Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

theguardian.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

621–630 of 754 posts

Re: Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

#621

Post by zamadatix »

crazygringo wrote: post #601
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…

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.

I give it an even split between spite and genuinely not understanding how software licensing is tracked/preinstalled trials work, thinking "if they don't buy the office addon I need to make sure they don't receive one with the office addon" as they would have to do with most other products.

Re: Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

#622

Post by EGreg »

salawat wrote: post #612
EGreg wrote: post #567

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There can be many models. One model is just to have shares expire after a certain point, the same way options do. Or undergo demurrage (a discount that grows from 0 to 100% over a decade, for instance, where the remaining % from the sale goes back to the ecosystem and is distributed as UBI to all tokenholders). In fact, staking your shares and getting a perpetual flow of utility tokens, or selling the shares, could b…

Stop trying to reimagine stocks as crypto to try to justify a failed attempt at manifesting a problem that cryptocurrency can attempt to be a solution to.

Stop hating on crypto just because you're on HN, and consider that actual problems have grown very large with current systems. This is the problem with many HN denizens -- they keep correctly posting about problems, but then dismiss solutions out of hand because they're against the groupthink. Then 10 years later the problem is worse, but you get triggered by the word "cryptocurrency" (which by the way I didn't even say).

As a result, you totally ignore the very real problems that get bigger and bigger due to late-stage shareholder capitalism, and call it a "failed attempt to manifest" the problems.

Re: Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

#623

Post by mastax »

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…

You may be shocked to hear that there are no seas in the Himalayas.

Re: Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

#624

Post by harimau777 »

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 sounds like it's basically the grocery equivalent of the boot theory of poverty. Poor people have to pay more in the long run because they can't afford to buy in bulk.

Re: Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

#625

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

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…

Yes because when I need a small bag of snacks to put in my backpack before a flight, my first stop is to Costco and buy everything I need in bulk.

Re: Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

#626

Post by ratelimitsteve »

dollar tree seems to have found a new way to do this which may or may not be legal. Everything is priced at "$1.25 unless otherwise marked" but the markings don't actually tell you the price, only that it's not the $1.25 default price. There are price checkers throughout the store, but unless you're stopping and prescanning all of your stuff there's no actual way to know what you'll be paying until you get to the register. My partner is a regular there for cheap craft supplies and has seen what essentially amounts to dynamic pricing there, with the price varying up and down on the same item week by week.

Re: Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

#627

Post by JumpCrisscross »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #554
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's a single-member LLC Maybe exempt pass-throughs?

Why do it for entities of that size at all? It's not about their type of incorporation, it's about not adding more paperwork for small businesses. You're using or . That means you don't need a low revenue number. You could use $10B because nearly all of the relevant companies would already be in on the basis of the number of employees regardless, so all you need is to catch the few outliers that manage to be major co…

> You could use $10B because nearly all of the relevant companies would already be in on the basis of the number of employees regardless

Out of curiosity, why $10bn versus $1bn?

Re: Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

#628

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

ineedasername wrote: post #445
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'll bet 1 share... I won't be your counterparty on that bet, you've already won: https://www.forbes.com/sites/saradorn/2025/09/15/trump-wants... One of the reasons cited? All the work it takes. Which is just an insane response. If your business is so poorly run and organized that reconciling things each quarter represents a disproportionate amount of effort, something is very wrong. It means you definitely don't kn…

There is a huge difference between reconciling things for your own business strategy and reconciling things in accordance with federal public company reporting standards for publicly traded companies.

These standards are different than IRS reporting.

Re: Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

#629

Post by sarchertech »

crazygringo wrote: post #601
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…

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.

I worked at Geek Squad almost 20 years ago and here’s how it went.

We would preinstall office on say 80% of the door buster laptops for something like $29. Most people used office so they’d pay it. Occasionally some people didn’t want it so they’d buy a bare laptop.

If all the bare laptops had been sold, we’d remove office from one of the preinstalled laptops. Then we’d take the box and send it back to the inventory guys to process and get credit back from the vendor. As part of that process we were supposed to verify to Microsoft that the product wasn’t installed on any machines.

So they weren’t tracking keys, but the manager wasn’t doing it to spite the OP, he was just doing what the vendor asked for.

Re: Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

#630

Post by sarchertech »

zamadatix wrote: post #621
crazygringo wrote: post #601

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I give it an even split between spite and genuinely not understanding how software licensing is tracked/preinstalled trials work, thinking "if they don't buy the office addon I need to make sure they don't receive one with the office addon" as they would have to do with most other products.

I did many of these preinstalls 20 years ago. When you get credit back from Microsoft they ask you to make sure the key isn’t installed anywhere. They don’t track it, but it is a retirement from the vendor not a misunderstanding on the part of the manager.
Post reply on HN