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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

#571

Post by dzjkb »

CPLX wrote: post #347
youarentrightjr wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see these private equity takes on HN frequently and am really baffled by the ignorance. There's a very clear difference between a public and private company - the fiduciary duty to shareholders. There is a legal requirement for directors of public companies to act in the financial interests of all shareholders. In practice, and according to precedent, this means long term viability of the company, in other words, a…

> I see these private equity takes on HN frequently and am really baffled by the ignorance. Probably a good time to note that you’re posting this comment on a website created by a private equity firm for promotional purposes.

quite the opposite actually, your comment adds nothing to the discussion

Re: Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

#572

Post by pembrook »

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 assume you're asking this rhetorically and just want people to affirm how 'evil' private equity is to support the narrative-driven belief you already have?

PE became a favorite journalist boogeyman in the 80s for saddling companies with high interest debt they could never repay or slicing up industrial companies and selling for parts. That's not reality today. A vast majority of private equity buyouts nobody ever hears about or cares about because everything turns out totally fine.

A private equity buyout that makes the company worse off, destroys customer trust, kills employee loyalty, and leaves room for competitors to swoop in is a failed private equity buyout. If that were true in the majority of cases the entire PE model wouldn't work at all.

Here's just a few success stories of companies you've heard of (there's thousands you haven't heard of, so no point in bringing them up).

- Hilton Hotels - Dunkin Brands - Beats by Dre - Dominos Pizza - Petsmart / Chewy

Businesses that sell to private equity are often businesses that are not doing well or are not long-term sustainable, hence why the owner wants to sell. Think about it logically. If you're running a fantastic business that is profitable, growing, sustainable, with happy employees -- why would you sell?? Or in the case of public companies being taken private, why would anybody take the risk if everything is going wonderfully?

Re: Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

#573

Post by voxic11 »

guelo wrote: post #472
technothrasher wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that this law is only for certain products. We would have people at the liquor store I used to own point out mislabeling occasionally and claim we owed them the $10 difference from this law. While we tried to work with customers when we made a pricing error, not only does the accuracy law not apply to alcoholic beverages, but it would often be illegal for us to offer the customer the mistaken price. Alcohol reta…

Is alcohol the only exception?

It's in the article linked

> When buying groceries—food and non-alcoholic beverages, pet food or supplies, disposable paper or plastic products, soap, household cleaners, laundry products, or light bulbs—you must be charged the lowest displayed price, whether on the sticker, scanner, website, or app.

Re: Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

#574

Post by mbesto »

epolanski wrote: post #557
sema4hacker wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Private equity has rarely done good for investors too. With the boom of popularity of ETFs in the last decades it has been increasingly hard for active fund managers to justify their costs by investing on public markets where benchmarks are visible and public. Thus they removed themselves from the benchmark entirely and moved to private equity where there's no benchmark and returns are very hard to gauge. Analysis sh…

Are you referring to Private Equity (as in MBOs/LBOs) or Venture Capital? None of what you're stating is rooted in reality or data. Source: https://www.bain.com/globalassets/noindex/2025/bain-report_g...

> - The overwhelming majority of PEs lose money.

What? No. Read the report:

"Buyout funds continue to outperform public markets in all regions across time horizons longer than five years"

> - Annualized return of PE in UK has been 2.1%, this doesn't even match parking money in short-term bonds.

Once again, read the report.

> The only ones that have profited out of PE, beyond the managers working there, are those that invested in the PE itself, meaning buying shares of the fund itself.

I sold my business to PE and I profited nicely. So I'm not sure what you're concluding here...

Take the parent's post with a grain of salt.

Re: Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

#575

Post by avsteele »

Article Context-free raw #'s, no comparisons to traditional grocery stores AFAIK. Dad journalism.

You should not update on this article unless you have some outside knowledge of the industry.

I had AI look into it, it found a national report found that dollar stores had pricing errors at about twice (3.5%) the rate of traditional supermarkets (1.7%) but lower than convenience stores (4.9%).

https://cdn.ncwm.com/userfiles/files/Resources/Price%20Verif...

Re: Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

#576

Post by mbesto »

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…

> PE model is very different from regular private companies, and it often involves extracting maximum profits at the expense of the company itself.

Not all PEs model. The ones you are referring to are often buying large businesses (like the infamous Toys R Us) load them with debt and strip their assets. 90% of the other PEs out there do not do this...in fact the opposite. They put capital on their balance sheet to grow.

Re: Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

#577

Post by francisofascii »

BrenBarn wrote: post #295

> But North Carolina law caps penalties at $5,000 per inspection, offering retailers little incentive to fix the problem This is a huge problem with all manner of laws in the US. We are not willing to insist that fees be limited only by their ability to prevent the prohibited behavior. Fines should continually escalate, if necessary until the offender is bankrupted, at which point their assets are taken. If Dollar Tr…

The article metions Family Dollar and Dollar General. Dollar Tree is a different company.

Re: Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

#578

Post by mbesto »

CPLX wrote: post #352
gruez wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

What you’re saying just isn’t true. Looting the companies is accomplished by stacking up debt and then giving themselves the money. Occasionally there are a few variations like looting a pension fund or taking a high quality product and making it horrible and selling that until people notice. It’s literally their business model, it’s happened thousands of times and is a very clear fixture of the modern American busin…

> It’s literally their business model

It's literally not. It happens to be the business model for a subsection of private equity (usually large cap) and its the one that gets most headlines. There are roughly ~5,000 M&A events per year (often involving PE) and yet you'll hear about 5~10 at most cases where the company gets loaded with debt and stripped of assets. The large plurality of PE groups are buy and hold for 4~7 years and are largely focused on EBITDA expansion.

> If you don’t know this it’s because you aren’t looking or it’s in your interest to say you don’t know this.

No offense, but you clearly don't know what you're talking about.

Re: Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

#579

Post by estearum »

rsynnott wrote: post #562
estearum wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty trivial to make profits "not exist" though if you planned to engage in fraud and wanted to de-risk it.

This is why GDPR fines, say, are a percentage of _revenue_. Harder to mess with without getting into outright fraud.

Yeah agreed this seems more directionally correct.

Re: Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

#580

Post by estearum »

bruce511 wrote: post #483
estearum wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 prof…

Yep, not to mention what you can do with complex conglomerates. For example, one should take a look at the intra-company eliminations that the giant pay-viders do (e.g. UnitedHealthGroup, owner of insurer/payer UnitedHealth and healthcare provider Optum)

Insurers are margin-capped, but wouldn't you know it once you own a PBM and the providers, you can make revenue, holdings, pricing power, and market share rise arbitrarily while never producing a profit beyond the cap.

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