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

321–330 of 754 posts

Re: Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

#321

Post by andrew_lettuce »

gruez wrote: post #237
darth_avocado wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big difference is the extent to which PE will go to juice the quarters earnings. Public companies cannot and will not just fire all staff, fleece customers to the point they won’t return and take on debt that they have no intention of paying back. PE will do all of the above and more if it means they get their money. Which means, you as a customer get screwed over more when PE is involved.

>Public companies cannot and will not just fire all staff, fleece customers to the point they won’t return and take on debt that they have no intention of paying back. Why? Is there some code of conduct for public companies but not private ones?

Because a PE fund is at most a seven year timeline, and everybody knows it. There is absolutely no incentive to add value beyond the next sale, and often you only need to add the perception of value. To quote my CTO of a PE owned company: "we want to make it look like we're on the road to ", not actually accomplish it

Re: Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

#322

Post by gruez »

jkaplowitz wrote: post #287
gruez wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 b…

> 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. Not at all true. They can enforce the law because there's a law being violated, not because there's an immediate need for the enforcement. > 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…

>There are so many cases where cops can arrest someone who isn't being a danger to society in any way, like someone who illegally crossed the border into the US (a criminal misdemeanor)

Does only committing a "criminal misdemeanor" somehow exempt you from arrest?

>Or for an example under state law, a cop arresting someone who is intentionally underpaying state income tax (criminal tax evasion) has no immediate need to take that person into custody before conviction but is 100% allowed to do so if probable cause exists, at least until the initial bail hearing.

Right, because arresting people who refuses to show up to court is needed for the justice system to work at all. Otherwise people can just shirk their court dates and never face judgement. There's plenty of other reasons to arrest people besides the two examples I provided, they're not supposed to be exhaustive.

>This has nothing to do with strongarming the shopkeeper to accept a lower-marked price in the sense of an ordinary pricing dispute between private parties, it's about enforcing state or local laws that regulate this in cases where a shop is violating applicable laws.

This makes as much sense as calling in the cops to report health code violations.

Re: Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

#323

Post by JumpCrisscross »

GolfPopper wrote: post #218
WarOnPrivacy wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Has private equity ever done anything good for anyone outside of the investors? If it's not publicly traded, it's super secure from any public accountability. And while I'm increasingly hostile toward the shareholder model, we do get one transparency breadcrumb from this (gov managed) contrivance: The Earnings Call Earnings Calls give us worthwhile amounts of internal information that we'd never get otherwise - inf…

> If it's not publicly traded, it's super secure from any public accountability. Under the existing legal and regulatory model , yes. But what abusing that model long-term will eventually result in government-level change that effectively bans the existence of such exploits, wide-spread vigilantism, and/or some sort of collapse.

> what abusing that model long-term will eventually result in government-level change that effectively bans the existence of such exploits, wide-spread vigilantism, and/or some sort of collapse

The endpoint of vigilantism and collapse is more economic opacity. Not less.

My personal view is companies with more than any of 1,000 employees, $10mm revenue or a $100mm valuation should have to file a simple annual disclosure showing the cap table ad balance sheet, a simple P/L, list of >5% beneficial owners and their auditor. But the path to that is through legislation in a complex, stable society.

Re: Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

#324

Post by jeltz »

teeray wrote: post #290
jeltz wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Corporate fines should all be percentages of profits.

Percentage of global tärevwbue works. We know that from GDPR. But I would personally prefer prison sentences for the execs.

Re: Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

#325

Post by pixl97 »

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…

Snap a pic I guess, there are many ways to game this either way, but if people start catching stores do this then it could lead to issues for the store.

Re: Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

#326

Post by pjc50 »

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…

This is very American: it's illegal, but everyone accepts both that the law will be enforced very unevenly, and that this kind of thing doesn't get solved by the regular political process. There's no political consumer complaints culture, it's seen as an individual matter.

You couldn't get away with this for as long in the UK as a retailer. Either the CMA or Trading Standards would deal with it.

Re: Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

#327

Post by StanislavPetrov »

teeray wrote: post #290
jeltz wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Corporate fines should all be percentages of profits.

Revenue, not profit.

Re: Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

#328

Post by JumpCrisscross »

pjc50 wrote: post #326
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…

This is very American: it's illegal, but everyone accepts both that the law will be enforced very unevenly, and that this kind of thing doesn't get solved by the regular political process. There's no political consumer complaints culture, it's seen as an individual matter. You couldn't get away with this for as long in the UK as a retailer. Either the CMA or Trading Standards would deal with it.

> everyone accepts both that the law will be enforced very unevenly, and that this kind of thing doesn't get solved by the regular political process

Nobody agrees on that. TFA follows "a state government inspector" whose effectiveness is hampered solely by a "North Carolina law" which "caps penalties at $5,000 per inspection." That law [1] doesn't exist outside North Carolina.

This is the first time I'm reading about this. We have a dollar store in my town. I'm curious to replicate this experiment myself and send the results into the local newspaper if the discrepancy is real.

[1] https://www.ncleg.gov/enactedlegislation/statutes/html/bycha... § 81A-30.1

Re: Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

#329

Post by andrew_lettuce »

gruez wrote: post #244
CPLX wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The rest of the shareholders (eg. pension funds, insurance companies, endowments, family offices) can be assumed to behave like ruthless capitalists chasing the highest returns, regardless of whether the company is public or not. Right but they are seeking the highest returns as equity holders typically, usually through things like stock buybacks. Private equity firms have much more devious ways of looting the comp…

>Private equity firms have much more devious ways of looting the companies, like management fees, acquiring other portfolio companies, and various other tricks. "looting the companies" is non-nonsensical when they also own it. It's like saying a scrap yard is "looting" the cars it bought by taking out the valuable parts to resell or whatever. The rest of the stuff might make sense in the context of the LPs getting sc…

PE puts very little of their own money into the deal though, while they own it they don't buy it. They use incredibly high leverage and often saddle the company with monstrous debt, then loot the assets to pay the interest and take management fees while doing all this. Red lobster is a great recent example. They sold off all the real estate, then had stores lease it back, turning profitable locations into losers. They often do the same thing with manufacturing, goodwill, brandnames and sales channels.

Think of this like an oil well. If you pump off all the gas, you depressurize the reservoir and can never get the oil. You need to slow your production to get the oil first, but private equity is happy to skim the cream and leave the milk to spoil.

Re: Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

#330

Post by autoexec »

antonymoose wrote: post #155
jmspring wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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,…

The concept of "small convenience store near me" isn't the problem. The problem is that these stores are actively engaging in outright fraud. People who shop there are absolutely getting fleeced regardless of how much gas they burn getting to the store that's regularly ripping them off.

Having a small nearby connivance store and not getting scammed is an option. If the ability to get beer and hot dogs buns without having to drive to a larger more distant store is really worth the higher prices customers are getting fraudulently charged at the register, then these stores can just stop lying to customers and post the accurate prices.

If the laws were meaningfully enforced this is exactly what would happen. These stores would either comply with the law and stop committing fraud or they would be shut down, their CEOs would be sent to prison, and competitors willing to follow the law would step in to fill the need the market has for a small shop that sells beer and buns to rake in that profit for themselves.

Post reply on HN