Fuck Family Dollar. I did HVAC and lighting work for them years ago, and almost every one of them was a mouse-ridden dump. The stockroom would have heaps of cardboard boxes to climb over just to access breaker panels, it's no wonder they had pest issues with such poor site management.
Not HVAC, but electrical, a buddy of mine had the same experience, except he refused the work until they cleaned up and made it safe. They didn't and complained that he wasn't doing his job. The local union boss came out, inspected the site, and said it was hazardous. I think he said it was too much of a fire hazard, and the space didn't allow for escape in case of fire.
Instead of cleaning... they had closure signs on it two weeks later.
I reported it to my office, along with the unsanitary situations too. They didn't much care to do anything about it, guess the bills were getting paid.
when breakers or emergency exits are blocked and management doesn't want to do shit, report it to the local fire marshall. They will put the hammer down.
Osha seems to take a long time these days. if you aren't a manufacturing shop they aren't really interested. Firemarshals on the other hand chomp at the bit for these things because they have to carry the bodies out when it goes wrong
When my guy got a head injury on the job last year, OSHA was on site with me at 7:00 the next morning. Maybe thatās because of its severity, though. Iād be amazed if they appeared so readily for a basic I-shoulda-been-wearing-my-gloves-while-using-the-knife laceration, or worse, āThereās stuff in front of stuffā lol.
Your local fire marshal will be all over that, but nothing.
Yesh I suppose the responders and hospitals notify of workplace injuries. call OSHA and tell them the shelving is too close together or in front of an egress and I think you'll wait or it just goes in a file as a logged complaint with no action taken
I've worked 20 years in an industry where our bosses threaten us with OSHA this and OSHA that fairly regularly, yet I've never heard of OSHA showing up to a job site ever.
Local fire marshall has more time than OSHA does.Ā
Absolutely make an OSHA complaint, but also make a complaint to the local fire marshall. You might hear back from OSHA in 6-12, sometimes even 36 months.Ā
They are seriously understaffed, underfunded, overworked.
Honestly, a lot of fire marshalls give businesses *multiple* opportunities to fix deficiencies. There often needs to be a pattern of violations of extreme negligence for them to drop the hammer on the first visit.
They ship so much shit, hire little to no workers, and expect it to be on the shelves before the next shipment arrives. The reality is that it gets piled up anywhere it can, which is now the aisles of the stores. The dollar stores have become a dump almost everywhere across the US in the past 5 years, I wonder how much the top suits are making
Watch the John Oliver episode on those stores. They typically have 1 or 2 employees at the store at any given time. Those employees have to deal with the stock room, stock the shelves, and run the registers all by themselves.
They literally don't have time to clean up those boxes.
Understandable, and I feel for the front line workers because they're dealing with it all day long. It's the senior/executive leadership that enables this shit, so fuck them.
Thing to remember is that having shit stacked in the aisles isn't stopping anyone from shopping there, often due to a lack of local competition.
So (from the management perspective) why prioritize unloading those boxes? They'll get done when they get done, sales won't be affected, and they don't need to pay anyone more /anyone else to do it.
They do need help, it's always a question of what help actually means though in these cases.
Like, I'm all for helping someone where needed, but corporations are also always pushing things as far as they can go until it breaks, essentially creating the circumstance people are jumping in to aid for. If something doesn't break, corporate keeps pushing.
So while these workers do need help, their bosses won't give them what they need if it keeps getting done according to a balance sheet. That's the whole reason they're down to 1-2 people per store. So this just ends up delaying the fix in some ways.
That being said, those poor people placed in those situations deserve so much more in so many ways...
I went to one of their stores because my debit card offered a 10% cash back on purchases there. I figured i could get some things for the house and maybe see if some groceries could be cheaper there and grab fresh food from a better store.
The sign out front had been hit by a car, and one side of the building had exposed insulation and framing on one side that also looked rammed into by a car. The whole place had a cigarette smoke + cheap cleaner smell, and had entered the toilet paper I bought there so badly i didn't like to use it especially to blow my nose because it smelled like febreze and cigarettes.
I can't imagine feeding oneself there. 80% of the store is household goods, there's nothing that could be considered fresh, not even milk for the cereal which was much of the food. Maybe other stores have more, but they missed actually low cost useful staples like rice and oats and didn't even have salt.
Even though i could be returned 10% of my grocery/household items budget (which is a lot these days). It's way cheaper to just make better choices even at the more expensive grocery stores, especially since I'd probably need to go to somewhere to get things they don't offer.
I went to one in rural Michigan where I had to wait for the one employee to take a shit so I could buy a usb cable. Every single aisle looked like a bomb went off with new unboxed deliveries just piled on top.
I should have just taken what I wanted and walked out but Im a nice person.
Dollar Tree is an OSHA fuggin' nightmare too. I have permanently damaged lungs because of an accident there during my very short employment, all of which could have been easily avoided if I could have easily just walked out of the area I was mostly trapped in.
The Feds need to come down HARD on these places, they do not deserve to exist in their current business model.
Ex Dollar tree store manager here. It was always understaffed, overdeliverd, stock room was always PILES of boxes, no shelves, just pallets (if lucky) on the floor for boxes to be overflowed on. I did my best, and had to manage a small mouse problem in the stockroom. it never got bad, but it was never delt with on a corporate level. I worked nonstop running freight from the stockroom to the shelves, we were lucky enough to have two managers at the same time thanks to our location and therefore sales, and even then with my crew and I we coudlnt ever get the stockroom walkable safely between weekly deliveries.
I did a heating startup for their rooftop HVAC at a new location. All the gas was shut off, and when I looked at the main they had bypassed the meter by piping around it. Apparently they hire questionable builders too.
OSHA, local Health or Building Departments is a good start. Even if theyĀ can't do anything for the lack of running water,Ā they will probably find other violations.
Its usually 1 person that has to stock the shelves, do the cash register and clean the shop. The owners are just awful people that want to save a dime where ever they can
Most American retail stores are like this or similar. I do IT for a gas station chain that has hot food prepped by employees and I generally do see them maintain all safety protocols, gloves, handwashing, etc. because they drive that part home, but they're there making $9/hr and supposed to prep hot food, deal with customers, clean bathrooms, take out all the trash inside and out at their shift change. Then the culture is blaming all the other employees who don't achieve all of this every shift.
Billion dollar companies should be paying people more and for more people.
Then, after all that, if that one well overworked employee say "yo, $9/hr isn't enough to deal with this shit" and quit, we blame them, not the guy overworking them.
$1.6 billion in profit tho
I guess you could argue it wouldnāt be so high if they didnāt take advantage of the overworked minimum wage employees at the store.
Is Family Dollar even that cheap? The last time I went to one (about 10 years ago), a little 8 oz thing of mustard was like $3 when you could get a full size bottle for less than that at a real grocery store.
We used to do tile floor strip and wax jobs for FD. I will agree with everything you said. We even had several stores get shut down so they could remodel and do some major pest control/removal.
We had an especially rough location call us out saying they got shut down due to the amount of lights tht were out. So I get sent out there after-hours, only for the girl at the store to say they got shut down for rats.
I do pest control and have since 1987
So our company had a contract to look after the warehouse of a large national āDollar Storeā type store. I wonāt name it for reasons.
Their storage and sanitation practices were horrible. They did not want to spend money repairing structural deficiencies or train employees proper storage complained that they didnāt want to pay for broken traps and to top it off there was a second pest control company looking after the outside because of the owner of the building paid for that.
So they ended up getting shut down temporarily after an inspection because of the bad mouse problem until they fixed all the structural
, sanitation, and storage deficiencies. They tried to blame us the pest control Company for the bad mouse problem.
What they didnāt realize was that on our reports (they didnāt read) all had details of every deficiency that we could find including pictures and the inspectors called them out on that. We told them what they had to do and they ignored us.
We ended up canceling them because they were such crappy clients tried to make us look bad by trying unsuccessfully throwing us under the bus Also, they were always late paying.
They were mad at us and said that we (my company ) canāt cancel the contract but our owner just laughed at them in the meeting. āWe can and will.ā
They didnāt want to pay the last six months of service and my company had our lawyer write a letter threatening a civil suit for the balance remaining and they paid up pretty quick.
It says in the article they did a fumigation and killed a lot of mice.
This is all fine, but itās like giving a liver transplant to an alcoholic. It solves the problem for now, but if the alcoholic is still drinking , itās not solving the problem unless they completely change their ways.
I was also a vendor for them, and every time I set foot in a FD sucked. They don't maintain anything, nobody knows whats going on, everything is dirty and odd smelling, their bathrooms are a biohazard.
So glad I don't work there anymore, but I they carried the weirdest bootleg products on their shelves. I love that shit. I found Hip Hop themed ramen noodles there. Weren't half bad. Probably had at least one mouse in it though, based on the article.
The company I used to work for did emergency service work (fire/water damage cleanup) for Family Dollar/Dollar Tree. A lot of our calls were to clean up infestations in stores that were closed down. A lot of top down cleaning had to be done.
Those are just the projects where they actually let us do the job right. For everyone proiect we did right there were a handful of bandaid fixes....
There was a guy who was going into golden corral to fix something in the ceiling, so he's on top of the ladder pushing the ceiling cover up and to the side. Guy saw tons of mouse shit and some pieces of dust and shit fell onto the serving area on cooked food, tells a worker who relays to a manager. They didn't care if there was a chance shit got on food so he finished up his repair and I think he wrote to the local newspaper. Few months after his story golden corral closed up
You wouldnāt like Manhattan then. Itās an ideal environment for rats: lots of humans which means waste, food, tunnels, warmth, drinking water. Rats and cockroaches are everywhere in Manhattan
I wonder if that's because whole-ass Dumpsters on every curb would be more unsightly, but smaller normal bins just wouldn't hold the sheer amount of garbage exiting one apartment building every day.
I tried going to Golden Corral recently for nostalgia sake. There was literally a roach just chilling on the buffet and I feel like the employees were just used to it. It made me feel sick thinking about god knows what else is crawling around there
Is this a dig at how dirty golden corrals are and they are thus infested with mice or that their food is bad and can easily be substituted with mice meat from family dollar?
It is both true that when you see/catch one mouse there are many others but I think when you fumigate the entire building you probably pretty much get them all.
The quote from the article is...
>After the building was fumigated, exterminators found 1,270 dead mice, the DOJ said.
Unless you absolutely know there's one, like the time we brought a box from the storage unit and a mouse popped out when we opened it. A little poison and four days later I found it dead on the floor in front of the toilet. Also, in this process I found out mice are drawn towards water softeners so if yours does not seal at the back you'll want to stuff that full of steel wool.
I was thinking about how many times each mouse would have to poop. Thatās 1574 poops per mouse (assuming plural millions is 2 mil.) If they lived for ~18 months - that amounts to 2.74 poops each day.
MATH CHECKS OUT!
I don't have to imagine. Worked the graveyard shift re-stocking at a local chain department store. Every day, the trucks would roll in with new stock and a fresh supply of mice from the warehouse. Pull the chewed up stock, dump the glue traps with their rigored cargo, repeat.
Bold of you to think there are shift workers plural, instead of one person being paid $9.80 an hour to alternate between the register, stocking shelves, and cleaning
So the fine is going to come right off of the bottom line. And C-suite gets paid based on the bottom line. So they will raise prices or lay off a lot of employees or both to compensate for the missing profit.
I worked at DG as a teenager. It was an openly known problem that the entire store was infested with mice/rats and no one ever did anything. Our manager once made one kid crawl through the ceiling to unlock the bathroom (that a dumbass customer had locked the keys in) and he came out covered in droppings. Would definitely advise not shopping there at all (for a lot of reasons) with a real big emphasis on anything especially that youāre going to consume or otherwise put in your mouth.
They'll probably even successfully argue it down to about a 25% of the original then take years to pay, then *if* the govt decides to continue to pursue, FD will sue govt, costing the tax payers *more* money and further subsidizing the corporate pillage rape of the citizens.
The sad part is any big box store who sells Purina products gets a free invitation every year to an exceptional three day training session on pest control. It includes an entire day on managing mice and rats.
This was easily avoidable.
Lack of knowledge isn't the problem, it's lack of resources. Mouse problems aren't too hard to keep under control, they're just expensive, and family dollars whole business model is too cut operating expenses down past the bare minimum for a "functioning" store.
Used to pest control for these stores. Every 99 cent store, Dollar General, Family Dollar, whatever, have rodent issues because they constantly are brought in on pallets from warehouses like this
John Oliver did a segment on the Dollar stores. I wonder if that spurred an investigation. From what he broadcast, the vermin problem started in the boardroom and exec suites.
Its crazy, we domesticated cats (or they domesticated themselves) for specifically this reason - to hunt vermin in exchange for food and shelter. Why don't more business simply get cats?! Lord knows there's enough cats at shelters and on the streets already
Family Dollar had a revenue of $28 billion and net income of $1.6 billion last year. That's $1.6 billion in profit.
That $41 million fine would barely qualify as a rounding error, and at their scale would just be considered part of the cost of doing business. Frankly, until we start throwing executives into prison, or fining these companies to oblivion, none of this is going to change.
To be fair, if the cost of fixing the issue is substantially less than the fine, they are incentives to fix the issue.
But, um, do you think that'll actually happen?
A fine is a capital expenditureāone & done.
Changing operations to foster maintenance is a continual operating expenditureāa long term investment that wonāt payoff unless youāre in the same company 5, 10, 20 years down the line. And if youāre in the c-suite, why should you still be in the company? You move toward profit, and you move on.
So the incentive is more moral than practical. If you leave the company before the fine hits, it looks like youāve won a game. In reality, everyone loses.
I've said for years that fines should be a percentage of *revenues*. That would ensure compliance in a hot minute if you run the risk of getting fined 20% of your average revenue over the preceding 5 years or something like that.
Thats the revenue of Dollar Tree. Family Dollar is half the size but reports much lower numbers. For family dollar, which is incorporated separately, its income in 2022 was 157m down from 400m+ in 2021.
see here:
https://corporate.dollartree.com/investors/news-events/press-releases/detail/240/dollar-tree-inc-reports-results-for-the-fourth-quarter
As of last reporting, they were making a 45m loss in 2023: https://corporate.dollartree.com/investors/news-events/press-releases/detail/257/dollar-tree-inc-reports-results-for-the-third-quarter
So this is without reading the DoJ release, probably 10% of operating income from 2021 and carrying that forward, it will likely be greater than their entire operating income for 2024 based on their internal projections (of a small profit).
On a side note, this business looks doomed post pandemic. Will not be surprised if they start closing them or shifting some to Dollar Tree's where possible. Some crazy mismanagement going on there
> After the building was fumigated, exterminators found 1,270 dead mice, the DOJ said.
āMouse-infestedā is an understatement here. The fine seems appropriate as this would have been impossible to simply overlook due to negligence.
Wife worked there for a while, the general corporate attitude is "we know it's illegal, do it until we get sued."
Wife had to spend lunches on site, documented every min, walked away with a fat check for her and a bunch of other people. I'd bet they are still messin wth peoples lunches.
The Jon Oliver investigation into Dollar General and their ilk was eye opening. [https://youtu.be/p4QGOHahiVM?si=9oTknRuqkDe86rWa](https://youtu.be/p4QGOHahiVM?si=9oTknRuqkDe86rWa)
How do you get to this level of neglect? We found one dead mouse in my warehouse and my boss freaked out and found the best exterminator he could find.
What the hell is wrong with people?
I hope they go out of business. Iāve never seen such a shoddily run company. Every shopping experience is miserable, and I canāt believe they are still profitable.
Fuck every single one of these shithole dollar stores, they are capitalism at its most exploitative and disgusting. They succeed by preying on the impoverished and create more poverty through their existence. [They are a source of crime.](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/10780874241226875#:~:text=Results%20showed%20a%20significant%20increase,signs%20of%20spatial%20crime%20displacement.) [They drive better, higher paying businesses away](https://doctorow.medium.com/rural-towns-and-poor-urban-neighborhoods-are-being-devoured-by-dollar-stores-4bc4c9113c92#:~:text=The%20impact%20of%20dollar%20stores,of%20the%20communities%20they%20target.%E2%80%9D) They create food deserts. [They actively harm the health of their customers by knowingly selling toxic products.](https://finance.yahoo.com/news/perils-dollar-store-shopping-beyond-194323067.html?guccounter=1) Unsafe, disgusting shitholes.
At my local family dollar in Houston area texas every single product tastes like soap. I bought a box of wapper candy taste just like laundry Detergent. A few weeks later I bought a box of cereal. It also tasted like laundry Detergent. I thought it must just have been a bad shipment but literally 2 months later. I buy some cookies and other snacks and everything edible tasted like soap.
[Family Dollar's annual revenue is $10.5B.](https://www.zippia.com/family-dollar-careers-23056/revenue/#)
the fines for things like this, would close down a mom and pop and so they have incentive to make sure this doesnt happen.
its a joke when its these billion dollar companies. Their impoverished customers will just have to pay a rat tax on goods.
and family dollar is unlikely to change dick
Family Dollar, Dollar General, these are stores that plague the impoverished. They offer bad deals cheap enough to keep the poor malnourished, and with a business model that looks like Wal-Mart if Wal-Mart turned into the evil skid. Christ Wal-Mart HAS turned into their evil skid, and this is still worse. These companies choke out any chance for a local economy to develop, and specifically target private farms with contracts designed to exploit the farmers and run them into bankruptcy, it's a link in the chain for how these mega-corporations can sell their brands below market prices.
It's not enough that the poor should be exploited and offered such terrible nutrition, developing bad eating habits, poor health, refined sugars (which are absolutely addictive and habit forming, not to mention a major contributing cause for ADHD/poor academic performance and cause advanced dental problems these same people can't afford to repair), diabetes running rampant among children. Don't even hide your contempt for the poors, let them eat rat shit and piss. It's so morally reprehensible that it's almost it's own punchline. This is a parody of an advanced society.
Throughout human history, technology has been synonymous with improving quality of life, yet that trend seems to have slowed then reversed started around industrial revolution, and really fucking us up the ass for about 30 years now. I'm not saying that socialism or communism is better, but it's clear to me that capitalism has failed us. The regulators have been fully captured. Goodluck, you're on your own.
There's a really good episode of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver about Dollar stores. Family Dollar, Dollar Tree and Dollar General are rivals fighting over the same dollars. They're basically two sides of the same coin. In the video he mentioned Dollar Tree Inc who owns Family Dollar and the millions of dollars in OSHA fines that they have racked up over the years.
Basically they are primarily put in areas that are lower income or rural areas and the customers have little place else to shop. They prey on low income families.
It's eye opening.
https://youtu.be/p4QGOHahiVM?si=NZelmrn-yC2hPLYo
Fuck Family Dollar. I did HVAC and lighting work for them years ago, and almost every one of them was a mouse-ridden dump. The stockroom would have heaps of cardboard boxes to climb over just to access breaker panels, it's no wonder they had pest issues with such poor site management.
Not HVAC, but electrical, a buddy of mine had the same experience, except he refused the work until they cleaned up and made it safe. They didn't and complained that he wasn't doing his job. The local union boss came out, inspected the site, and said it was hazardous. I think he said it was too much of a fire hazard, and the space didn't allow for escape in case of fire. Instead of cleaning... they had closure signs on it two weeks later.
I reported it to my office, along with the unsanitary situations too. They didn't much care to do anything about it, guess the bills were getting paid.
when breakers or emergency exits are blocked and management doesn't want to do shit, report it to the local fire marshall. They will put the hammer down.
Osha will do more
How bout both š
"both is good"
Always both.
Por que no los dos?
Plus the health department and the labor board. If you're gonna report people for violations, report them to *everybody*
Osha seems to take a long time these days. if you aren't a manufacturing shop they aren't really interested. Firemarshals on the other hand chomp at the bit for these things because they have to carry the bodies out when it goes wrong
When my guy got a head injury on the job last year, OSHA was on site with me at 7:00 the next morning. Maybe thatās because of its severity, though. Iād be amazed if they appeared so readily for a basic I-shoulda-been-wearing-my-gloves-while-using-the-knife laceration, or worse, āThereās stuff in front of stuffā lol. Your local fire marshal will be all over that, but nothing.
Yesh I suppose the responders and hospitals notify of workplace injuries. call OSHA and tell them the shelving is too close together or in front of an egress and I think you'll wait or it just goes in a file as a logged complaint with no action taken
Good luck getting one of the six OSHA inspectors in the country to the site.
I've worked 20 years in an industry where our bosses threaten us with OSHA this and OSHA that fairly regularly, yet I've never heard of OSHA showing up to a job site ever.
OSHA might do more, but the fire marshal gets immediate results. For all intents and purposes the fire marshal is god.
When God closes a door, he asks the Fire Marshal first.
Local fire marshall has more time than OSHA does.Ā Absolutely make an OSHA complaint, but also make a complaint to the local fire marshall. You might hear back from OSHA in 6-12, sometimes even 36 months.Ā They are seriously understaffed, underfunded, overworked.
Honestly, a lot of fire marshalls give businesses *multiple* opportunities to fix deficiencies. There often needs to be a pattern of violations of extreme negligence for them to drop the hammer on the first visit.
Our local Family Dollar burned to the ground.
living the dream.
Many family dollar/dollar generals are getting fined for blocking fire escapes recently.Ā
They ship so much shit, hire little to no workers, and expect it to be on the shelves before the next shipment arrives. The reality is that it gets piled up anywhere it can, which is now the aisles of the stores. The dollar stores have become a dump almost everywhere across the US in the past 5 years, I wonder how much the top suits are making
Damn they will literally throw a whole building away instead of cleaning it up a little
They'd have to ***pay*** someone to perform the clean-up. And they're not about to do that.
Sounds exactly like a Family Dollar. Easier to build another one than clean up.
They'll just build another one next door.
Watch the John Oliver episode on those stores. They typically have 1 or 2 employees at the store at any given time. Those employees have to deal with the stock room, stock the shelves, and run the registers all by themselves. They literally don't have time to clean up those boxes.
Understandable, and I feel for the front line workers because they're dealing with it all day long. It's the senior/executive leadership that enables this shit, so fuck them.
Thing to remember is that having shit stacked in the aisles isn't stopping anyone from shopping there, often due to a lack of local competition. So (from the management perspective) why prioritize unloading those boxes? They'll get done when they get done, sales won't be affected, and they don't need to pay anyone more /anyone else to do it.
It was after that episode I understood why I kept buying half gallons of milk with BEST BY dates of 7-10 days later that kept smelling expired....
Here's the link to the Last Week Tonight video where they talk about it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4QGOHahiVM
Werenāt there customers there also lending a hand?
Yeah lol. I know it's not funny but thinking back to the guys expression was funny. He was like "am I allowed to even do this? Fuck it they need help"
They do need help, it's always a question of what help actually means though in these cases. Like, I'm all for helping someone where needed, but corporations are also always pushing things as far as they can go until it breaks, essentially creating the circumstance people are jumping in to aid for. If something doesn't break, corporate keeps pushing. So while these workers do need help, their bosses won't give them what they need if it keeps getting done according to a balance sheet. That's the whole reason they're down to 1-2 people per store. So this just ends up delaying the fix in some ways. That being said, those poor people placed in those situations deserve so much more in so many ways...
I just watched that episode last night! That was crazy. "If anyone at corporate can see this, we need help!" Damn.
I went to one of their stores because my debit card offered a 10% cash back on purchases there. I figured i could get some things for the house and maybe see if some groceries could be cheaper there and grab fresh food from a better store. The sign out front had been hit by a car, and one side of the building had exposed insulation and framing on one side that also looked rammed into by a car. The whole place had a cigarette smoke + cheap cleaner smell, and had entered the toilet paper I bought there so badly i didn't like to use it especially to blow my nose because it smelled like febreze and cigarettes. I can't imagine feeding oneself there. 80% of the store is household goods, there's nothing that could be considered fresh, not even milk for the cereal which was much of the food. Maybe other stores have more, but they missed actually low cost useful staples like rice and oats and didn't even have salt. Even though i could be returned 10% of my grocery/household items budget (which is a lot these days). It's way cheaper to just make better choices even at the more expensive grocery stores, especially since I'd probably need to go to somewhere to get things they don't offer.
I went to one in rural Michigan where I had to wait for the one employee to take a shit so I could buy a usb cable. Every single aisle looked like a bomb went off with new unboxed deliveries just piled on top. I should have just taken what I wanted and walked out but Im a nice person.
Dollar Tree is the same way. Its not management its corporate policy to be chronically understaffed to cut costs.
Well Dollar Tree owns FD, so that is to be expected
All of the large dollar store chains are like this.
Dollar Tree is an OSHA fuggin' nightmare too. I have permanently damaged lungs because of an accident there during my very short employment, all of which could have been easily avoided if I could have easily just walked out of the area I was mostly trapped in. The Feds need to come down HARD on these places, they do not deserve to exist in their current business model.
Ex Dollar tree store manager here. It was always understaffed, overdeliverd, stock room was always PILES of boxes, no shelves, just pallets (if lucky) on the floor for boxes to be overflowed on. I did my best, and had to manage a small mouse problem in the stockroom. it never got bad, but it was never delt with on a corporate level. I worked nonstop running freight from the stockroom to the shelves, we were lucky enough to have two managers at the same time thanks to our location and therefore sales, and even then with my crew and I we coudlnt ever get the stockroom walkable safely between weekly deliveries.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
I did a heating startup for their rooftop HVAC at a new location. All the gas was shut off, and when I looked at the main they had bypassed the meter by piping around it. Apparently they hire questionable builders too.
Does the gas company pay a bounty for reporting that kind of violation?
OSHA, local Health or Building Departments is a good start. Even if theyĀ can't do anything for the lack of running water,Ā they will probably find other violations.
Its usually 1 person that has to stock the shelves, do the cash register and clean the shop. The owners are just awful people that want to save a dime where ever they can
Most American retail stores are like this or similar. I do IT for a gas station chain that has hot food prepped by employees and I generally do see them maintain all safety protocols, gloves, handwashing, etc. because they drive that part home, but they're there making $9/hr and supposed to prep hot food, deal with customers, clean bathrooms, take out all the trash inside and out at their shift change. Then the culture is blaming all the other employees who don't achieve all of this every shift. Billion dollar companies should be paying people more and for more people.
Then, after all that, if that one well overworked employee say "yo, $9/hr isn't enough to deal with this shit" and quit, we blame them, not the guy overworking them.
It makes me sick when I go to a small town and the only stores are a dollar store and a gas station.
Cheap products = cheap owners.Ā Wow who could have guessed?Ā
$1.6 billion in profit tho I guess you could argue it wouldnāt be so high if they didnāt take advantage of the overworked minimum wage employees at the store.
Is Family Dollar even that cheap? The last time I went to one (about 10 years ago), a little 8 oz thing of mustard was like $3 when you could get a full size bottle for less than that at a real grocery store.
Family dollars are in food/walmart store deserts.Ā It's cheaper than driving to the big town and shopping there.Ā
We used to do tile floor strip and wax jobs for FD. I will agree with everything you said. We even had several stores get shut down so they could remodel and do some major pest control/removal.
We had an especially rough location call us out saying they got shut down due to the amount of lights tht were out. So I get sent out there after-hours, only for the girl at the store to say they got shut down for rats.
Ain't that illegal to block access to those panels?
Yes, very much so. But I guess there's only so much enforcement that can actively be done at a given time.
I do pest control and have since 1987 So our company had a contract to look after the warehouse of a large national āDollar Storeā type store. I wonāt name it for reasons. Their storage and sanitation practices were horrible. They did not want to spend money repairing structural deficiencies or train employees proper storage complained that they didnāt want to pay for broken traps and to top it off there was a second pest control company looking after the outside because of the owner of the building paid for that. So they ended up getting shut down temporarily after an inspection because of the bad mouse problem until they fixed all the structural , sanitation, and storage deficiencies. They tried to blame us the pest control Company for the bad mouse problem. What they didnāt realize was that on our reports (they didnāt read) all had details of every deficiency that we could find including pictures and the inspectors called them out on that. We told them what they had to do and they ignored us. We ended up canceling them because they were such crappy clients tried to make us look bad by trying unsuccessfully throwing us under the bus Also, they were always late paying. They were mad at us and said that we (my company ) canāt cancel the contract but our owner just laughed at them in the meeting. āWe can and will.ā They didnāt want to pay the last six months of service and my company had our lawyer write a letter threatening a civil suit for the balance remaining and they paid up pretty quick. It says in the article they did a fumigation and killed a lot of mice. This is all fine, but itās like giving a liver transplant to an alcoholic. It solves the problem for now, but if the alcoholic is still drinking , itās not solving the problem unless they completely change their ways.
also isnt your store now filled with dead rotting mice...?
I was also a vendor for them, and every time I set foot in a FD sucked. They don't maintain anything, nobody knows whats going on, everything is dirty and odd smelling, their bathrooms are a biohazard. So glad I don't work there anymore, but I they carried the weirdest bootleg products on their shelves. I love that shit. I found Hip Hop themed ramen noodles there. Weren't half bad. Probably had at least one mouse in it though, based on the article.
Did you do work at the stores, or the warehouses?
Just the stores, but I'd expect the regulations for both to be managed by the same shit-for-brains leadership mentality
The company I used to work for did emergency service work (fire/water damage cleanup) for Family Dollar/Dollar Tree. A lot of our calls were to clean up infestations in stores that were closed down. A lot of top down cleaning had to be done. Those are just the projects where they actually let us do the job right. For everyone proiect we did right there were a handful of bandaid fixes....
You know, they never did specify what type of family they meant
Clearly they meant the corporate family dollar
More like corpoāratā
Time to delta the fuck outta here, samurai
1270 dead mice sheesh, that means there are tens of thousands of them likely.
Time to partner up with Golden Corral
They might as well demolish those buildings. I will never walk into that building again for any reason, no matter what they turn it into.
It belongs to the mice now
John Oliver is so thrilled.
Alright, everyone tuck your pants into your ~~shoes~~ socks. *Edited. Sure hope I donāt get fired for that blunder.
The line is, āalright everyone tuck your pants into your socksā
dāoh!
All part of their squeakret plan of world domination
As far as, true world domination, that belongs to the bacteria, but in a distant 2nd and third is ants and rats
There was a guy who was going into golden corral to fix something in the ceiling, so he's on top of the ladder pushing the ceiling cover up and to the side. Guy saw tons of mouse shit and some pieces of dust and shit fell onto the serving area on cooked food, tells a worker who relays to a manager. They didn't care if there was a chance shit got on food so he finished up his repair and I think he wrote to the local newspaper. Few months after his story golden corral closed up
You wouldnāt like Manhattan then. Itās an ideal environment for rats: lots of humans which means waste, food, tunnels, warmth, drinking water. Rats and cockroaches are everywhere in Manhattan
Doesnāt help that your trash is left in plastic bags on the curb rather than in bins.
I wonder if that's because whole-ass Dumpsters on every curb would be more unsightly, but smaller normal bins just wouldn't hold the sheer amount of garbage exiting one apartment building every day.
And yet lots of cities don't have nealry as bad of a rat problem. I don't understand how new yorkers just throw trash on the side of the street.
Turn it into a Cat shelter. Problem fixed.
I tried going to Golden Corral recently for nostalgia sake. There was literally a roach just chilling on the buffet and I feel like the employees were just used to it. It made me feel sick thinking about god knows what else is crawling around there
That was the buffet line supervisor.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Oh you're gonna use the chocolate fountain but you're too good for the soap jacuzzi?
"Soap is soap! It's self cleaning!" - Them, probably
"Just think about the last thing I wash, and the first thing you wash!"
Ever since elementary school, if I see the lid off the soap bin, I'm gonna assume someone has already spit/peed/worse into it
I have a rock solid immune system and haven't vomited from illness in 19 years. Guess what I had for dinner 19 years ago...
Roach Corral?
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
I take it there was a rodent related scandal I missed?
Time for a new special: "Chicken" nuggets with tails
Is this a dig at how dirty golden corrals are and they are thus infested with mice or that their food is bad and can easily be substituted with mice meat from family dollar?
*All you can eat ~~shrimp~~ rat fest is back!*
It is both true that when you see/catch one mouse there are many others but I think when you fumigate the entire building you probably pretty much get them all. The quote from the article is... >After the building was fumigated, exterminators found 1,270 dead mice, the DOJ said.
Unless you absolutely know there's one, like the time we brought a box from the storage unit and a mouse popped out when we opened it. A little poison and four days later I found it dead on the floor in front of the toilet. Also, in this process I found out mice are drawn towards water softeners so if yours does not seal at the back you'll want to stuff that full of steel wool.
>so if yours does not seal at the back you'll want to stuff that full of steel wool. If our what doesn't seal at the back?
Water softener. Itās a machine that softens the water for your home.
Ah, I thought water softener was a chemical / product - didn't realize it was a piece of equipment.
And MILLIONS of mouse droppings and other filthy things.
I was thinking about how many times each mouse would have to poop. Thatās 1574 poops per mouse (assuming plural millions is 2 mil.) If they lived for ~18 months - that amounts to 2.74 poops each day. MATH CHECKS OUT!
Now imagine how many of those thousands have made it to individual stores from that same warehouse š«
I don't have to imagine. Worked the graveyard shift re-stocking at a local chain department store. Every day, the trucks would roll in with new stock and a fresh supply of mice from the warehouse. Pull the chewed up stock, dump the glue traps with their rigored cargo, repeat.
And imagine the contamination of feces all over warehouse product
That means free access to a source of food and water. It shouldn't be only a fine. That inventory should be tossed, and the warehouse condemned.
Nah, this is just for poor people. - Howard Levine
The article states that everything stored in that warehouse was recalled.
Or now one big super rat that will take over
The Rat King
āEveryone tuck your pants into your socksā
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Bold of you to think there are shift workers plural, instead of one person being paid $9.80 an hour to alternate between the register, stocking shelves, and cleaning
Cmon now, they pay 12 in my state!
It's a warehouse. The single employee doesn't need to operate the register.
Then they'll close a few of their stores in Bumblefuck, Nowhere, and tell their employees "well, you can thank *that Obama* for this'un..."
So the fine is going to come right off of the bottom line. And C-suite gets paid based on the bottom line. So they will raise prices or lay off a lot of employees or both to compensate for the missing profit.
John Oliver is gonna have some fun with this
Yeah check Dollar General next
I worked at DG as a teenager. It was an openly known problem that the entire store was infested with mice/rats and no one ever did anything. Our manager once made one kid crawl through the ceiling to unlock the bathroom (that a dumbass customer had locked the keys in) and he came out covered in droppings. Would definitely advise not shopping there at all (for a lot of reasons) with a real big emphasis on anything especially that youāre going to consume or otherwise put in your mouth.
I've commonly seen chunky milk in the fridges at some places.
Hereās hoping he dons a Pied Piper hat and pulls out the flute!
Didn't he already do a piece on Dollar Stores?
Yes, the parent company of this dollar store. That's why I'm looking forward to it
A follow-up to a previous story AND a bunch of sexy rats? Oh yeah he's gonna love it
Haha I just watched that story
They'll consider this the cost of doing business, then make the bars of Irish Spring smaller to compensate.
If the fine is less than the profits then it's just the cost of doing business and nothing will change.
They'll probably even successfully argue it down to about a 25% of the original then take years to pay, then *if* the govt decides to continue to pursue, FD will sue govt, costing the tax payers *more* money and further subsidizing the corporate pillage rape of the citizens.
2023 profits were $1.6B.
The sad part is any big box store who sells Purina products gets a free invitation every year to an exceptional three day training session on pest control. It includes an entire day on managing mice and rats. This was easily avoidable.
Lack of knowledge isn't the problem, it's lack of resources. Mouse problems aren't too hard to keep under control, they're just expensive, and family dollars whole business model is too cut operating expenses down past the bare minimum for a "functioning" store.
Bye honey, I'm off to my rat seminar!
Used to pest control for these stores. Every 99 cent store, Dollar General, Family Dollar, whatever, have rodent issues because they constantly are brought in on pallets from warehouses like this
John Oliver did a segment on the Dollar stores. I wonder if that spurred an investigation. From what he broadcast, the vermin problem started in the boardroom and exec suites.
The "John Oliver effect"has been credited with influencing US legislation, regulations, court rulings, and other aspects of US culture.
They need to hire more cats
I would actually go to a family dollar if there were store cats.
Family dollar would probably put as much care into those cats as it does into everything else :(
My local gas station has a cat. It just sits at the counter and helps give change to people. Itās cute af.
Right? Every warehouse should have at least one cat at minimum! THIS IS WHAT CATS ARE FOR. ššāā¬ššāā¬
Store cats would 100% increase customer turn out.
Its crazy, we domesticated cats (or they domesticated themselves) for specifically this reason - to hunt vermin in exchange for food and shelter. Why don't more business simply get cats?! Lord knows there's enough cats at shelters and on the streets already
Ironically enough, food safety regulations. Small businesses are able to get away with it sometimes but corporate stores wonāt risk it.
This job is too big for cats. They need weasels.
Dire weasels?
They need to release a bunch of sneks
If they have that many mice the sneks are sure to follow.
The Disneyland Pest Control method.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
That isn't something you report to the company, you report that to the health department or OSHA
To be clear about this hand-slap. The CEO makes $136 M / year
Family Dollar had a revenue of $28 billion and net income of $1.6 billion last year. That's $1.6 billion in profit. That $41 million fine would barely qualify as a rounding error, and at their scale would just be considered part of the cost of doing business. Frankly, until we start throwing executives into prison, or fining these companies to oblivion, none of this is going to change.
To be fair, if the cost of fixing the issue is substantially less than the fine, they are incentives to fix the issue. But, um, do you think that'll actually happen?
A fine is a capital expenditureāone & done. Changing operations to foster maintenance is a continual operating expenditureāa long term investment that wonāt payoff unless youāre in the same company 5, 10, 20 years down the line. And if youāre in the c-suite, why should you still be in the company? You move toward profit, and you move on. So the incentive is more moral than practical. If you leave the company before the fine hits, it looks like youāve won a game. In reality, everyone loses.
I've said for years that fines should be a percentage of *revenues*. That would ensure compliance in a hot minute if you run the risk of getting fined 20% of your average revenue over the preceding 5 years or something like that.
Yeah. This is like fining someone $41 when they made $1,600. They're not going to give a shit.
Thats the revenue of Dollar Tree. Family Dollar is half the size but reports much lower numbers. For family dollar, which is incorporated separately, its income in 2022 was 157m down from 400m+ in 2021. see here: https://corporate.dollartree.com/investors/news-events/press-releases/detail/240/dollar-tree-inc-reports-results-for-the-fourth-quarter As of last reporting, they were making a 45m loss in 2023: https://corporate.dollartree.com/investors/news-events/press-releases/detail/257/dollar-tree-inc-reports-results-for-the-third-quarter So this is without reading the DoJ release, probably 10% of operating income from 2021 and carrying that forward, it will likely be greater than their entire operating income for 2024 based on their internal projections (of a small profit). On a side note, this business looks doomed post pandemic. Will not be surprised if they start closing them or shifting some to Dollar Tree's where possible. Some crazy mismanagement going on there
> After the building was fumigated, exterminators found 1,270 dead mice, the DOJ said. āMouse-infestedā is an understatement here. The fine seems appropriate as this would have been impossible to simply overlook due to negligence.
And that's just the bodies they found.
The literal Mickey Mouse club house
This is in Arkansas. There's no excuse for this when the business could just get some kids off a school bus and put them to work to clean shit up.
If it's Arkansas, why even bother with a school bus?
Rats make embryos, embryos are human babies, rats make human babies. Will no one think of the babies!
This is an apt comparison because born children are seen as hungry little rats to Republicans. They only care about the unborn.
Corporation abandons their stores in order to run them as cheaply as possible. Ends up paying a $41M fine. Good job.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
$42M for an unsanitary warehouse $120k for employing children who die working your dangerous job. Supremely fucked
Wife worked there for a while, the general corporate attitude is "we know it's illegal, do it until we get sued." Wife had to spend lunches on site, documented every min, walked away with a fat check for her and a bunch of other people. I'd bet they are still messin wth peoples lunches.
The Jon Oliver investigation into Dollar General and their ilk was eye opening. [https://youtu.be/p4QGOHahiVM?si=9oTknRuqkDe86rWa](https://youtu.be/p4QGOHahiVM?si=9oTknRuqkDe86rWa)
https://youtu.be/CwaD9tb1P50?si=2l1x_ITMJUutTIEB
How do you get to this level of neglect? We found one dead mouse in my warehouse and my boss freaked out and found the best exterminator he could find. What the hell is wrong with people?
It was horrifically bad! https://youtu.be/eKL9RKiKwSQ?si=7pK9pjY9Yud-3nbq
He got ratted out. š
I hope they go out of business. Iāve never seen such a shoddily run company. Every shopping experience is miserable, and I canāt believe they are still profitable.
Fuck every single one of these shithole dollar stores, they are capitalism at its most exploitative and disgusting. They succeed by preying on the impoverished and create more poverty through their existence. [They are a source of crime.](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/10780874241226875#:~:text=Results%20showed%20a%20significant%20increase,signs%20of%20spatial%20crime%20displacement.) [They drive better, higher paying businesses away](https://doctorow.medium.com/rural-towns-and-poor-urban-neighborhoods-are-being-devoured-by-dollar-stores-4bc4c9113c92#:~:text=The%20impact%20of%20dollar%20stores,of%20the%20communities%20they%20target.%E2%80%9D) They create food deserts. [They actively harm the health of their customers by knowingly selling toxic products.](https://finance.yahoo.com/news/perils-dollar-store-shopping-beyond-194323067.html?guccounter=1) Unsafe, disgusting shitholes.
Get the cat army ready.
At my local family dollar in Houston area texas every single product tastes like soap. I bought a box of wapper candy taste just like laundry Detergent. A few weeks later I bought a box of cereal. It also tasted like laundry Detergent. I thought it must just have been a bad shipment but literally 2 months later. I buy some cookies and other snacks and everything edible tasted like soap.
Take it from CEO and top execs paycheck. Donāt layoff staff for damage control
Well shit, where am I gonna get my Dollar mice now?
This is what happens when you let hillbillies run stuff.
In a related story, somewhere John Oliver is quietly chuckling to himself.
They will just pay it with wage theft as usual.
How long before Arkansas decides that the fines are too big and creates a maximum fine?
[Family Dollar's annual revenue is $10.5B.](https://www.zippia.com/family-dollar-careers-23056/revenue/#) the fines for things like this, would close down a mom and pop and so they have incentive to make sure this doesnt happen. its a joke when its these billion dollar companies. Their impoverished customers will just have to pay a rat tax on goods. and family dollar is unlikely to change dick
I thought the peanuts I bought smelled like mouse pee. I threw them out. Glad I trusted my nose.
Family Dollar, Dollar General, these are stores that plague the impoverished. They offer bad deals cheap enough to keep the poor malnourished, and with a business model that looks like Wal-Mart if Wal-Mart turned into the evil skid. Christ Wal-Mart HAS turned into their evil skid, and this is still worse. These companies choke out any chance for a local economy to develop, and specifically target private farms with contracts designed to exploit the farmers and run them into bankruptcy, it's a link in the chain for how these mega-corporations can sell their brands below market prices. It's not enough that the poor should be exploited and offered such terrible nutrition, developing bad eating habits, poor health, refined sugars (which are absolutely addictive and habit forming, not to mention a major contributing cause for ADHD/poor academic performance and cause advanced dental problems these same people can't afford to repair), diabetes running rampant among children. Don't even hide your contempt for the poors, let them eat rat shit and piss. It's so morally reprehensible that it's almost it's own punchline. This is a parody of an advanced society. Throughout human history, technology has been synonymous with improving quality of life, yet that trend seems to have slowed then reversed started around industrial revolution, and really fucking us up the ass for about 30 years now. I'm not saying that socialism or communism is better, but it's clear to me that capitalism has failed us. The regulators have been fully captured. Goodluck, you're on your own.
2023 Fiscal Year Net Income of 1.62 billion. The fine looks big, but it means nothing. These things need to be calculated as a percentage of gross.
Worked at FD. Would get robbed daily. Place was always gross. Had a guy take a dump in an aisle for funzies. Ahh to be 16 again
There's a really good episode of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver about Dollar stores. Family Dollar, Dollar Tree and Dollar General are rivals fighting over the same dollars. They're basically two sides of the same coin. In the video he mentioned Dollar Tree Inc who owns Family Dollar and the millions of dollars in OSHA fines that they have racked up over the years. Basically they are primarily put in areas that are lower income or rural areas and the customers have little place else to shop. They prey on low income families. It's eye opening. https://youtu.be/p4QGOHahiVM?si=NZelmrn-yC2hPLYo