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Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

theguardian.com

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Re: Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

#261

Post by rootusrootus »

adamsb6 wrote: post #102
burnt-resistor wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Re: Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

#262

Post by skippyboxedhero »

devilbunny wrote: post #229
venturecruelty wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because your margins are low doesn't mean you still aren't screwing over poor people.

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.

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).

Re: Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

#263

Post by gruez »

jkaplowitz wrote: post #247
gruez wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to mention that cops only have powers to arrest/issue tickets, not to adjudicate disputes. This isn't Judge Dredd where cops can mete out judgements as they see fit. That's the whole reason why we have courts and judges.

It's not about adjudicating disputes in an arbitrary sense, it's about enforcing consumer protection laws about prices displayed and then charged at retail. Many places legislate that the lower of shelf or scanner price be the maximum price charged.

>It's not about adjudicating disputes in an arbitrary sense, it's about enforcing consumer protection laws about prices displayed and then charged at retail.

This is a fundamental misunderstanding of how the legal system works, at least for common law ones. When cops "enforce" the law, like arresting someone or towing a car, they're only allowed to do it because there's some immediate need. In the former case, it's because having a criminal roaming around the streets is a danger to society, and in the latter case because the car is blocking traffic and needs to be removed. In both cases you still need a judge to ruled that the person actually shoplifted or parked illegally. None of these factors apply in a dispute over pricing, and it's not the police's job to strongarm the shopkeeper to accept the lower-marked price. Indeed, in the two examples, there are often cases where no actions are taken at all, for instance issuing a summons instead of arresting someone, or issuing a ticket instead of towing a car.

Re: Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

#264

Post by otterley »

netsharc wrote: post #48
morkalork wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

This is what discovery is for. Changing e-ink tags has an audit trail associated with it.

Re: Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

#265

Post by nrhrjrjrjtntbt »

cs702 wrote: post #258

> 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…

It was investigated. They got fined $5k. 4 times.

Is there another law that can get them for repeat abuse.

Re: Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

#266

Post by JumpCrisscross »

sema4hacker wrote: post #122
regera wrote: post #116

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/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…

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

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

Yes. Productivity typically goes up [1]. Its reputation for job cutting is overblown [2], as is its record on price increases [3]. And historically, it's tended to decrease concentration in the industries it operates in. (The conglomerate break-ups of the 1980s were fuelled by new entrants and carve-outs.)

Instead, what I think we have is a category error. Berkshire Hathaway is a private equity shop as is all venture capital [4], and most family businesses of any scale are structured identically to sponsor-owned firms. Meanwhile, LBOs have been unable to shake the private-equity label for decades, unless they're lead by a founder, in which case they're "take private" transactions. In essence, we brand failed alternative asset strategies as private equity ex post facto.

Moreover, transaction size is negatively correlated with returns, particularly for leveraged buyouts. So the biggest private equity deals, which represent a minority of transaction activity, are disproportionately (a) bad and (b) public.

Finally, we get a lot of false conflation of market failures to private equity per se. Private-equity owned hospitals are bad [5]. But I haven't seen great evidence they're worse than other privately-owned hospitals with similar scale. The problem is hospitals probably shouldn't be run for profit or on-locally. But because nobody in particular is defending private equity, that's easier to attack.

[1] https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=67233

[2] https://www.jstor.org/stable/43495362

[3] https://centers.tuck.dartmouth.edu/uploads/cpee/files/Is_Pri...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_history_of_private_equit...

[5] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2813379#go...

Re: Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

#267

Post by Full_Clark »

itchingsphynx wrote: post #227

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 ext…

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?

Re: Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

#268

Post by gruez »

jkaplowitz wrote: post #252
gruez wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Call the police to stop a store from criminally restraining the freedom of a customer [...] Realistically no store is going chase after the customer for that, but that doesn't mean the average shopper is going to risk arrest/banned (for what the store essentially sees as shoplifting) to send a $2 message over the price difference. And all of this assumes your novel legal theory is actually correct.

It's not a novel legal theory, But yeah, I did call it a theoretical option, not a practical one. I don't pretend that it's practical.

Your original idea of "paying the marked (lower) price, walking away, even if the cashier corrected you with the higher price" certainly is novel. Otherwise can you link any sort of judicial ruling or even a random lawyer that agrees with you?Otherwise this looks suspiciously similar to all the spurious legal theories that sovereign citizens have, about how they don't need a drivers license because they're "traveling" or whatever.

Re: Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

#269

Post by LorenPechtel »

chongli wrote: post #146
sema4hacker wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

They pick on the weak companies but the basic model is to pick over the corpse and leave someone else holding the bag. Make it look good on the surface, leverage it to the hilt, extract cash and let it die.

Re: Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

#270

Post by chongli »

darth_avocado wrote: post #210
chongli wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

As far as I’ve seen that’s as far from the truth as it can be. They in fact consolidate terrible businesses, undercut the good ones and drive them out of the market until only they are left, after which point, they get even worse.

From what I've seen, they take a terrible business and liquify its valuable assets for their investors, freeing up capital to be invested more productively elsewhere in the economy. Of course those investors could take the money and commission a bunch of statues of themselves, but frequently they do something more productive than that.

A lot of the negative reaction to them seems to me to be mostly emotional. They'll dismantle a business that holds a lot of nostalgic value for people, even though it's long since ceased to be a viable and productive company. But it wasn't their fault that the business was in that situation in the first place! Years of mismanagement and neglect or perhaps disruption from a competitor left the business in zombie-like state. PE came along and put it out of its misery rather than allow it to slowly crumble while depreciating the value of its illiquid assets.

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