Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

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.

https://corporate.dollartree.com/news-media/press-releases/d...

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.

Has private equity ever done anything good for anyone outside of the investors?

I'm not sure why private equity is singled out here, when every time a public company does a bad (eg. Boeing), people crow about how public companies only care about juicing next quarter's earnings.

Private equity is far worse. It means 100% ownership by a group of sociopaths who are executing on a plan to extract as much cash as possible quickly with no other goals at all.

At least public companies have some diversity in ownership and agenda.

>Private equity is far worse. It’s mean 100% ownership by a group of sociopaths who are executing on a plan to extract as much cash as possible quickly with no other goals at all.

...as opposed to the average public company? An average company might have more "average joe" shareholders (almost by definition, because private equity is typically off limits to non-accredited investors), but outside of meme stocks, there's not enough of them to make a difference. The rest of the shareholders (eg. pension funds, insurance companies, endowments, family offices) can be assumed to behave like ruthless capitalists chasing the highest returns, regardless of whether the company is public or not.

Let me explain this with a simple example:

* If a company controlled by PE goes bankrupt, shareholders (PE) likely make a profit * But if a publicly listed company goes bankrupt, shareholders lose their money

In other words, PEs almost never lose money, so they could extract the last bit of a company, even more short sighted than shareholders of a public company

>* If a company controlled by PE goes bankrupt, shareholders (PE) likely make a profit

That's not necessarily a bad thing, or sign of anything sinister. If a business is failing, and you buy it for pennies on the dollar, and despite your best efforts it still goes under, so you liquidate it, you can still turn a profit if the price you paid is lower than what you got from liquidating it. That's not bad, because private equity (or anyone else, for that matter) isn't expected to operate as a charity. The only reason they're willing to stump up the cash to buy the business in the first place is the expectation that they'll make money. It's also not bad for the original owners either, because the fact that they hold to PE rather than someone else, or liquidating it, suggests that the PE offered a better deal than either.

>But if a publicly listed company goes bankrupt, shareholders lose their money

Often times yes, but sometimes not, eg. hertz.