Will Dollar Tree's new pricing strategy work?

As most people know, Dollar Tree is now Buck Twenty-Five Tree on most of its stuff.

Well, scratch that.

The one nearest me, and presumably this is national, now has most of two aisles devoted to "specials" for $3 or $5.

Will customers pay, or will they comparison shop?

Some things, I know are cheaper elsewhere. Even if it has a slightly bigger bottle, and even if rising oil prices are part of the reason why for jumps in prices in product in general, I can get a bottle of gas treatment at Walmart for less than $3 I can tell you without looking.

And, if I need a 7-inch skillet, if I want to buy as part of a group of cookware, I can get it cheaper than $5 at Wally, and get a lid with it, which $5 at Buck-Twenty-Five Chuck doesn't give you.

What many people may still NOT know is that Dollar Tree also owns Family Dollar. And, I'm venturing the parent is trying to work on some synergies, even perhaps charging a bit more than at Family Dollar, but not too much, in hopes that people won't comparison shop, at least that hard. 

I might just do that; I have both stores within walking distance.

It sucks to work at these places

Not just WallyWorld. Not just WallyWorld plus the various dollar stores. Rather, WallyWorld, dollar stores and even some supposedly higher-level retailers are pretty much shitholes not only for hourly workers at stores, but store managers, pressured by corporate higher-ups to break federal law by knocking hours off workers’ clocked-in time, among other things.

Originally from the The New York Times Review of Books:

(Drew Pooters) placed his resume on Monster.com and found a $26,000-a-year job at Family Dollar, another discount store, as a manager-in-training. He rose quickly to become manager, but he was now required to cut back the hours worked by his employees. And he found he had to put in fourteen- to sixteen-hour days to keep up with the work they would ordinarily have done. A father of four, he needed the job. But then Pooters found that his district manager also was jiggering the time records of his employees.

Problem is that Hilzoy at Washington Monthly doesn’t go far enough in the condemnation.

The slippery slope to W.’s wage policies began, though much more softly, back with Reagan, and continued through Bush I.

Then Clinton did nothing to arrest it.

Sorry, folks, but that’s the fact. Take a look at the Slickster’s record on labor issues when he was governor of Arkansas.

So, once again, the DLC/neolib wing of the Democratic Party hoists its moral compass, or what’s left of one, by its own petard.