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.
Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices
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Re: Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices
#62Dollar 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.
Re: Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices
#63Even 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.
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…
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Re: Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices
#64"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
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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.
Re: Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices
#6523% 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.
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.
Re: Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices
#6623% 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.
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?
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.
Re: Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices
#67Even 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.
Yup. Dollar General is worse than a convenience store like 7-11, it's an expensive inconvenience store.
And we need more local co-op grocery stores like Berkeley Bowl, the Davis Co-op, and ATX Wheatsville.
Re: Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
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)
It literally is the employee's fault but they are not legally liable for it.
An employee is generally only liable if they purposefully sabotage their employer's business. So a mistake doesn't cut it.
Re: Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices
#69This 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…
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.
I believe they may in the US, too. Anecdotally, I bought all of the Dr Thunder Zero Sugar at one store twice, and they bumped it about 20% for a few weeks after that. They didn’t change the other generic sodas’ prices.
Re: Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices
#70At a certain point we have to acknowledge that a huge share of our economy is just raw predation.
Well, why don't the ethical non-predators open up shops in economically disadvantaged areas and offer non-predatory prices? The margins must be huge if they really are predators.