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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

#601

Post by crazygringo »

b3lvedere wrote: post #552
jefftk wrote: post #372

> 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. This very rarely happens in MA, because when it does the store has to give you the item for $10 off, including if that makes it free. And they have to post a sign at the register explaining the law, which means when you're invoking it all you need to do is point at the sign. https://www.…

Once i had a very amusing discusson with a store that sold laptops. I wanted to purchase a laptop at the advertised price. The sales person told me i was in luck, because all their laptops came preinstalled with Microsoft Office for a little extra money. I told him politely i did not want to buy Microsoft Office, even for such little extra money. I just wanted the laptop. Semi-flabbergasted he told me this was not po…

That's actually fascinating, because they surely weren't tracking the actual Office license keys, and getting their money back. The manager literally uninstalled Office just to spite you. That's super funny! Especially since it made zero difference to you in the end.

Re: Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

#602

Post by greenavocado »

b3lvedere wrote: post #552
jefftk wrote: post #372

> 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. This very rarely happens in MA, because when it does the store has to give you the item for $10 off, including if that makes it free. And they have to post a sign at the register explaining the law, which means when you're invoking it all you need to do is point at the sign. https://www.…

Once i had a very amusing discusson with a store that sold laptops. I wanted to purchase a laptop at the advertised price. The sales person told me i was in luck, because all their laptops came preinstalled with Microsoft Office for a little extra money. I told him politely i did not want to buy Microsoft Office, even for such little extra money. I just wanted the laptop. Semi-flabbergasted he told me this was not po…

Was this in the US? I never purchased computers from people in a storefront.

Re: Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

#603

Post by entuno »

unwind wrote: post #528
soanvig wrote: post #526

> Dollar General’s lawyers argued that “it is virtually impossible for a retailer to match shelf pricing and scanned pricing 100% of the time for all items. Perfection in this regard is neither plausible nor expected under the law.” Can you explain to me how USA is called civilized? How somebody can say things like that, and how a shop is even allowed to have an error margin

The article touches on this: All told, 69 of the 300 items came up higher at the register: a 23% error rate that exceeded the state’s limit by more than tenfold. This implies that an error rate of perhaps 2% would be legal. I haven't checked, but I guess Europe has something similar even though I'm quite certain that retailers have to sell things at the posted price if there's a mistake. Part of the problem seems to…

The interesting question would be how many products came in lower, but sadly the article doesn't include that.

If 23% were higher and 23% were lower then you could make a reasonable argument that it's just incompetence from the store.

But if 23% are higher and none are lower, then that looks a lot more like malice - because the odds of you happening to have a 23% error rate than just happens to always work out in the retailer's favour are basically zero.

Re: Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

#604

Post by schnable »

cbdevidal wrote: post #559
b3lvedere wrote: post #552

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once i had a very amusing discusson with a store that sold laptops. I wanted to purchase a laptop at the advertised price. The sales person told me i was in luck, because all their laptops came preinstalled with Microsoft Office for a little extra money. I told him politely i did not want to buy Microsoft Office, even for such little extra money. I just wanted the laptop. Semi-flabbergasted he told me this was not po…

The irony is even though Dollar Tree prices are honest because they all are the same $1.25 (excluding the new “More Choices” $3-5 items) they’re still ripping you off. I always shop on a per-unit basis e.g. dollars per pound or cents per ounce, since that’s how I actually eat food. I need a certain amount of calories and a certain quantity of food to survive, and the less I pay per unit, the lower overall cost. On a…

That's not really a rip off, it caters to people who can't afford to buy in larger quantities.

Re: Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

#605

Post by sgerenser »

zahlman wrote: post #537
jefftk wrote: post #372

> 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. This very rarely happens in MA, because when it does the store has to give you the item for $10 off, including if that makes it free. And they have to post a sign at the register explaining the law, which means when you're invoking it all you need to do is point at the sign. https://www.…

... American "dollar stores" have items in the first place at $10+? I thought it was already amusing when Dollarama reached the $5 CAD threshold.

Family Dollar and Dollar General (the subjects of this piece) are not traditional “dollar stores” (and haven’t been in a long time) despite having Dollar in the name. They’re just discount stores, like a smaller Wal-Mart. Dollar Tree, on the other hand, had long been a traditional dollar store where most items are priced at a dollar. However after pandemic-induced inflation they have mostly changed to a $1.25-$1.50 price point and now have a number of items marked above that as well.

Re: Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

#606

Post by satvikpendem »

greenavocado wrote: post #602
b3lvedere wrote: post #552

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once i had a very amusing discusson with a store that sold laptops. I wanted to purchase a laptop at the advertised price. The sales person told me i was in luck, because all their laptops came preinstalled with Microsoft Office for a little extra money. I told him politely i did not want to buy Microsoft Office, even for such little extra money. I just wanted the laptop. Semi-flabbergasted he told me this was not po…

Was this in the US? I never purchased computers from people in a storefront.

This is possible in the US but I'm sure in many other countries too where electronics and computer stores exist, not even counting the wide swath of Apple stores around the world.

Re: Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

#607

Post by satvikpendem »

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?

Valve is private equity and seems to do a lot of good things, for gamers and for Linux users in general.

Re: Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

#608

Post by maest »

EGreg wrote: post #527
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…

I'd even go so far as to say that shareholding in PUBLICLY TRADED companies is one of the primary engines of enshittification. Shareholders want to extract rents from the ecosystem, full stop. And if the CEO isn't sociopathic enough about it, they’ll replace them with one who is. Everyone who buys shares at price X wants to sell at >X, forever. That incentive structure alone guarantees a race to the bottom. How to fi…

While I get your frustration, the root cause of the issue is not shareholder value maximisation, it's the failure modes of the free market.

Monopolies, lack of transparency, lack of competition, regulatory capture, failure to price in externalities are what allows this to happen.

And these failure modes are allowed to persist due to lobbying, normalised corruption, and the desire for a small/weak government.

The latter is useful for corporations, as it limits regulation, which is the main way these failure modes are supposed to be managed. Yes, too much/bad regulation is detrimental, but so is no/weak regulation.

The more baffling thing is that the modal American voter supports lax regulation and pro-corporate rules at their own personal expense.

Re: Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

#609

Post by hylaride »

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?

> Is there some code of conduct for public companies but not private ones?

It's more about Private Equity firms than private companies. The oversimplified TL;DR strategy for most PE firms is acquire, strip, pump, then dump (combined with all sorts of tax strategies). Most PE firms don't own the companies themselves, but act on behalf of investors and take a cut of the ultimate profits. So it's basically tons of short term thinking.

Re: Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

#610

Post by gwbas1c »

Cyclone_ wrote: post #438
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…

That's probably aimed at reducing consumption.

There's a lot of old laws that special case alcohol in the US; mostly artifacts of prohibition and temperance movements.
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