Your “tricks and traps” economy
Hang in with me for the next two paragraphs.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren has long complained that corporations bilk consumers. Hidden bank and credit card fees, terms of service agreements pages long, class action waivers, binding mandatory arbitration, noncompete clauses, etc. Consumers daily step on economic land mines buried in legalese that only corporate lawyers might understand. Tricks and traps, Warren calls them. She proposed, lobbied for, and won establishment of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in 2011 to defend consumers. Business hated it. Through last December the CFPB had returned over $21 billion to consumers in “monetary compensation, principal reductions, canceled debts, and other consumer relief.”
Then in 2025 came Trump 2.0, Elon Musk, DOGE, and Trump’s acting director Russell Vought to neuter the CFPB. Their actions, Helaine Olen wrote, constitute “an overt power grab by Big Tech — and their gain could result in the rest of us losing much more than almost anyone realizes.”
All that is prelude to this report in The Guardian:
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 Some of the price tags were months out of date.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.
It’s not just Family Dollar stores. The Guardian reviewed records from Family Dollar and Dollar General stores in “45 states and more than 140 counties.”
The 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 notice they’re overpaying.
These overcharges are widespread.
Dollar General stores have failed more than 4,300 government price-accuracy inspections in 23 states since January 2022, a Guardian review found. Family Dollar stores have failed more than 2,100 price inspections in 20 states over the same time span, the review found.
In Arizona, in New Jersey, Vermont, Wisconsin, and Ohio, state attorneys general have reached consumer fraud settlements with the two companies. Both declined to answer the Guardian’s questions about their practices. Dollar General has a history of chronic understaffing resulting in clutter and unsafe working conditions. It’s little wonder why their price tags are months out of fate.
The New York Times (March 28, 2023): Dollar General Is Deemed a ‘Severe Violator’ by the Labor Dept.
NPR (July 16, 2024): Dollar General will pay $12 million in fines over workplace safety violations
The stores are regulated by state-level agencies, as the reporting above notes. But there is a wider consumer impact.
Dean Baker comments at The Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) in a post titled “Dollar Stores: Where Trumpian Sleaze Meets Affordability“:
This piece is striking for three reasons. First, insofar as this sort of cheating is common, it indicates that inflation could be greater than is generally recognized. Second, it brings home the problem of “affordability” in a way that many of us probably did not anticipate. If someone thought they were buying $80 of groceries, only to have the cash register ring up $100, it is understandable they would be upset. Finally, it shows how the Trump-Musk habit of laughing at consumer fraud has very real pocketbook effects.
If the practices are widespread enough beyond the dollar stores it could mean that inflation measured in the monthly Consumer Price Index (CPI) is understated. “It would take some footwork to answer this question,” Baker writes, “but my guess is that if companies know they can get away with cheating their customers, they probably do.”
Baker continues, and here we get back to the CFPB:
Trump has made a point of laughing at efforts to rein in corporate abuses of all forms. He has gutted the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Labor Relations Board, and many other agencies created to protect consumers, workers, and the environment. His sidekick, Elon Musk, thought it was hilarious that he was “deleting” the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the agency set up to prevent banks, credits card companies, and other financial institutions from ripping off their customers.
The mispricing of items at the checkout counter by major retailers would seem to be exactly the sort of reason for which God created government. (Lawsuits should work also, except the piece indicates that the Dollar chains largely preempt class-action suits by requiring arbitration. Good luck getting a lawyer to sue for being overcharged $20.) Anyhow, Trump’s laugh-at-corporate-crime approach is directly pulling money out of people’s pocketbooks in this Dollar chain story.
What Trump apparently thinks is all good fun, is companies making people pay more for the necessities of life. Yesterday, Trump told people that affordability is a “con job.” That could be right, although probably not quite in the way that Trump intended.
And these stores cater to (or take advantage of, pick one) low-income urban and rural communities lacking larger chain food stores (food deserts).
The Guardian again:
“My 87-year-old mother and I have frequented Dollar General for years, and there have been innumerable times we have made purchases that were well higher than advertised,” wrote Robert Hevlin of Dayton. “My mother and I have literally lost thousands over the years with this company, but both of us being on social security, we have little choice in where we shop.”
Yes, the Windsor, N.C. inspection dates from two years prior to Trump 2.0 taking office, but the report points up the chronic nature of corporate rip-offs Warren’s agency is meant to curb. Instead, Trump 2.0 is curbing the CFPB. And the grift goes on.
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