Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

by bookofjoe on 12/7/2025, 2:37:21 PM

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/03/customers-pay-more-rising-dollar-store-costs

Comments

by: jefftk

> 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.<a href="https://www.mass.gov/info-details/consumer-pricing-accuracy-information" rel="nofollow">https://www.mass.gov/info-details/consumer-pricing-accuracy-...</a>

12/8/2025, 1:04:10 AM

by: regera

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.<a href="https://corporate.dollartree.com/news-media/press-releases/detail/288/dollar-tree-completes-sale-of-family-dollar-business-to" rel="nofollow">https://corporate.dollartree.com/news-media/press-releases/d...</a>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 thin-staff, high-volume model. That 23% increase is not a glitch. They know their customers can’t drive across town to complain. They know the regulators won’t scale fines to revenue.

12/7/2025, 9:07:31 PM

by: securingsincity

Massachusetts has a quite prominent law against this."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.If the lowest price you saw for an item is $10 or less, and that lowest price is not what you were charged or not what appeared on the in-aisle price scanner, the first item should be FREE. If the lowest price you saw for an item is more than $10, and that lowest price is not what you were charged or not what appeared on the in-aisle price scanner, you should receive $10.00 off the first item."<a href="https://www.mass.gov/info-details/consumer-pricing-accuracy-information" rel="nofollow">https://www.mass.gov/info-details/consumer-pricing-accuracy-...</a>Not to say it's not happening in a Mass based Dollar Stores but you could be walking away with a lot of free stuff and it would be enough of a deterrent to stomp out the practice. I've had it happen at grocery stores usually at their suggesting.

12/7/2025, 8:37:58 PM

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%).<a href="https://cdn.ncwm.com/userfiles/files/Resources/Price%20Verification%20Survey/National%20Price%20Verification%20Report-Final.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://cdn.ncwm.com/userfiles/files/Resources/Price%20Verif...</a>

12/8/2025, 1:02:11 PM

by: cs702

> 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. Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes, Stouffer’s frozen meatloaf, Sprite and Pepsi, ibuprofen, Klondike Minis – shoppers were overpaying for all of them. Pedigree puppy food, listed at $12.25, rang up at $14.75.Surely, now that this made the news, there will be an investigation into the fraudulent behavior of Dollar General and Family Dollar.Left unsaid is that both Dollar General and Family Dollar would become unprofitable if they stop tricking customers. (Both companies typically earn only 3-4% on sales.)

12/7/2025, 11:15:08 PM

by: stevenjgarner

It is important to understand that Dollar General and Family Dollar serve thousands of flyover communities where there are no Walmart stores or other viable market access. Dollar General has stated that it can generate profits in communities with fewer than 1,000 homes. Walmart generally requires a much larger population base for its stores.Dollar General is the largest retailer in the US by number of locations, with over 20,000 stores across 48 states. Family Dollar operates over 8,200 stores. Walmart's U.S. store count is significantly smaller (around 4,700 U.S. Walmart stores and 600 Sam's Clubs as of 2024).Dollar stores are frequently found at the heart of "food deserts," which are often rural communities located more than 10 miles from a grocery store selling fresh produce—a gap often created when a community is too small to maintain a supermarket or attract a retailer like Walmart.

12/8/2025, 12:45:04 AM

by: BrenBarn

> But North Carolina law caps penalties at $5,000 per inspection, offering retailers little incentive to fix the problemThis 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 Tree keeps doing this, the fines should eventually reach into the hundreds of millions of dollars, even the billions. Such penalties should also apply to company executives and board members who are responsible for the company's overall conduct.

12/7/2025, 11:51:56 PM

by: veunes

The saddest part is the feedback loop

12/8/2025, 1:28:59 PM

by: JSR_FDED

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.

12/7/2025, 3:10:25 PM

by: itchingsphynx

In Australia, according to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission:- Businesses must communicate clear and accurate prices prior to consumers booking, ordering or purchasing. They must not mislead consumers about their prices.- There are specific laws about how businesses must display their prices.- Businesses must display a total price that includes taxes, duties and all unavoidable or pre-selected extra fees.- If a business charges a surcharge for card payments, weekends or public holidays, it must follow the rules about displaying the surcharge.- If more than one price is displayed for an item, the business must charge the lowest price, or stop selling the item until the price is corrected.In practice, if the checkout price is more than listed price, many retailers give the item for free. It doesn’t stop dodgy constantly fluctuating ‘on sale’ pricing…<a href="https://www.accc.gov.au/business/pricing/price-displays" rel="nofollow">https://www.accc.gov.au/business/pricing/price-displays</a>

12/7/2025, 10:49:41 PM

by: soanvig

> 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

12/8/2025, 8:42:11 AM

by: hamdingers

Even if they accurately charged shelf prices, these places are still a ripoff targeting the vulnerable. The list price is low but the per-unit price is astronomical compared to grocery store prices.

12/7/2025, 3:40:03 PM

by: josh_p

When I worked grocery retail when I was a teen 20ish years ago, any time a customer disputed the price of something during checkout, we’d have someone check the shelf and find the display tag. If the price was lower as the customer suggested, we’d always give them the item at the price listed on the display tag. An employee usually just missed that tag during price change day.It’s so foreign to me that any retail place would defer to “the computer” if display price and database price were out of sync.Even young-me understood the idea of “oh yeah, our bad, have it at the lower price” and the potential for legal action if we did otherwise.

12/8/2025, 12:53:51 AM

by: kaluga

What this investigation really shows isn’t “bad dollar stores” — it’s a perfect case study in how misaligned incentives scale.If updating shelf prices costs labor, but failing inspections costs almost nothing, then the rational outcome is widespread overcharging. And when the customer base has low mobility, limited alternatives, and little time to notice each discrepancy, the effective penalty for inaccuracy approaches zero.This isn’t a glitch in the system — it’s the system working exactly as designed. Any market where the poorest customers face the highest frictions will inevitably become a profit center based on those frictions.The surprising thing isn’t that this happens. The surprising thing is that we still pretend it’s accidental.

12/8/2025, 12:16:30 PM

by: tdeck

If you live in Seattle and you find items are rung up for the wrong price, I highly recommend reporting it to the city. I did this once and was shocked that they promptly sent someone out to check the store and issue a citation. The inspector who emailed me was very polite and professional as well. It's rare to have something like this taken seriously and to have the enforcement properly funded.Unfortunately I don't remember which form I filled out but I believe it was this one<a href="https://www.seattle.gov/your-rights-as-a-customer/file-a-complaint/general-business-complaints" rel="nofollow">https://www.seattle.gov/your-rights-as-a-customer/file-a-com...</a>

12/8/2025, 2:54:36 AM

by: epsteingpt

While most comments will be negative toward Dollar General, in many areas Dollar General or Family Dollar or Dollar Tree are the only places you can get access and distribution to a wide range of products and brands in areas which are otherwise underserved.You can dislike it, but they've evolved and expanded in part because they are very good at serving these areas profitably, where other businesses aren't.People wanting bank branches and grocery stores and brunch spots here clearly have never lived or worked in many of these areas. The reality of theft, low spend, and employees - though not universal - is hard to fathom if you're not trying to 'run' the business. Good will does not pay your suppliers or rent.

12/8/2025, 1:34:01 AM

by: parpfish

an interesting contrast that i think about a lot:- in rural america, there are dollar stores everywhere that overcharge for small items. people treat them as a necessary evil and begrudgingly shop there.- in nyc, there are corner bodegas everywhere that overcharge for small items. they are generally seen as beloved neighborhood institutions.so... what's the difference? corporate owned vs family owned? length of time in community? presence of cute cat at the register?

12/7/2025, 4:30:38 PM

by: LanceH

Lots and lots of articles written about 23% of 300 items -- at one store? Every store?What's the actual extent of the problem?There have been way too many articles and videos at this point to keep pointing at the same small data set.I've personally never experienced an overcharge, and at 1 in 5, it should have happened by now.Is this a one store thing, or a regional thing, or should I just put those thoughts on hold and rage blindly?

12/8/2025, 12:40:31 AM

by: agumonkey

It seems that we're in a phase where most parts of society is distorting reality to extract value from others. I don't know if it's a usual step in human groups cycles but it's worrisome.

12/8/2025, 9:45:47 AM

by: mr_windfrog

If the goal is to fix the behavior instead of just documenting it, the penalties need to escalate with repeat violations. The first mismatch can be treated as an honest mistake. But when the third or fourth inspection still shows the same pattern, the fine shouldn't be the same $5k: it should jump sharply. At some point the cost of ignoring the problem has to exceed the profit from letting it continue.Right now the incentive structure is backwards. As long as the downside is fixed and small, large retailers will keep treating it as business-as-usual. A tiered system tied to repeated violations would at least push them toward actually fixing the issue, instead of just shrugging it off every time they get caught.

12/8/2025, 2:09:50 AM

by: _fat_santa

I experienced this first hand maybe a year ago when I randomly walked into a dollar general to get something, their prices often times are pretty close to the "regular" versions of the product, but packaged specifically for dollar stores.I get why people shop at them in rural places because that's the only shop within 10-20 miles but in cities it makes no sense. Had prices been 20-30% cheaper but in a smaller size it would still be a ripoff but an understandable one, but often times I saw products that were priced just 3-5% below their standard counterparts while giving you maybe 30%-50% of the product.

12/7/2025, 4:17:13 PM

by: ChuckMcM

From the article -- But North Carolina law caps penalties at $5,000 per inspection, offering retailers little incentive to fix the problem. “Sometimes it is cheaper to pay the fines,” said Chad Parker, who runs the agency’s weights-and-measures program.This is what I think of as the 'give us a story to tell the people because we're okay with business doing this' rule. Too often the local (or state, or even federal) government is aware of bad actors but fails to act in a way that would actually cure the problem. It is a remarkably persistent form of corruption in many liberal democracies (not just the USA).

12/8/2025, 7:15:22 AM

by: seizethecheese

This comment section is full of allegations that dollar stores are predatory, yet when I look up their operating margins they are super low (4% for Dollar General, for example).

12/7/2025, 9:42:18 PM

by: cm2012

Dollar stores have on average a 2% profit margin, just like grocery stores. They are not the villains here.

12/7/2025, 10:17:59 PM

by: eudamoniac

As someone who typically only enters a Whole Foods or a Home Depot for her retail experiences, the one time I entered a Dollar General, I was struck by how depressing it felt. I would never go back into one. Yes, I know how out of touch this sounds.

12/7/2025, 4:49:16 PM

by: fencepost

I believe Michigan has laws on the books that should be the model for this (the "Scanner law") - if you're overcharged at the register and the sale is completed, you have 30 days to get the price corrected plus ten times the amount of overcharge (between $1 and $5). Paying you the 'bonus' is optional, but if they don't do so you can file a suit for the greater of your actual damages or $250 (in small claims on your own or regular court which allows up to $300 in attorney fees).An alternative would be to force stores with mischarge rates exceeding a specified level to close until they've completed a full audit of all shelf prices in the store but in some areas that could cause significant local hardship.

12/7/2025, 10:41:52 PM

by: cluckindan

”Dollar General argued that when customers create accounts – for example, by downloading the company’s mobile app – they agree to use arbitration to resolve disputes and forfeit the right to file class-action suits. The judge agreed.”Let me guess, the mobile app provides discounts…?

12/7/2025, 10:48:21 PM

by: iinnPP

This happens at Walmart Canada all the time. The policy there is to slash 10$ off shelf price (or free for anything 10 or less).Since COVID, Walmart has stopped having immediate fixes of the problem.Since 2020, I have accumulated about $1200 in free merchandise using the above. Almost always food.

12/7/2025, 3:26:35 PM

by: jimnotgym

Time for direct action. Record the prices of a trolley full of goods. When a price rings up incorrectly, state loudly that you are not agreeing to that higher price scam and walk out, abandoning your goods at the checkout.It would be best if a dozen of you went together and so closing all the checkout lanes.Call a local journalist to come with you.

12/8/2025, 8:31:07 AM

by: nasmorn

In Austria the retailer simply has to honor their lowest labeled price. Only clear and obvious errors like if the price would be just cents instead of euros are exempt

12/8/2025, 9:39:08 AM

by: DangitBobby

Have the fines pay out to customers that report and suddenly the issue is gone.

12/7/2025, 10:06:44 PM

by: brettermeier

I never heard of something like this happening in Europe. Do we simply have better control and regulations?

12/8/2025, 9:52:16 AM

by: daft_pink

It seems fairly obvious that a small store cannot really compete with massive giants like Walmart that invested in electronic interchange formats, logistics and negotiate huge volumes with customers to get to the absolute lowest price.You can't go to some small store and see them consistently deliver better prices.

12/8/2025, 5:02:03 AM

by: fat_cantor

I noticed my local wal mart doing this, not on every product, but more than one. I had hoped it was an honest mistake until it happened on my next visit. I told an associate about it, left my groceries, and I haven't been back. It's wild to think that a few decades ago they accepted returns of any product based on trust, no questions asked, regardless of whether you had a receipt.

12/8/2025, 2:24:06 AM

by: nlh

“In one court case in Ohio, 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.””Sorry—-what? Isn’t that one of the fundamental basic jobs to be done and expectations of a retailer? You put physical things on display for sale, you mark prices on them, and you sell them. When the prices change, you send one of your employees to the appropriate shelves and you change the tag.When on earth did we get into a world where that absolutely fundamental most basic task is now too burdensome to do with accuracy?

12/7/2025, 3:16:00 PM

by: 1123581321

This is poor behavior by the stores. The solution will be conversion to eink shelf labels that sync like registers do. Realistically, the fines will not be increased to the point where increasing store staffing and training is cheaper. I don’t know where Dollar General is in this process, but many other c-stores and grocery stores have implemented digital labels. Digital labels come with the temptation to experiment with more dynamic pricing which would also make it harder to shop on a budget. However, high staffing or fines also increases prices. I wish we had better retail in more of the United States, especially needier areas.

12/7/2025, 3:17:12 PM

by: ccamrobertson

One simple solution here (and for all sorts of legislated fines and thresholds) would be to tie them to inflation; it looks like the fine of $5,000 dates to the early 90s.

12/7/2025, 4:45:45 PM

by: cocainemonster

> that would involve paying for a bus ride. “I don’t have money like that,”inconvenience aside, are buses so expensive that you wouldn't save any money by going to a different store?

12/8/2025, 1:32:30 AM

by: jhawk28

They are attributing malice/greed to what is more likely just incompetence compounded by inflation. The employees most likely haven't updated the pricing on the shelves. If you have ever been in a DG or DT, you can see that the inventory is generally a mess and just put everywhere. There is one or two people up at the front. They don't have as many people stocking shelves as a grocery store to keep the inventory in order.

12/8/2025, 2:06:53 AM

by: paulcole

> North Carolina law caps penalties at $5,000 per inspection, offering retailers little incentive to fix the problem. “Sometimes it is cheaper to pay the fines,” said Chad Parker, who runs the agency’s weights-and-measures program.Well, there’s your problem.

12/7/2025, 3:41:22 PM

by: websiteapi

in 2025 I'm surprised you can't just scan everything on your phone yourself and get the up-to-date price. are there laws stating things must be a posted price? seems easier for everyone to have something you can scan that show you the latest price, or auto updating tags.

12/8/2025, 2:02:37 AM

by: EGreg

Both Family Dollar and Dollar General declined interview requests and did not answer detailed lists of questions from the Guardian. Instead, both sent the Guardian brief statements.“At Family Dollar, we take customer trust seriously and are committed to ensuring pricing accuracy across our stores,” the company said. “We are currently reviewing the concerns raised and working to better understand any potential discrepancies. We continue to be focused on providing a consistent and transparent shopping experience.”Dollar General said it was “committed to providing customers with accurate prices on items purchased in our stores, and we are disappointed any time we fail to deliver on this commitment”. In one court case in Ohio, 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.”They make it sound like isolated incidents. Someone should keep following up on statements like that until they are fixed, or refer them to a DA. No?Furthermore, what about "false advertising" laws?

12/8/2025, 8:39:00 AM

by:

12/7/2025, 8:59:43 PM

by: panny

Do any of you actually shop at Family Dollar? I do. They're cheaper on a lot of stuff. A box of Cinnamon Toast Crunch is $2 less than the same box at the grocery store in town. I bought a pair of shoes there for $4. They weren't stylish, but lasted longer than the last pair of Nikes I purchased.Yeah, sometimes the sale price posted on the shelf is no longer applicable. Either the employees don't feel like they are paid enough to be vigilant or maybe they're too overworked to keep up. Whatever the case, you just learn to keep an eye on the checkout, or alternately ask for a price check on it before the cashier starts ringing merch. The second approach is more polite and the cashiers appreciate that.The same thing commonly happens at the grocery store, and other stores I shop at too. It's not unique to Family Dollar or Dollar General. But I will note, at the Family Dollar, the cashiers will often say "This is on sale now, but it's not posted yet. That whole shelf is discount." And they will give me a better price than what I was expecting to pay. They have to manually adjust the price to give that discount to me a lot of times. Grocery cashiers just scan as quickly as they can and don't check.So while all the yuppies who never step into dollar stores are acting hyperoffended about this story, I think the story is unfairly targeting the dollar stores. Apparently saving money gives some people here the "ick" but the employees there are only human. A lot of times, lower paid humans. Cut 'em some slack.

12/8/2025, 12:56:11 AM

by: firefax

I had a clerk flip out on me a while back at a Dollar Tree because I wanted a charge for a dollar -- it rang up as 1.25. They rolled their eyes and told me not everything is a dollar, and I maintained that absent pricing stickers indicating otherwise, the default is a dollar. When I pointed out another way to look at it is it's a twenty five percent price discrepancy, someone came out of an office and literally screamed at me and chased me out of the store for "causing a problem", telling me that if I'm going to cause problems, so will she.I wasn't cursing or yelling, just calmly making the points I made above as the employees took a dive bar approach to customer service...It doesn't surprise me at all that this kind of thing is intentional -- they're banking on you not walking out without the item having carried it to the checkout.

12/7/2025, 3:38:21 PM

by: analog8374

Happened to me yesterday. Haagendaz ice cream. $4 on the shelf, $5 at the register.

12/7/2025, 3:33:57 PM

by: Jackson__

This once again shows that idiocracy was an overly optimistic movie.

12/8/2025, 7:40:50 AM

by: paultopia

At a certain point we have to acknowledge that a huge share of our economy is just raw predation.

12/7/2025, 3:42:57 PM

by: jmclnx

I wish I could be surprised and I can see this happening in many places. This type of 'fraud' was predicted when we allowed the stores to stop marking items with the price.Many places were I shop, hardly any products are lined up with the price attached to the shelves, plus the descriptions of some items are confusing due to the multiple names for the same thing.Time to force stores to mark each item with the price once again.

12/7/2025, 8:33:21 PM

by: absoluteunit1

Dollarama Inc. stock price is up 273% in the last 5 years.

12/7/2025, 8:12:41 PM

by: burnt-resistor

Dollar stores are the new neighborhood "outlet stores" compared to outlet stores of yesteryear (remote locations for not much/any savings). They're actually glorified convenience stores while also not being proper substitutes for grocery stores in food deserts. Most US grocery stores are also now rip-offs like convenience stores were, while big box stores are somewhat savings stores now... f'kin' turbo inflation.I don't know about the feasibility of government grocery stores, but I'm pretty sure the entire food supply chain would benefit from massively changing to the employee-/customer-/supplier-owned co-op model and get megacorps and private equity out of the normalized deviancy of predatory money extraction for essential goods and services.

12/7/2025, 5:12:57 PM

by: danaris

"The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. ... A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. ... But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.""This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socio-economic unfairness."- Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms——Dollar stores, even when they're actually giving you low prices (and not just charging $1 for 1 of something that you could get a 3-pack of for $2 elsewhere), are often selling lower-quality versions of the products they sell—sometimes versions specifically made for them, but without any visible difference in packaging.

12/7/2025, 5:25:36 PM

by: exasperaited

Cash strapped, but also presumably more likely than the general population to be innumerate or have dyscalculia or dyslexia.It's the same bullshit that allows discount prices on Black Friday or during January sales to be completely misleading.In the UK we are much tougher on this kind of manipulative pricing, but you still find manipulative things, like being unable to find the price-per-100g on discounted items and "clubcard" items, or bulk buys that end up having higher unit costs and yet seem not to be errors.

12/7/2025, 8:35:34 PM

by:

12/8/2025, 3:36:13 AM

by: modzu

what's the point of this hit piece? isnt that frying pan with a sticker price of $10 and rung up at $12 still $50 anywhere else?

12/7/2025, 3:32:25 PM

by: potato3732842

Listen, I know we all love to circle jerk about how dollar stores are evil, but you can walk into just about any regional chain supermarket and replicate the same exercise and get about the same results.

12/7/2025, 8:12:50 PM

by: tgsovlerkhgsel

> listed on the shelf at $5, rang up at $7.65. Bounty paper towels, shelf price $10.99, rang up at $15.50I'm sure the US obsession with not putting the actual price (tax included) on the shelf helps a lot with this. I would notice quite quickly if a store would systematically overcharge me in Europe. It'd be much harder in the US where I expect the price on the shelf to not match the price at checkout.

12/7/2025, 9:55:31 PM

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