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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

#481

Post by Buttons840 »

jimmydddd wrote: post #440
coin wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Michigan in the 90s had a similar rule. Customer gets 10x the overcharge (up to $5 max). I can guarantee you they fixed the price immediately. Where I live there’s no such rule I can tell you no one is correcting the price when I point out that I got overcharged (they usually shrug with “it does that sometimes”).

"It does that sometimes." I guess for some reason the minimum wage cashier was not fully invested in maximizing the customer experience.

Somehow the entity exploiting both parties of the exchange is not actually present or accountable for anything that happens in the exchange.

Re: Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

#482

Post by onetokeoverthe »

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…

[dead]

Re: Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

#483

Post by bruce511 »

estearum wrote: post #452
esseph wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Explain, please. I ask because I've never invested in a company that wasn't very profitable. I'm trying to find out besides intense insider information why someone would. (I'm not VC clearly, just a retail investor.)

Explain how people care about more than just profitability? If they didn't, everyone would be invested in the single most profitable company on the market, which they're not. There are unprofitable companies people are perfectly willing to buy. Growth, absolute revenue, rates of rates of change are all relevant depending on what you care about.

All the above. Plus it is absurdly simple to manipulate profit up or down.

For example, as an owner, I can be paid a bonus, or not. Crumbs, I can be paid a salary or not. If I want profits high, I simply take a low salary and no bonus. Or vice versa if I want profits low.

But that's the tip of the iceberg. Buying an asset this year, depreciated over the next 5, means higher profit this year, and 4 years of lower profit.

Marketing expenses this year, benefits next year, and so on. Drop the head count to juice profits for a couple years, raise head count to drop it, and do on.

Profits are the easiest thing to manipulate and hence the worst metric for fines. Which is why you see Europe use Revenue (not profit) as the measure for some fines.

Re: Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

#484

Post by epsteingpt »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #425
epsteingpt wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question anyone reading this analysis should ask is: if private equity is so benign, where do the returns come from? The unlock, which these papers don't understand, is the extractive nature of P/E that is hidden. A few clues: 1. A .5%-1% increase in prices is meaningful (Overall industry prices rise after buyouts, but again the price increase is on average very modest.) Retails margins routinely are measured in…

> if private equity is so benign, where do the returns come from? “During the last 10 years PE on average did not outperform the public markets in aggregate” [1]. (Individual firms overperform, some of them consistently.) > even if you like P/E as a VEHICLE (which - I would argue it hasn't been a 'good' ones since like the late 90s), you can't ignore the fact that it's returns have largely been eaten by fees Yup! Tho…

What are you arguing then? That a growing asset class that increases prices, destroys communities because of lack of ties, and shifts wealth from builders to owners that doesn't outperform public markets in aggregate is a good thing? Hard to argue this is 'good for society!'

> VC returns as an asset class (outside of a handful of firms) have underperformed in the past 20 years. I don't even count it here.

> PE as an exit for small builders Agree. But again, it's the builders who have built over multiple decades who profit (great!) one time. The employees - typically - don't. Search can help this (because searchers are usually more dependent on employees) so this is a good example of "micro-PE" being generically better than larger scale PE.

Re: Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

#485

Post by terminalshort »

Spivak wrote: post #105
terminalshort wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An easy test for this is how often the price at the register is higher vs lower than the marked price. If it's close to 50%, then ok, it's a mistake. But if it's higher...

I don't think you would reasonably expect it to be close to 50/50. Most price changes are increases and the mistake theory basically boils down to the employees never updating the shelf tags. Which I think is an extremely plausible theory since the one employee at the store isn't paid enough to bother. And who's even going to check that they updated the tags? Dollar General isn't shelling out money for that. There's…

When we are in an environment of 3% annual inflation the day to day price movements will overwhelm the drift of inflation and be basically random in terms of increases vs decreases.

Re: Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

#486

Post by WarOnPrivacy »

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.

> But what abusing that model long-term will eventually result in government-level change that effectively bans the existence of such exploits

After a couple of generations watching my government become increasingly captured by the lobbyists funding elections - I'm fairly skeptical that your optimistic assertion will come to pass.

Doubly so now that capture is rapidly accelerating into a hostile, fascist takeover.

Re: Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

#487

Post by bruce511 »

doctor_radium wrote: post #396
ssl-3 wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people say it's trickery, but when I apply the razor I find pricing errors more likely to be the result of stupidity than of malice. Having worked in retail myself, I understand that some days there just isn't time to get it all done. A debt of unfinished tasks can accumulate. It happens. Sometimes old prices get left up. (I think the stupidity is on the part of management more than it is the employees, but it's…

I would like to think incompetence as well, but when the problem is this widespread, IMHO it does point to a corporate issue...even if that's simply leaving too many incompetent managers in charge. IMHO if you're the manager and the part-time teenager didn't finish updating all the shelf pricing, then it's on you to finish before going home. But today too many people just don't give a damn. My first job was in retail…

Where I live the rule is simple, and all stores adopted it.

If something is mislabeled you get (one of) free, and all the rest at the lower price. (And you see a worker skurry off to fix it immediately.)

And here's a shock, mislabelling is vanishingly rare... seems it can be done if desired...

Re: Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

#488

Post by squeaky-clean »

rtp4me wrote: post #465
greycol wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you really believe 5 cent transactions never amount to significant consequences why don't you send me 5 cents a million times.

OK, and the next time you defraud your employer by $0.05 (take a longer break then needed, arrive late to work, etc) then you should spend the rest of your days in prison. Fair is fair, right?

You're really missing the point here. If I defrauded a million companies for $0.05 yeah throw me in prison. If Dollar Tree defrauded a single customer of $0.05 that's very different than doing it millions of times.

Re: Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

#489

Post by daft_pink »

It seems fairly obvious that a small store cannot really compete with massive giants like Walmart that invested in electronic interchange formats, logistics and negotiate huge volumes with customers to get to the absolute lowest price.

You can't go to some small store and see them consistently deliver better prices.

Re: Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

#490

Post by bittercynic »

qeternity wrote: post #408
garbagewoman wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you ever consider that they might have caused this situation?

It would help people to consider your point if you made even a modest attempt to explain and justify what you mean.

Dollar General and their ilk are behemoths compared to the shops that might have served these areas before they rolled in. It's possible they're the only game in town because they engaged in dumping or other dirty/illegal tactics to drive out established businesses.

I'm not an expert on the topic, but I don't think it's a reach to think that they might have engineered this situation.

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