581–590 of 754 posts
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.
It is all these Karen memes that ruined complaining about being screwed over by corparate interests.
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>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. The…
This is simply untrue. A typical PE firm creates a GP fund using LPs money. This GP fund typically does a management buyout (which means 50.1% of more) of several companies using a mix of equity (e.g. GPs capital) and debt (banking lenders). So by every definition of the word, they absolutely own the company.
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That's probably aimed at reducing consumption.
I assume eliminating the "loss leader" concept is the main effect, since shops shouldn't otherwise price things as losses regardless? In which case it seems like it's meant to maintain some friction / overhead for people wanting to visit the stores, possibly reducing consumption at least for the price-sensitive.
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Paying 10 to 20 cents more for an item can still be a better deal than traveling further away to a larger store. The mis-pricing is completely unacceptable, though.
But because these stores exist, they lead to grocery stores no longer existing, because they eat the majority of the profit from grocery stores. This forces people to shop at the dollar stores because it's the only thing nearby. The dollar store model increases prices, reduces consumer choice, and makes us less healthy.
In my hometown, we had a grocery, but it closed in the earl 90s. They didn't get another on until the lat 00s. It was open a few years, had bare shelves most of the time and convenience store level prices when they did have something. In the late 10s, a Dollar General opened... so far, it has remained open, has much better prices than the previous attempts, and is generally much better stocked. The town hasn't grown in that time. But Dollar General is existing where no one had managed to survive before.
We'll see how it goes long term.
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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…
IRR comparisons admittedly get a little fuzzy since the lack of liquidity and pegging values is difficult.
You're also correct to say that VC is a subset of PE, technically speaking, colloquially it's not really. If you put VC into the whole mix, then yes the asset class sucks versus the public market. PE is often synonymous with an MBO.
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To me, that is an utterly hilarious question to be posing on this website of all places.
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…
And this type of PE represents a very small minority of what is actually considered "Private Equity". The vast majority of PE deals are about growth. This small minority of asset stripping PE groups gets the most headlines though.
Source: my firm works with ~400 PE firms.
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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.
Could it? A gas station doesn't get in trouble if I show up with a photo of yesterday's posted price
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/userf…
> Article Context-free raw #'s
What does this mean?
> no comparisons to traditional grocery stores AFAIK.
So? The article is very specific from the beginning it was an investigation on two specific chains. That different stores may also do it does not invalidate the point.
> Dad journalism
Did you mean “bad journalism”, or is “dad journalism” a term with meaning (like “armchair psychologist”)? B and D aren’t that close on a typical QWERTY, but maybe it was a wrong autocorrect?
> You should not update on this article
Also here. I’m guessing “update” was meant to be a different word? I don’t understand what you mean.
> (…) a national report found that (…)
Which is useful information, but (again) does nothing for the article’s point. Because other stores do it, it doesn’t mean it’s not worth reporting that these ones do too. The article isn’t saying these are the only chains engaging the the practice. Furthermore, the point matters because the people who need to frequent dollar stores are the ones who are already cash strapped.
The article goes deeper than just presenting some numbers, it argues for why exactly this matters, why it happens, and why it isn’t being fixed.
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…