Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

Always has been.

It really wasn't this bad in the past on a whole. There were plenty of bad actors, but EVERY actor wasn't bad.

Just look at food recipes American corporations feed to Americans, and their different recipes for Europe that look more like the American recipes circa the 1990s. Everything in America is optimised to the max permissible bad action.

There is one overriding difference between US culture and European culture (and to a fading extent, British culture).

In the EU and UK, shame still motivates better behaviour.

Every single problem the USA has comes down to the fact that shame, in the USA, stopped functioning in the late 1970s.