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.

The big difference is the extent to which PE will go to juice the quarters earnings. Public companies cannot and will not just fire all staff, fleece customers to the point they won’t return and take on debt that they have no intention of paying back. PE will do all of the above and more if it means they get their money. Which means, you as a customer get screwed over more when PE is involved.

>Public companies cannot and will not just fire all staff, fleece customers to the point they won’t return and take on debt that they have no intention of paying back.

Why? Is there some code of conduct for public companies but not private ones?

> Is there some code of conduct for public companies but not private ones?

No but there’s a difference between private companies and PE owned companies. PE model is very different from regular private companies, and it often involves extracting maximum profits at the expense of the company itself.

And as far as public companies go, shareholders will have to say something about the operation of the company if you start intentionally sinking it.

But doesn't extracting maximum profits at the expense of the company itself mean front loading profits - i.e. long-term worse outcomes?

How does a PE company make money from that - unless who they sell it to is not saavu enough to realize it?