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?

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

If it's not publicly traded, it's super secure from any public accountability.

And while I'm increasingly hostile toward the shareholder model, we do get one transparency breadcrumb from this (gov managed) contrivance: The Earnings Call

Earnings Calls give us worthwhile amounts of internal information that we'd never get otherwise - info that often conflicts with public statements and reports to govs.

Like CapEx expenditures/forecast and the actual reasons that certain segments over/underperform. It's a solid way to catch corporations issuing bald-faced lies (for any press, public, gov that are paying attention).

    AT&T PR: Net Neutrality is tanking our infra investment
    ATT's EC: CapEx is high and that will continue

I'll bet 1 share that there are moves to get this admin to do away with the requirement.

>If it's not publicly traded, it's super secure from any public accountability.

Under the existing legal and regulatory model, yes.

But what abusing that model long-term will eventually result in government-level change that effectively bans the existence of such exploits, wide-spread vigilantism, and/or some sort of collapse.

> what abusing that model long-term will eventually result in government-level change that effectively bans the existence of such exploits, wide-spread vigilantism, and/or some sort of collapse

The endpoint of vigilantism and collapse is more economic opacity. Not less.

My personal view is companies with more than any of 1,000 employees, $10mm revenue or a $100mm valuation should have to file a simple annual disclosure showing the cap table ad balance sheet, a simple P/L, list of >5% beneficial owners and their auditor. But the path to that is through legislation in a complex, stable society.

Those are single-member LLC revenue numbers. You can get $10M in revenue just by being in a low-margin business. For industries with a 1% margin that's $100k a year in net income, i.e. wages and benefits for one person.

And how are you going to calculate valuation for a closely held private company? In particular, how are you going to calculate it without making them do the thing you don't know if they're required to do without having the calculation already?

> Those are single-member LLC revenue numbers. You can get $10M in revenue just by being in a low-margin business. For industries with a 1% margin that's $100k a year in net income, i.e. wages and benefits for one person.

I'm not sure I understand your argument? Wages come out of revenue not income? So the $100k would go to the owners, but as captical gains not wages.

It's a single-member LLC. The person doing the labor and the person who owns the company are the same person and whether they pay themselves the money as wages or dividends is not really the issue.

A thousand employees is a business on the scale of a mid-sized bank or companies like VeriSign or LendingTree or Iridium Communications. Companies with something like a billion dollars in revenue. $10M in revenue is a small business.