• The FTC and 20 US states are suing Dollar General over its pricing practices.
• A complaint filed Monday alleges the company repeatedly mislabeled products and overcharged customers.
• Dollar General said it will defend the lawsuit while remaining open to discussing a resolution.

Dollar General is facing fresh federal scrutiny over its pricing practices.

The US Federal Trade Commission said Monday it has filed a lawsuit, along with 20 states, accusing the discount retailer of deceptive pricing on its shelves, price tags, and advertisements.

"Dollar General has, for years, repeatedly mislabeled prices, overcharged consumers and failed to correct the issue despite extensive corporate knowledge of the problem," the FTC said in a statement.

The company operates more than 21,000 US stores and typically serves customers in more rural and low-income areas of the country.

The filings say Dollar General has received tens of thousands of complaints from shoppers who said they did not receive an advertised price and that the company failed to adequately address the problem.

As a result, Dollar General received millions of dollars from overcharging customers, the FTC alleged.

In a statement, Dollar General said it will defend the lawsuit while remaining open to discussing a resolution.

"The lawsuit filed today by the Federal Trade Commission and several States suggests that we have abandoned our mission and willfully disregarded the affordability needs of our customers. Nothing could be further from the truth," the statement said.

Dollar General said its goal is accuracy between shelf and register prices. When discrepancies occur, store teams are expected to make things right for customers.

The company said it cooperated with the investigation since February, producing documents, data, and testimony. The FTC and the company had exchanged potential remedies when the lawsuit was filed, the company said.

The action comes less than two weeks after New York Attorney General Letitia James reached a settlement of nearly $1.9 million in food and personal items as a civil penalty for overcharging shoppers in the state. New York did not join the FTC's complaint.

US consumers have been particularly worried about fairness in retail pricing as more stores introduce digital price tags. Both Walmart and Target have issued public statements promising price transparency and consistency online and at the register. Home Depot recently did the same.

• Verizon's CEO says he assumes SpaceX will flawlessly execute its US ambitions — but he's not worried.
• In order for Starlink to compete, it will still need a lot of land-based infrastructure.
• That building could require SpaceX to spend a half trillion dollars over up to eight years, he said.

In business, as in war, the safest bet is often to avoid underestimating your competitors, even when the odds appear to be in your favor.

Verizon CEO Dan Schulman says he's a student of that philosophy when it comes to Elon Musk's ambitions to develop SpaceX's Starlink into a significant US network player.

"Clearly, the tech and the wireless landscape is rapidly evolving, and we need to rapidly evolve along with that," he said during the company's third-quarter earnings call Monday. "I also operate under the assumption that everything SpaceX says they will do, they will do, and that they will execute flawlessly."

Setting aside Musk's track record of delivering on his eyebrow-raising promises, Schulman said there are significant technical and financial hurdles that Starlink would have to clear to meaningfully compete with established networks like Verizon. But it is possible.

"If they build a terrestrial network, it will basically look and feel like every other network," he said. "I think we should take it quite seriously."

News earlier this month that Starlink had acquired a batch of mobile-friendly low-band spectrum sent the share prices of the major US mobile carriers falling by approximately 10%. Verizon is the only one of the three to partially recover from the drop.

"Their service just can't compete with a terrestrial network in suburban and urban areas, where like 98% of our revenues are," he said of the satellite-based system. "We're somewhere between 100 to 1000 times more efficient than they are."

Building a competitive US network, especially for mobile, would require building as many as 80,000 large cell towers on Earth linked with some combination of satellites and fiber optics, Schulman said.

Schulman estimates that project would cost up to a half trillion dollars over six to eight years, with a minimum of four to six years to actually build out the network.

"Then they need to build retail customer service, back office systems, et cetera., and all of that gets them basically the same network and same capabilities and same cost structure as what we have today," Schulman said.

After the call, Musk responded to the forecast with a post on X: "Will take 2 or 3 years."

The Verizon chief's remarks come less than a week after his AT&T counterpart, John Stankey, brushed off concerns that Starlink's mobile network could pose a threat to his business.

"I wouldn't over-rotate on what I would call one carrier of low band spectrum," he said.