuilding isn't always a good thing. So its nuanced. I think people need to fairly give credit that there are both good and bad. The capital efficiency is real and produces real world outcomes since there is a strong financial incentive at the end of the door. But financial incentives sometimes bump up to issues causing harm in real life, which need to be recognized and called out.
• lotsofpulp 10mo ago
  > They already run on a thin-staff, high-volume model. Like every other retail business not targeting the top 5%. And Dollar Tree and Dollar General are both publicly listed companies, not private equity. Dollar Tree sold Family Dollar for $1B 10 years after buying it for $8.5B, a pretty big loss. Dollar Tree’s market cap is $25B, so a pretty negligible part of the national dollar store business is “private equity”.
  • whynotmaybe 10mo ago
    Costco
    • alephnerd 10mo ago
      Costco's revenue comes from their membership fees and their ability to strongarm suppliers to give them favorable terms (eg. Costco is one of the largest alcohol importers in the US and tends to strongarm LVMH). I love Costco (I practically grew up at Costco as a kid), but their ICP is not the kind of person who shops at Dollar General or is on SNAP - it's very much targeted at the 50th percentile income bracket and above [0]. And this is why PE has taken over the dollar market segment - because it's a trash business that no one else wants to service over the long term. PE is basically the last resort if a business cannot raise capital from traditional avenues, and leadership and investors want to exit. For y'all graybeards think of "Sam Vimes Boots theory". Mine Safety Disclosures did a great overview on Costco's operating model a couple years ago [1]. [0] - https://www.businessinsider.com/how-costco-sams-club-shoppers-differ-income-spending-habits-2025-3 https://www.businessinsider.com/how-costco-sams-club-shopper... [1] - https://minesafetydisclosures.com/blog/2018/6/18/costco https://minesafetydisclosures.com/blog/2018/6/18/costco
    • phil21 10mo ago
      Costco purposefully targets the upper middle class to nearly the point of exclusion of everyone else. By charging membership fees, product selection, and the bulk pricing. They could care less about the bottom 50% of the market.
• jmspring 10mo ago
  The sad thing is, people in rural areas that depend on places like Dollar General, and are getting fleeced blame everyone but republicans and they are usually in red areas
  • antonymoose 10mo ago
    I’ll bite… I live in a rural area with a Dollar General about a half mile from my neighborhood. For staples, it’s honestly fine. You want a 6 pack and some hot dog buns because you missed it in the Wal-Mart run the other day (15 miles away), it’s great! You’re not getting fleeced and if you are, the gas savings alone more than make up for it (0.65 per mile per the IRS.) For folks who depend on the local DG for, idk, clothes and household goods it might be much worse, I don’t shop for those there ever, but on staples it’ll do, especially given the density of stores compared to major chains.
    • WarOnPrivacy 10mo ago
      Being in a shopping rich area, I have some luxury of choosing what I get where. DG is a good option for a small list of items, about ½% of my shopping. But it'd be awful if my best shopping option was 15mi away.
      • antonymoose 10mo ago
        Having moved from a shopping rich environment of some 30 years to a very rural setting, I was innately trained to hate on Dollar General by my 15 years on HN. In reality, it’s a trade off. Nothing more, nothing less. Whereas before you might have fallen back on a country-store with a small kitchen and minor staples (eggs, cheese, milk) next to the RedBull most folks now have a wider variety of options at a price point comparable to or better than that filling station. All the better, DG has rolled out their “Market” concept with fresh options as well. At this point I’d love to see a conversation about price points and convenience of a Japanese conbini as compared to a Japanese supermarket on HN. Far less politicized and denigrated I would hope.
      • pwg 10mo ago
• thanhhaimai 10mo ago
  And this is exactly why I only shop at Costco. While other retailers try to get me to buy more stuffs, Costco try to make sure I'm satisfied enough that I'll renew my yearly membership (their main profit source). The incentive structure aligns very well.
  • Waterluvian 10mo ago
    Buying in bulk is about having the ability to both afford next week’s food this week and have the means to store it. Not to mention the annual subscription. Responding to a comment about dollar stores preying on the poor with, “that’s why I shop at Costco” is… a choice.
    • joncp 10mo ago
      ... and a car to haul all that stuff, and time to drive to the nearest Costco. It really is a luxury that a ton of people can't afford.
      • geodel 10mo ago
        Indeed. And I say this as Costco member. There are lot of factors that make Costco memberships work. And a lot of people won't be able to make much benefit out of Costco membership.
        • andrew_lettuce 10mo ago
          I say this as someone who admires their business model and how they treat customers & employees: your typical Costco experience is drive to the suburbs, spend $500 and load up your car with nice to have food products and discretionary purchases. Poorer people cannot do any of these things.
      • cyberax 10mo ago
        Why is car a luxury? A clunker car worth $2000 will still work fine for years with minor maintenance that can be done by yourself. Oh, yeah. Cities. Cars are expensive when you live in a 100 sq. ft. box. Perhaps that's what is causing problems?
• NedF 10mo ago
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• expedition32 10mo ago
  Interesting. The Netherlands is no class society so rich or poor nobody has any goddamn shame to stand in line at the Action checkout if there's a good sale to be had. Seeing people in BMWs at the Aldi parking lot. Strange country.
  • antonvs 10mo ago
    > The Netherlands is no class society Americans used to claim this too. It’s invariably false. It just means that the wealthiest people do a better job of concealing, or not advertising, how vast the wealth discrepancy between them and the average person is. > Seeing people in BMWs at the Aldi parking lot The least wealthy person on the list at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Dutch_by_net_worth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Dutch_by_net_worth could afford 10,000 high-end BMWs and still be extremely wealthy, far too wealthy to have any interest in lining up at Aldi’s for a sale.
  • sgerenser 10mo ago
    I do most of my grocery shopping at Aldi (in the US). There’s plenty of Teslas, BMWs and Mercedes in the parking lot (although late model Hondas, Toyotas and Kias are probably the most prevalent). Turns out people of all income brackets like saving money.
• dehrmann 10mo ago
  > Dollar stores are private equity with a checkout lane. Dollar Tree and Dollar General are publicly traded. So Family Dollar might be the result of PE tactics, but the other two aren't, and Dollar Tree sold Family Dollar because they saw it as under-performing. It's actually sort of weird Dollar Tree couldn't make it work. I know the dollar stores all have somewhat different businesses, but you'd think that Dollar Tree could have either turned Family Dollar around or knew it was selling a loser (see the market for lemons) to PE.
• EnPissant 10mo ago
  Then why doesn't some other established brand open in the same area and undercut them?
• sergiotapia 10mo ago
  private equity is a tumor on this country. it seems any business stained with this actively becomes worse for the customer for as long as possible.
• JKCalhoun 10mo ago
  Here's how shitty of a business person I am: I had no idea that the poor were a "market" you could prey upon. Somehow I thought that if I presented a business plan that began, "Our target audience are those living paycheck to paycheck…" that I would be quickly shown the door.
  • toomuchtodo 10mo ago
    It’s an industry worth tens of billions of dollars in the aggregate unfortunately.
  • cwmoore 10mo ago
    Paid For By Poor Folks (PFBPF)
  • thephyber 10mo ago
    Dollar Tree and Dollar General are sometimes located in the poor part of a city, but most of their locations are in areas which are too poor to sustain good margin businesses. Rural towns with a single road and only 1-2 gas stations, etc. their core business is to offer smaller and smaller portions to maintain profits while rival stores go under. They are so prolific, they can get giant companies (think drinks, household items, and pharma) to create smaller and smaller portioned SKUs over time. The businesses were originally just exploiting a gap in the market, but then PE realized that they could just buy out these local monopolies.
• onetokeoverthe 10mo ago
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• agumonkey 10mo ago
  Makes me wonder if the right way to help lower classes is to give them some space (association, platform) to meet and solve issues on their own terms so nobody tries to leech from them.
• veunes 10mo ago
  When the goal isn't to run a good store but to extract value as fast as possible, all the classic PE patterns show up
• reenorap 10mo ago
  Private equity is even more insidious than you can imagine. How it works is that PE will buy a profitable company, and then strip out everything it can, and then load on the debt. In exchange for loading on the debt, the banks will give preferential treatment to the other companies in the PE fund's portfolio. <----- This is the part everyone misses. In addition, they will force the company to purchase services and even entire companies from the PE company's fund portfolio. <----- This is the part everyone misses. Then, after a year or so, PE will IPO the company and sell to retail suckers. Mutual fund companies will hold their nose and buy into the IPO even though everyone knows it's a shitty company. The reason why is because the PE company will give early access to investment in their other more promising companies. <---------- This is the part everyone misses. So PE companies will make a lot of money by stripping every part of the company out, maximizing and leveraging its portfolio of other companies so that banks and mutual fund companies will dump money into them. It's literally like harvesting a farm animal and carving absolutely everything of value off of it, as well as leveraging other companies to dump into it with the promise of access to other companies in its portfolio. And then they turn around and dump the carcass into the hands of retail suckers, either through their mutual funds like Fidelity or straight onto the markets.
• raydev 10mo ago
  Family Dollar isn't a dollar store though.