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