How the dollar-store industry overcharges cash-strapped customers while promising low prices

I'm not a fan of those dynamic e-ink shelf signs for pricing, but this seems like the perfect use of them.

Assuming, of course, that these companies aren't engaging in intentional fraud.

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% error rate that exceeded the state’s limit by more than tenfold. Some of the price tags were months out of date.