by Barry Yeoman and Jocelyn C Zuckerman
The Guardian
On a cloudy winter day, a state government inspector named Ryan Coffield walked into a Family Dollar store in Windsor, North Carolina, carrying a scanner gun and a laptop.
Inside the store, which sits along a three-lane road in a county of peanut growers and poultry workers, Coffield scanned 300 items and recorded their shelf prices. He carried the scanned bar codes to the cashier and watched as item after item rang up at a higher price.
Red Baron frozen pizzas, listed on the shelf at $5, rang up at $7.65. Bounty paper towels, shelf price $10.99, rang up at $15.50. Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes, Stouffer’s frozen meatloaf, Sprite and Pepsi, ibuprofen, Klondike Minis – shoppers were overpaying for all of them. Pedigree puppy food, listed at $12.25, rang up at $14.75.
All told, 69 of the 300 items came up higher at the register: a 23 percent error rate that exceeded the state’s limit by more than tenfold. Some of the price tags were months out of date.
The January 2023 inspection produced the store’s fourth consecutive failure, and Coffield’s agency, the state department of agriculture & consumer services, had fined Family Dollar after two previous visits. But North Carolina law caps penalties at $5,000 per inspection, offering retailers little incentive to fix the problem. “Sometimes it is cheaper to pay the fines,” said Chad Parker, who runs the agency’s weights-and-measures program.
The dollar-store industry, including Family Dollar and its larger rival, Dollar General, promises everyday low prices for household essentials. But an investigation by the Guardian found that the prices listed on the shelves at these two chains often don’t materialize at checkout – in North Carolina and around the country. As the cost of living soars across America, the customers bearing the burden are those who can least afford it – customers who often don’t even notice they’re overpaying.
These overcharges are widespread.
Dollar General stores have failed more than 4,300 government price-accuracy inspections in 23 states since January 2022, a Guardian review found. Family Dollar stores have failed more than 2,100 price inspections in 20 states over the same time span, the review found.
Among these thousands of failed inspections, some of the biggest flops include a 76 percent error rate in October 2022 at a Dollar General in Hamilton, Ohio; a 68 percent error rate in February 2023 at a Family Dollar in Bound Brook, New Jersey; and a 58 percent error rate three months ago at a Family Dollar in Lorain, Ohio.
Many of the stores that failed state or local government checks were repeat violators. A Family Dollar in Provo, Utah, flunked 28 inspections in a row – failures that included a 48 percent overcharge rate in May 2024 and a 12 percent overcharge rate in October 2025.
The chains’ pricing disparities are drawing increasing attention. In May, Arizona’s attorney general announced a $600,000 settlement to resolve a consumer-fraud investigation against Family Dollar. In October, Colorado’s attorney general settled with Dollar General for $400,000 after its stores failed 15 out of 23 state inspections. Dollar General has also settled with New Jersey, Vermont and Wisconsin, and both companies have settled with Ohio.
Linda Davis, a 64-year-old Family Dollar shopper in Dayton, Ohio, called the state attorney general’s office in February after walking home from the dollar store and discovering that 12 of her 23 purchases had rung up incorrectly. “I’m adding it up in my head as I’m shopping,” she told the Guardian. “But I was way off and I didn’t know why … I thought: where did I miscalculate? I’ve [only] got so much cash on me.”
Davis, who lives on social security, said she could shop elsewhere, but that would involve paying for a bus ride. “I don’t have money like that,” she said.
Both Family Dollar and Dollar General declined interview requests and did not answer detailed lists of questions from the Guardian. Instead, both sent the Guardian brief statements.
“At Family Dollar, we take customer trust seriously and are committed to ensuring pricing accuracy across our stores,” the company said. “We are currently reviewing the concerns raised and working to better understand any potential discrepancies. We continue to be focused on providing a consistent and transparent shopping experience.”
Dollar General said it was “committed to providing customers with accurate prices on items purchased in our stores, and we are disappointed any time we fail to deliver on this commitment”. In one court case in Ohio, Dollar General’s lawyers argued that “it is virtually impossible for a retailer to match shelf pricing and scanned pricing 100% of the time for all items. Perfection in this regard is neither plausible nor expected under the law.”
The Guardian’s examination of inspection failures by the two chains was based on record requests to 45 states and more than 140 counties and cities in New York, Ohio and California, along with court documents and public databases.
In nearly half of US states, information about whether customers are being overcharged was limited or unavailable. Many states do little or nothing to monitor retail stores’ pricing practices. Some, like Maryland, Idaho and Washington, do no random inspections, responding only to consumer complaints. Illinois, South Carolina and others don’t inspect at all. In 2020, auditors in Kansas revealed that these inspections were a low priority in many states. “Consumers can check price accuracy themselves,” they wrote.
Even in states with tougher enforcement, financial penalties don’t always solve the problem: in the 23 months after Dollar General agreed in November 2023 to pay Wisconsin $850,000, its stores failed 31 percent of their price inspections. During the same period, Wisconsin’s Family Dollar stores failed 30 percent of their state inspections.
According to industry watchers, employees and lawsuits, overcharges often stem from labor practices within the dollar-store sector. When a company changes prices, the registers are updated automatically. But the shelf prices are not: someone needs to remove the old labels manually and replace them with new ones. In an industry known for minimal staffing, workers don’t always have time to put up the new shelf tags.
In many instances, customers may not notice that they are being charged more than what’s listed on the shelf. If they notice at the register, they may decide to put those items back – or ask a store employee to honor the shelf price.
Dollar General, in its statement, said its store teams “are empowered to correct the matter on the spot”. But customers and current and former employees said that while some dollar stores will correct the price, others refuse to make fixes at the register – and turn away customers who return later and request a refund.
“Overcharging even by a small amount per item can strain a really tight budget,” said Elizabeth M Harris, acting director of the New Jersey division of consumer affairs. “If you’ve ever gone into any store … with a child like I have, there’s chaos at the checkout counter and you’re not really paying attention.” With items being rung up quickly, she added, “consumers are trusting that the retailer is actually charging them the price that’s displayed.”
Her state settled in 2023 with Dollar General for $1.2 million after finding more than 2,000 items rung up as overcharges across 58 stores.
Even if the overcharges paid by dollar-store customers are accidental, they still reflect the industry’s decision not to correct a problem it has known about for years, according to Kennedy Smith, a researcher at the non-profit Institute for Local Self-Reliance, which works to protect communities from negative impacts of big corporations.
“If they’re called on it, they’ll say, ‘Oh yeah, our mistake,’” Kennedy said. “Until they’re called on it, they’re happy to let those scanner errors bring in the millions.”
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