Dollar Stores: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

Love that companies always say, "A union only gets between us and our employees". I am sorry but if I am alone in the room with my abuser, I want someone to jump in between us.

Feeding the warehouse rat a Pringle is somehow a wholesome vibe

Many people in this country are working in situations that treat workers like slave labor. Meanwhile the corporations are raking in the dollars. Thanks for shining a light on one of many awful situations.

I worked at a local Dollar General, and as a former employee, I approve this message.

Imagine all the employees they could have hired with all the millions in fines they have had to pay.

my mom was an employee for 5 years, always gave the extra mile to ensure her store looked decent, staying longer hours and even sacrificing her weekends to make sure her store was staffed. There were other employees who would literally steal or come to work drunk so when my mother would send them home due to this, they complained to her manager and her manager waited for her to make a mistake and fired her for being late 10 min cause her car died on her and couldnt get a jump start from anyone in time. This place is a literally the absolute worst..... I feel bad for my poor mom.

As a former dollar tree employee... 100% accurate. Even the parts you were joking about. I really can't stress this enough.
We were told to stack helium containers in front of the fire exit.
I threatened to call the fire marshal.
They ignored me.
I called.
They threatened to have me fired.
I got my boss investigated by OSHA, made them into a liability for the company, got them fired, then quit.

I’m glad you covered the twisted world of Dollar stores. In our town, the fire department actually forces Dollar General to close AT LEAST once a week due to the fire hazard created by the bursting freight trolleys and cases of merchandise shoved down the aisles.

The real scummy thing about DG is that when they open a new store they are fully staffed, they do a great job pushing every other small mom and pop out of business, then once they are the only show in town they cut their staff and let the store go to hell like what you see here.

Years ago, I was in a Goodwill...they get most of their merchandise for free, the CEOs are millionaires/billionaires, mark up some products more than what the same thing at the dollar stores cost yet a friendly employee told me she hadn't had a raise in 8 years. Insane. The corporate greed in out of control. I now call them GREEDYWILL.

I work at Home Depot and the bird and rat problems hit close to home lol. Just today I could smell a dead one in a trap in the store. A while back a customer's terrier was going nuts trying to crawl into the shelves, and she told me "You've got rats". I'm like we know lmao. We also have to clean rat and bird piss and shit off of products instead of throwing them out, it's disgusting. Some of the shelves in garden are just full of rat shit when you take the product out and get a good look, and we don't follow proper safe cleaning procedures. It's all the seed that attracts them, I'm not sure what the solution is but the few traps scattered through the store sure aren't doing it.

My sister suing dollar general, her son slipped on spilled laundry detergent and hit his head in the store. Corporate refused to even speak with her or file an incident report.

Time to eat breakfast and learn about another existential problem, have a great week everybody!

I work at Dollar Tree. Last winter the heating system was out and the front door would not automatically close, so it was left open when it was 14 below zero outside. I was wearing gloves at the register. Then, this summer, the Air Conditioning didnt work. The candy was melting on the shelves and we had 1 box fan that one of our employees bought at the Goodwill to keep the air moving. A few weeks ago we ran out of bags and just had to hand the customers their items back to them. We only have 2 people scheduled at a time: a cashier and a manager. The lines are always long and the back room has so much freight we cant walk back there. On top of all this, there isn't room on the shelves to put any of the products when we do have time to stock shelves. OH, and the pay is 9$ an hour, after a year of working there, I got a 25 cent raise. The security cameras only record the front door and the registers (this is to prevent the cashiers from stealing, not in case of a robbery). Last week, we found a rat in our store under the cash register! 100% of this segment is true!

I was in a dollar store ten years back. I walked by a twenty something stocking shelves with two people in suits yelling and pointing about how he was not stocking right and not following standards. Under my breath but still loud enough to hear I said, "wow, they treat people like shit here. I am never coming back." I finished getting what I came in for I saw all the managers in suits run to the back of the building into the employee only area and I didn't see them the rest of the time. Sad to see nothing has changed.

I live in Brooklyn and the Dollar Tree near Myrtle Ave-Broadway had giant rats parading around. I also used to work at a Dollar Tree distribution center. One thing not mentioned in this video is the brutal labor practices at those warehouses. The stores are jam packed because the other side of the equation besides cheap products is the brutal productivity standards that leads to people working until exhaustion to get so much of the cheap crappy product into the trucks and inside the stores. It was like a death camp.

I went back to the little town I grew up in and was shocked at how few locally owned businesses there were compared to when I lived there. As I was traveling around I saw multiple Dollar General stores located just outside the city limits and in surrounding rural areas. I then understood why the other stores were no longer profitable.

When i worked at DG, the store manager was desperately looking for people to try and fill in hours, while working 60 hours a week and not being paid more than $16/hr since he wasnt even on salary. Its awfully overwhelming for managers because they can't work all the freight alone and most of the time they need help to clear it all. Its a mess and corporate is not doing anything about it at all.

Edit: During COVID-19 before lockdowns when my mom was working at dollar tree, corporate sent a thank you letter saying they were "grateful for their work", while other retail places like walmart gave payouts. Do not work at these small retail stores.

I worked at Walmart for a while, and a few of my coworkers described working at Dollar General as a torture chamber. They say that WHILE working at Walmart

I was a store manager for Dollar General while in college. Everything said here is true. I was pistol whipped in the back of the head during a robbery and expected back the next morning. Without the necessary number of hours to get shipments stocked, I'd work plenty of shifts alone just to save hours to get stuff done.