How Dollar General Is Secretly Robbing Its Customers

I've begun to really see Dollar General as like a criminal organization.

You are stealing from my community and I think they're very aware of it.

It's a classic bait and switch.

Go for a drive in any American county and you'll likely soon pass by the yellow and black lettering of a Dollar General. With nearly 20,000 Dollar General stores in 48 states, the Tennessee-based discount chain has sunk its teeth into lower-income rural and suburban areas everywhere. Underneath Dollar General's so-called low everyday prices

in convenient locations lies a sinister business model and a massive scandal that hardly anybody knows about.

My name is Lori Hartline. I am a Dollar General shopper out of convenience in my neighborhood. The price of my kitty litter was $8.95. Well, one day, wait a minute, $10? I asked them about it.

Oh no, they've raised the price. Well, that doesn't say it on the shelf. Well, they just have to change it. It's in the computer, it say it on the shelf. Well, they just have to change it. It's in the computer. It's not on the shelf. Next week, go in and buy cat litter.

Same thing. That is not what the price says on the shelf. What am I doing wrong here? I was watching the news one morning and heard about Dollar General in the state of Ohio was being sued for deceptive pricing. That is what happens to me.

Lori's story was brought to attorney Mark Dan, where it became the basis for one of three class action lawsuits in Oklahoma, New York and New Jersey.

I don't think there's any question that Dollar General is doing this intentionally and systematically. If you tell me one thing and then charge me something else in almost every jurisdiction in America, that would be theft by deception. So we have the poorest people in the country going to a store that's deceiving them about the price that they're charging for goods in a situation where they have very few other realistic choices. I think it's about as exploitive a business plan

as I've ever seen.

Price verification is when we see that a product is listed for $2.99, take it up to the register, scan it, make sure it's ringing up as $2.99. Unfortunately, in Dollar General's case, the scale or the concern was over 80 percent of the stores that we checked were're failing and we're failing repetitively. Dollar General has been fined over $20 million

by states and the federal government since 2017. But those fines, which pale in comparison to the amount Dollar General has siphoned from communities, have done little to change the company's behavior.

There are literally millions of transactions a day. And even if at 10% of the time, they're stealing 10 cents on 10 percent of the items that are sold, we're talking about hundreds of millions of dollars going into the pockets that are sold, we're talking about hundreds of millions of dollars going into the pockets of dollar general shareholders and out of the pockets of the poorest people in America.