Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

theguardian.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

531–540 of 754 posts

Re: Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

#531

Post by bux93 »

fencepost wrote: post #232
JSR_FDED wrote: post #2

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.

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 in…

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.

Re: Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

#532

Post by soanvig »

sneak wrote: post #133
amarant wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Why are fines capped?

I think because it's 10% income before cost deduction

Re: Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

#533

Post by wodenokoto »

bob1029 wrote: post #530
soanvig wrote: post #526

> 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

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.

You have it backwards. Building a flexible system and constantly changing pricing database without regard to how to physically update prices in the store is the silly thing.

And when the mismatch tends to be in the stores favor, then maybe it isn’t silly but malicious.

Re: Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

#534

Post by mxfh »

gruez wrote: post #154
sema4hacker wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

To me PE is just secondary effect of incentivizing private pension schemes over pay-as-you-go schemes in the last half century to me.

A huge wealth transfer in disguise providing capital to financial actors (not at last PE) that are usually not aligned with goals of regular employess: affordable housing and healtcare and reasonably safe jobs.

As Germany is on it's way to dismantle it's core of it's pay-as-you-go mandatory state pension insurance and shift towards private, and privat-by-proxy schemes via company pension plans. Europe might be also going that way some time in the near future, but without the comparably healthy demographics of the US.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revenue_Act_of_1978

Funny that all those charts eventually go back to Carter allowing for 401k not, Reagan, though that reuse only happened later.

My bigger hunch here is supplying the capital markets with that much additional money was a mistake, that ultimately lead to the current guilded age and accelarated existing trends of in the productivity–pay gap, social stratification and wealth inequality, if not solely being responsible for it.

It seems outright impossible for most to compete with a economic reality where the accrued value of like a third of your and everyone else's paycheck is actively working against your net quality of living, when you're not in the top 1 to 10% where the capital gains are a still a net positive over the increased cost of housing and wage stagflation etc.

Re: Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

#535

Post by zahlman »

iinnPP wrote: post #6

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.

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.

Re: Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

#536

Post by AnthonyMouse »

cycomanic wrote: post #520
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those are single-member LLC revenue numbers. You can get $10M in revenue just by being in a low-margin business. For industries with a 1% margin that's $100k a year in net income, i.e. wages and benefits for one person. And how are you going to calculate valuation for a closely held private company? In particular, how are you going to calculate it without making them do the thing you don't know if they're required to…

> Those are single-member LLC revenue numbers. You can get $10M in revenue just by being in a low-margin business. For industries with a 1% margin that's $100k a year in net income, i.e. wages and benefits for one person. I'm not sure I understand your argument? Wages come out of revenue not income? So the $100k would go to the owners, but as captical gains not wages.

It's a single-member LLC. The person doing the labor and the person who owns the company are the same person and whether they pay themselves the money as wages or dividends is not really the issue.

A thousand employees is a business on the scale of a mid-sized bank or companies like VeriSign or LendingTree or Iridium Communications. Companies with something like a billion dollars in revenue. $10M in revenue is a small business.

Re: Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

#537

Post by zahlman »

jefftk wrote: post #372

> 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.…

... American "dollar stores" have items in the first place at $10+? I thought it was already amusing when Dollarama reached the $5 CAD threshold.

Re: Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

#538

Post by gadders »

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?

I can't think of a single example. It normally means making a company worse whilst relying on existing name recognition to drive sales with the aim of re-selling it before people realise how bad the company has begun.

Re: Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

#539

Post by bkor »

chongli wrote: post #311
excalibur wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a good point. Private Equity is a fairly broad umbrella term that encompasses a variety of investment strategies and business models. The type of Private Equity that most here are referring to is the type that buys up existing businesses, squeezes as much money as possible out of them, and throws their desecrated corpses in the gutter. These "investors" are a blight on society, this activity should be criminal…

Just like crows! People hate crows even though they play a valuable role in ecosystems. I would argue that moribund businesses who maintain a competitive moat but are otherwise extremely unproductive and inefficient are the real blight on society. If PE firms can liquidate those businesses and open up the market while freeing up capital for more productive investment then I fully support them. I would love to hear so…

> Productive and innovative businesses with really solid fundamentals (balance sheets) that were acquired and dismantled by PE.

You have way too much (unneeded) limiting qualifications. In Netherlands PE have bought loads of companies, then put the acquisition price as a loan on the balance sheet. Plus then sold the assets, made the company then lease those assets. Then those companies often went bankrupt as the leasing prices increased crazily.

> I would argue that moribund businesses who maintain a competitive moat but are otherwise extremely unproductive and inefficient are the real blight on society.

The companies I've cited weren't "extremely unproductive and inefficient". Businesses can be profitable and healthy without all the qualifications you think they need.

Post reply on HN