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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

#501

Post by AnthonyMouse »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #323
GolfPopper wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 disclosu…

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 do without having the calculation already?

Re: Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

#502

Post by AnthonyMouse »

bloppe wrote: post #498
sema4hacker wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If you have a pension, you're an investor in PE. If you live in a country with a sovereign wealth fund, you're a beneficiary of PE. If you're connected to a school with an endowment, a lot of that money ends up in PE funds, and can fund lots of research and student resources. So ya, I'd agree the PE is rarely good for anyone but the investors, but you'd be surprised how many people are investors without realizing it.

If all of those things never invested a cent in private equity funds that buy up existing companies to turn the screws on their customers and put the money into new business creation instead, they wouldn't be making any less money and the whole world would be better off, including the investors themselves in their role as customers and employees.

Re: Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

#503

Post by deepbreath1 »

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…

I am a POS system developer. Such errors can occur in the systems I develop, but they are unintentional—often caused by price data synchronization issues. I am actively working to resolve them.

Re: Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

#504

Post by nazcan »

darth_avocado wrote: post #253
gruez wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?

> Is there some code of conduct for public companies but not private ones? No but there’s a difference between private companies and PE owned companies. PE model is very different from regular private companies, and it often involves extracting maximum profits at the expense of the company itself. And as far as public companies go, shareholders will have to say something about the operation of the company if you star…

But doesn't extracting maximum profits at the expense of the company itself mean front loading profits - i.e. long-term worse outcomes?

How does a PE company make money from that - unless who they sell it to is not saavu enough to realize it?

Re: Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

#505

Post by ssl-3 »

panny wrote: post #363

Do any of you actually shop at Family Dollar? I do. They're cheaper on a lot of stuff. A box of Cinnamon Toast Crunch is $2 less than the same box at the grocery store in town. I bought a pair of shoes there for $4. They weren't stylish, but lasted longer than the last pair of Nikes I purchased. Yeah, sometimes the sale price posted on the shelf is no longer applicable. Either the employees don't feel like they are p…

I shop at Family Dollar sometimes, and also Dollar General and (shock, horror) even Dollar Tree.

I shop at these places because I am very cheap, and these places are also often (not always, but often) very cheap and the selection is usually pretty good, for the size.

And before someone else blames math for my perception: I can math. I can also remember prices between the shelf and/or the website and the register, and between different stores. (I've been cheap for a very long time. One cannot succeed at being cheap without honing these kinds of skills.)

The shelves at these places aren't beautifully-faced. The lighting is shit -- lowest-bidder, lacking design coherence, and either too bright or too dim. The music, if it exists, is usually a Bluetooth speaker playing from an employee's phone or a single pair of thrift store speakers from a 1990s Aiwa mini system [sometimes, even fancy-style with one on each side of the building] with some local radio station or other playing. There's usually large delivery carts sitting around in the already-narrow aisles with fresh inventory that the 1 or 2 employees who might be present sometimes get time to stock a bit of.

And that's... that's all just fine.

I don't want to pay for beautifully-faced shelves, good lighting, and a professionally-installed overhead PA system that plays professionally-programmed musical selections in a professional manner. I don't want to pay for shelves that are magically stocked in the wee hours of the morning by a dedicated team of professional stockpeople.

Like, seriously: I'm not that proud. My goal is to save money; shopping for inexpensive canned beans and a gallon of milk from some factory farm does not have to be an enriching, transcendent experience.

So when I have need to buy stuff, and there's a Family Dollar across the street from the office and Dollar General is around the corner from my house? I cheerfully stop in and give them my money.

The employees are almost unilaterally very polite and helpful. They know the entire store's products very well, even if the price tags aren't always up-to-date. It's a good, quick, cheap place to shop for good cheap stuff.

(I see comments here that read like "I only shop at Whole Foods. I went to an Aldi once and turned right around and walked out" and all I can think of are callously demeaning phrases like "You blithering, sheltered, classist snob. It may be possible for a person to bring even less relevancy to this discussion, but I cannot presently imagine how that would be possible."

But I usually try to keep that kind of phrasing to myself.)

Re: Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

#506

Post by epsteingpt »

garbagewoman wrote: post #463
qeternity wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

My point is not to explain how they caused it, its to point out that the commenter didn’t even mention the existence of that possibility

It's possible, just unlikely.

The reality is a small business owner does not have the time or wherewithal to negotiate large contracts across hundreds or thousands of brands. They may nail SKU's and quantities better than a Wal-Mart or Dollar General, but at the price of higher costs and lower selection.

You don't really see large scale backlash in communities against these stores for this reason - buying branded at a reasonable price point is foundational for a good quality of life in modern society.

Most people vote with their feet, and are happy with the tradeoff.

Re: Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

#507

Post by ChuckMcM »

From the article -- But North Carolina law caps penalties at $5,000 per inspection, offering retailers little incentive to fix the problem. “Sometimes it is cheaper to pay the fines,” said Chad Parker, who runs the agency’s weights-and-measures program.

This is what I think of as the 'give us a story to tell the people because we're okay with business doing this' rule. Too often the local (or state, or even federal) government is aware of bad actors but fails to act in a way that would actually cure the problem. It is a remarkably persistent form of corruption in many liberal democracies (not just the USA).

Re: Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

#508

Post by JumpCrisscross »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #501
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 disclosu…

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

My thinking was it should be simple to produce. Maybe for revenue only you eliminate the balance sheet and maybe P/L or cap table requirements.

> how are you going to calculate valuation for a closely held private company?

I was thinking headline valuations, but you’re right. Skip valuation.

Re: Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

#509

Post by anovikov »

darth_avocado wrote: post #253
gruez wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?

> Is there some code of conduct for public companies but not private ones? No but there’s a difference between private companies and PE owned companies. PE model is very different from regular private companies, and it often involves extracting maximum profits at the expense of the company itself. And as far as public companies go, shareholders will have to say something about the operation of the company if you star…

What is the "company itself" if not its owners (private equity company that is)? Everything else is just an asset of it. If they see a way to maximise profit by draining the company that's better than any other one, why not? After all if company is then simply liquidated, it frees up market opportunity for new entrants.

Re: Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

#510

Post by dmurray »

mindslight wrote: post #374
dmurray wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but it's in the same category as the owner putting up a sign by mistake, or omitting to update a sign by mistake. Or more realistically, an employee of the owner putting up a sign even though the owner had instructed him to put up a different sign.

> or omitting to update a sign by mistake No, in this case the shop is legitimately offering an item for sale, and then forgetting to change the price they are offering it at. It's quite disingenuous for a shop to put up signs, and then act like those numbers aren't legally binding, while the real prices are hidden away in a database somewhere. If they want to have their database be the authoritative copy pricing inf…

> If they want to have their database be the authoritative copy pricing information, then they can just not put up price signs to begin with.

This one really does vary by jurisdiction, but no, grocery stores generally must display prices by law.

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