Dollar-stores overcharge cash-strapped customers while promising low prices

Summary

On a cloudy winter day, a state government inspector named Ryan Coffield walked into a Family Dollar store in Windsor, North Carolina, carrying a scanner gun and a laptop.Inside the store, which sits along a three-lane road in a county of peanut growers and poultry workers, Coffield scanned 300 items and recorded their shelf prices. He carried the scanned bar codes to the cashier and watched as item after item rang up at a higher price.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.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. Some of the price tags were months out of date.The January 2023 inspection produced the store’s fourth consecutive failure, and Coffield’s agency, the state department of agriculture & consumer services, had fined Family Dollar after two previous visits. 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.Chris Outlaw shops at Family Dollar’s King Street location in Windsor, North Carolina, on 24 November. Photograph: Cornell Watson/The GuardianThe dollar-store industry, including Family Dollar and its larger rival, Dollar General, promises everyday low prices for household essentials. But an investigation by the Guardian found that the prices listed on the shelves at these two chains often don’t materialize at checkout – in North Carolina and around the country. As the cost of living soars across America, the customers bearing the burden are those who can least afford it – customers who often don’t even...