Utah passes new law to combat overcharges at dollar stores after Guardian investigation

Utah lawmakers have voted to stiffen penalties on retailers who chronically overcharge customers.

The new state law, which takes effect on 6 May, was introduced in direct response to a Guardian investigation of pricing practices at two national chains, Dollar General and Family Dollar, according to an official who oversees the state’s price-accuracy inspections.

Both dollar-store chains target cost-conscious families, yet their stores often post one price on the shelf and ring up a higher price at the register.

The investigation, published in December, found that Dollar General stores failed more than 4,300 government price-accuracy inspections in 23 states between 2022 and 2025. The smaller Family Dollar chain failed more than 2,100 price-accuracy inspections in 20 states during the same period.

Among the biggest offenders was a Family Dollar store in Provo, Utah, a city of 115,000 people that’s home to Brigham Young University. According to state records, the store failed 28 pricing inspections in the four-year span. During one visit, an inspector discovered overcharges for 48% of the items she tested, including baked beans, Ivory soap, frozen pizza and disposable diapers.

State representative Candice Pierucci, who sponsored the Utah bill, singled out the Provo store and its 48% overcharge rate when she introduced the legislation on the House floor in February. The Republican lawmaker noted that shoppers don’t always notice overcharges.

“If you’re like me, once you get to checkout, at that point I’m wrangling two kiddos and I’m not really checking what the amount is,” Pierucci said. “I just assume they’re being honest with the prices listed.”

The exterior of Family Dollar on King Stree in Windsor, North Carolina. Photograph: Cornell Watson/The Guardian

After the Guardian published its article, legislators contacted the Utah department of agriculture and food to ask if there was some way to prevent these repeated overcharges, said Miland Kofford, who heads the agency’s weights-and-measures program.

Utah has the nation’s largest average household size, which Kofford said makes residents sensitive to rising costs. “With inflation and price of everything going up,” he said, “big families are trying to budget their money the best they can.”

Kofford, whose program conducts price-accuracy inspections, had an idea for how to pressure retailers into compliance.

Historically, civil penalties for repeat offenders in Utah topped out at $5,000 per failed price-accuracy inspection. Companies tended to pay those fines without complaint, Kofford said.

But in March 2025, Family Dollar missed a payment deadline for one of the failures at the Provo store with the flawed track record. As a result, the fine automatically increased. “Soon as it doubled to $10,000, we got calls from corporate saying, ‘What’s going on? We can’t be paying $10,000,’” Kofford told the Guardian. “And all of a sudden, they changed managers down there.”

Kofford realized that $10,000 was the pain point – the threshold that catches the attention of company executives. As a result, the new law imposes a $10,000 fine per failed inspection starting with the sixth violation. It passed with bipartisan support. In addition to dollar stores, the increased penalties also apply to supermarkets, box stores and other retailers.

Family Dollar did not respond to questions about the failed inspections and the Utah law. The company told the Guardian in a statement in November that “we take customer trust seriously and are committed to ensuring pricing accuracy across our stores.” Dollar General told the Guardian at the time that it was “committed to providing customers with accurate prices on items purchased in our stores, and we are disappointed any time we fail to deliver on this commitment”.

• Jocelyn C Zuckerman contributed to this story