Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices • Hacker News Board

Re: Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

#631

Post by youarentrightjr » Mon, Dec 08, 2025, 3:14 PM UTC

chongli wrote: post #362

darth_avocado wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> lot of the negative reaction to them seems to me to be mostly emotional Mine specifically stems from PE buying up all but one 24x7 emergency vets in a 20 miles radius from me. All of them were thriving businesses. There is only one remaining non PE ones has its days numbered. After monopolizing the emergency vet market, they shut down a few locations, which previously acted as competition for each other, effectivel…

Lots of businesses have big positive externalities [1]. They provide more benefit to their communities than they take in for themselves. Unfortunately, these sorts of businesses are easy pickings for PE. Artists are a classic example. They generate huge positive externalities for a community while reaping almost none of the benefits for themselves. Artists get severely exploited by the economy for this! To counteract…

Man, it's horrible people have such an emotional connection to art and businesses that keep their pets alive. If only we could transform these into an asset that extracted wealth, now that would be great for society! Think of all the externalities!

Re: Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

#632

Post by raw_anon_1111 » Mon, Dec 08, 2025, 3:18 PM UTC

addicted wrote: post #614

EGreg wrote: post #527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm curious what you think VCs, etc. who are investing in all these private companies want to do? The only difference with public companies is we actually have data about their finances. The private companies are doing it all under wraps.

Don’t conflate two different investment models.

1. Investors who want to invest in companies with a growth story and want the company to grow bigger and be “successful” enough to exit either via an acquisition or the public market. But often times these days, just to pawn off to the greater fool.

https://medium.com/@Arakunrin/the-post-ipo-performance-of-y-...

2. Investors who want to go in and make the company worse and do enough value extraction for short term gains. The canonical case is when a restaurant chain owns its own real estate. They split off the restaurant from the underlying real estate and make the restaurant pay rent that goes up. The restaurant flounders and the real estate holdings increase in value.

And another strategy is to acquire companies in your vertical, roll them all up, fire redundant staff and integrate systems and then exit. Of course you enshitify the smaller once independent mom and pop systems in the process.

Re: Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

#633

Post by raw_anon_1111 » Mon, Dec 08, 2025, 3:31 PM UTC

youarentrightjr wrote: post #251

gruez wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Private equity is far worse. It’s mean 100% ownership by a group of sociopaths who are executing on a plan to extract as much cash as possible quickly with no other goals at all. ...as opposed to the average public company? An average company might have more "average joe" shareholders (almost by definition, because private equity is typically off limits to non-accredited investors), but outside of meme stocks, there…

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…

Public companies are interested in quarterly profits. But for the most part still have longer term goals and don’t purposefully make decisions that will make the company worse off in the long term.

Apple is not going to sell off all of its real estate into separate company, force the other half to rent it and then sell off the rental holdings. Even when it was almost bankrupt it didn’t “shut down the company and give the money back to shareholders”.

The former is a standard PE play. I’ve been part of the “roll up small companies and enshittify them and go public” playbook. I was the lead architect at the parent company designing the software system that integrated the disparate systems of the target companies.

Funny enough I worked for a startup that I loved in 2018-2020 and only left because a job at BigTech fell into my lap. After leaving BigTech in 2023, the company that acquired the startup I worked for (a PE backed acquire and enshittify company) offered me a job as the architect to consolidate their systems based on a referral. I booed out after having a lot of discussions with their internal management and one with a representative from their investor.

It’s hell being under the thumb of a PE companies management (not the internal management) they second guess everything and the level they were hiring me for, I would have dealt with the PE investors representatives directly

Re: Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

#634

Post by crazygringo » Mon, Dec 08, 2025, 3:32 PM UTC

sarchertech wrote: post #629

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 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…

Oh thanks, that's really interesting. It makes more sense if there's a physical box involved -- I don't remember ever getting physical boxes for preinstalled software, but it makes sense that way.

Re: Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

#635

Post by stonemetal12 » Mon, Dec 08, 2025, 3:33 PM UTC

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #501

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #323

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> 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…

So? At 10M revenue what are the chances they don't have an accountant who does their taxes and already has all the relevant info? Asking their accountant to crank out one extra form is not going to break the bank.

Re: Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

#636

Post by raw_anon_1111 » Mon, Dec 08, 2025, 3:33 PM UTC

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #517

margalabargala wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, that's the major difference between the public and PE companies that OP was highlighting. The owners of a public company can't raid it to fund other ventures. They have to sell it off to someone else to do that. Selling off a public company like that is generally not trivial and is not surprise sprung on shareholders.

> owners of a public company can't raid it to fund other ventures This is a constant source of litigation in public and private companies alike. A recent prominent case on the public side was National Amusements constantly fucking up the sale of Paramount if it didn't have special goodies for Shari Redstone. > Selling off a public company like that is generally not trivial and is not surprise sprung on shareholders M…

> This is a constant source of litigation in public and private companies alike. A recent prominent case on the public side was National Amusements constantly fucking up the sale of Paramount if it didn't have special goodies for Shari Redstone.

Instead they had to give “goodies” personally to Trump in the form of a $15 million bribe…

Re: Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

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Post by underlipton » Mon, Dec 08, 2025, 3:34 PM UTC

hedora wrote: post #455

underlipton wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's different in different states. In Maryland, once a complaint is filed with the relevant authority, the store has a certain number of days to correct pricing. Most retailers will give you the misprice if it's clearly their fault in not changing the tags, as a matter of policy. The confusion around this law is quite frustrating, though. Quite a few customers think they're entitled to not just prices on tags that h…

Is it a certain number of days to fix all the mispriced items? If not, there’s an obvious loophole here. Misprice intentionally, then stop purchasing the item from your distributor if you get called on it, rotating in some similar thing. Later, bring it back with a different sku, or mispriced at some other level. This would work well for dollar stores, which are optimized to spread in / sustain food/retail deserts. T…

This seems to be the handbook for price complaint inspections following a complaint to the relevant authority (in this case, the Maryland Office of the Attorney General).

https://mda.maryland.gov/Documents/HANDBOOK%20130%20Examinat...

Practically-speaking, stores have at least as long as it takes for an inspector to come out to the physical location. So, yes, it's a bit of a loophole, but I imagine that if you're mispricing as a matter of course and getting hit with complaints and constant inspections, you're probably going to eventually get fined (unless you're paying off inspectors). Store operations are usually designed to catch mistakes, as half the job is making sure items are stocked and labeled correctly. (I think most stores would prefer to transition to essentially local warehouses that delivered to customers from online orders, so that they wouldn't have to deal with any of this, but then they'd lose out on impulse purchases.)

Re: Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

#638

Post by spockz » Mon, Dec 08, 2025, 3:34 PM UTC

EGreg wrote: post #567

spockz wrote: post #560

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can still have shares and pay out dividend. Then when you want to sell your shares they are like a fixed price?

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…

Or perhaps we go one step further by making shareholders also owners. They get to take their part (as determined by the amount of shares they possess) of the profits and equally have to cough up their part of the losses.

This would return closer to the model where you invest into a business because you believe in it.

Re: Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

#639

Post by williamdclt » Mon, Dec 08, 2025, 3:37 PM UTC

mastax wrote: post #623

cbdevidal wrote: post #559

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well ackshually, Himalayan salt does come from a sea (although this sea has disappeared a long long time ago) so it's not _technically_ wrong

Re: Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

#640

Post by froglets » Mon, Dec 08, 2025, 3:40 PM UTC

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…

Dollar Tree regular items aren’t all $1.25 anymore. Maybe half of what I’ve purchased there recently (mostly craft/gift wrap/party supplies) have changed to $1.50 or $1.75. If you grab multiple of the same item each one can ring up a different price.