Lori Hartline kept the receipts.
Several years ago, the 55-year-old, who lives in eastern Oklahoma, noticed that her trips to the Dollar General kept costing more than she had added up in her head. So she started photographing shelf tags and checking them against her receipts.
Over three months, she said, she was overcharged on nine of 27 items. Bud Light Cheladas marked $3 that rang up at $3.15. A loaf of Wonder bread marked $2.80 that rang up at $3.35. A container of cat litter marked $10.30 that rang up at $11.30.
When she pointed out the difference, she said, the clerk told her the store couldn't do anything because the prices came from headquarters. Once, they said the printer was out of ink so they couldn't update the shelf prices. She complained to Oklahoma's attorney general three times. Dollar General, she said, offered her a $10 gift card.
"We're in a rural part of Oklahoma that's impoverished and they are just taking advantage," said Hartline, who eventually sued the company in a class-action lawsuit that has since been settled.
Consumer concern about overcharging, intensified by years of inflation, has come for none other than the very retailer that caters to low-income shoppers in 5-cent increments.
After years of complaints from consumers and state lawsuits, the discounter's pricing is now drawing scrutiny from federal regulators. This week, the Federal Trade Commission, joined by 20 states, alleged the company routinely charges customers more at the register than the prices displayed on shelves and in advertisements.
Between January 2023 and March of this year, Dollar General received over 29,000 customer complaints categorized internally as "did not honor marked price" in all 48 states it operates in, according to the lawsuit.
Dollar General said it follows pricing practices similar to other retailers, but "despite our policies and procedures, occasional price discrepancies can occur." The company is vigorously defending against the litigation, it said, while saying it remains willing to negotiate.
Its predicament shows how the price weariness that has afflicted shoppers after years of rising prices -- and made affordability a political buzzword in the midterm elections -- has moved beyond a business challenge and become a legal matter for companies, even for discounters that charge relatively low prices.
Over the past six years, overall prices as measured by the consumer-price index have risen more than 29%.
Today, consumers and regulators are on high alert for potentially unfair pricing. McDonald's, Walmart and other companies have faced what the companies say are unfounded claims they are using artificial intelligence to maximize how much they can charge customers. Several states have fined Walmart and Family Dollar, another discount chain, in recent years for overcharging related to paper tag information.
This week, the FTC also ordered nine companies, including airlines, ride-share companies and retailers such as Target and Walmart, to provide more information regarding how they use consumer data to raise prices.
At the center of much scrutiny is the price tag. Stores have long struggled to keep paper tags updated so the prices displayed on shelves match the one charged at a register.
With inflation, the challenge has deepened because prices are changing more frequently than they used to, said Bryan Eshelman, Americas leader for retail at consulting firm AlixPartners. Keeping up is especially hard for dollar chains, Eshelman said, because they keep staffing to as few as one or two workers a shift given their low margins and they tend to change their selection of goods frequently.
"The notion of going around and reticking when prices change is just very difficult operationally for them," he said.
Dollar General has entered into seven settlements with six state attorneys general and consumer protection agencies over inaccurate prices since 2018. Consumers have also filed a string of civil lawsuits. In its lawsuit filed in a federal court in Tennessee, the FTC joined states including Alabama, Arizona and New Jersey to allege "pervasive and systemic pricing inaccuracies, rather than isolated or accidental errors."
The price discrepancies between shelf labels and registers described in overcharging lawsuits are small, often a few dollars on a basket of goods. Yet for Dollar General shoppers, $5 or $10 more per shopping trip total can feel massive, according to current and former workers.
Customers tend to be low or middle income, and are often on fixed budgets. Dollar General's more than 21,000 U.S. stores, often small locations in rural communities, can be one of few sources of groceries and household staples for miles. To limit spending on gas, many customers bike or walk to a Dollar General store rather than driving to a more distant competitor, Chief Executive Todd Vasos told investors recently.
The retailer marks many prices in 5-cent increments to make it easier for shoppers to estimate the total price of their purchases and avoid the embarrassment of walking away during checkout if the bill turns out to be more than expected, Vasos said in a 2017 interview.
Nekodah Whipkey, who worked this summer at a Dollar General in South Bend, Ind., said customers abandoned carts full of perishables, cursed at her or issued threats when the price she rang up at the register was more than an item's price tag.
Part of the problem, Whipkey said, was understaffing. At times, she said, she was the only worker in the store, juggling the register, stocking shelves and helping customers, as well as counting inventory and checking cooler temperatures.
"I can't tell you how many times I have had customers come up to the register and ring up things that would not match," said Whipkey, 31.
Whipkey said store management told workers to stick to the price on the register, though the manager sometimes reduced the charges. Dollar General's longstanding policy is that store managers can and should match lower shelf tag prices when a discrepancy is found, a company spokeswoman said.
Older pricing technology and limited store staffing have made it difficult for Dollar General stores to keep the price tags on shelves current, according to internal documents made public in past lawsuits and current and former store workers.
"Gaps in tech capabilities," have led to inaccurate prices, McKinsey said in a 2023 presentation to the company that was made public as part of a previous lawsuit. The consulting firm told Dollar General that fixing the pricing technology issues would reduce demands on store labor and help the retailer learn more from pricing trends.
Dollar General said it has taken several actions to make sure prices are accurate, including limiting the volume of weekly price changes sent to stores and giving workers shifts before stores open to update prices.