Nephi • In the small central Utah town of Nephi, Michelle and Brandan Tippetts have been shopping at the Dollar General across the street from their home for as long as they can remember.

They stop in several times a week to pick up odds and ends, whether it’s chips and soda or laundry detergent and toiletries. For larger hauls, they have groceries delivered from the Walmart Supercenter in nearby Payson.

Before her Dollar General trips, Michelle Tippetts said, she always looks through the store’s advertisements, either bringing one with her or grabbing one near the entrance. It’s one of the few places in the town to buy groceries and household items.

Others in the neighborhood also use the Dollar General as a convenience store, including Meagan Harmon, who lives nearby. But she has since stopped shopping there, despite its proximity to her home.

Harmon said the store often feels disorganized, and employees frequently come and go. She also remembers a time when she stopped in to buy Tylenol and spotted a toy marked for $6.

“I was like, oh, six bucks. Like, cool, I’ll get that,” she said from her porch late last month. “And I got to the register, and it was like $12. So I was like, I’m not buying that.”

A store employee adjusted the price for her, and Harmon bought the toy, she said.

Harmon’s experience, and similar complaints from Dollar General customers across the country, are at the center of a new federal lawsuit against the discount retailer.

The Nephi store is among those mentioned in the complaint filed Oct. 26 by the Federal Trade Commission and 20 states, including Utah.

The complaint alleges Dollar General has cost consumers millions of dollars over several years through deceptive pricing practices, repeatedly charging customers more at the register than what’s displayed on shelves, price tags and advertisements.

Dollar General has disputed the allegations in a statement, arguing that the lawsuit “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 continued.

The company said pricing mistakes can happen, but employees are trained to correct them for customers. The retailer has also cooperated with the FTC’s investigation, the statement notes, despite an “unusually accelerated timeline.”

As part of that investigation, the company said it provided more than 200,000 documents and over 350 gigabytes of data on short notice, along with testimony from company representatives.

For shoppers who ‘stretch their dollars’

Dollar General stores are primarily located in rural communities with fewer than 20,000 people, according to the complaint.

Its core customers are people who rely on the retailer to “stretch their dollars,” with most coming from low- and fixed-income households earning $35,000 or less a year.

The company’s CEO, according to the filing, has described its customers as people who “run out of money before the month runs out,” and depend on $1 items to make ends meet.

“But Dollar General has for years engaged in deceptive conduct that harms the very consumers it claims to serve,” the complaint alleges.

In Utah, Dollar General operates 15 stores, according to the complaint. Between Jan. 10, 2023, and April 15, 2026, those stores failed more than 45% of pricing inspections across the state.

The Nephi store alone failed 15 of 19 pricing inspections, including 10 in a row between May 21, 2025, and April 8, 2026, the filing states. Of the pricing inaccuracies inspectors found, 63.9% were overcharges.

Inside the Nephi store late last month, shoppers pushed bright yellow carts through the aisles, picking up last-minute Halloween items, cards, sodas and snacks. A delivery truck was parked outside and towers of boxes blocked some aisles, forcing shoppers to weave around them.

Bright-yellow price tags advertised deals such as three select 2-liter soda bottles for $6 and three boxes of cereal bars for $9.

Some longtime shoppers, like the Tippettses, said they haven’t encountered any mismatched prices. Others, like Harmon and her neighbor Britney Ford, said they’ve noticed small differences from time to time, though for Ford, it hasn’t kept her from going back.

She said she’s only noticed the discrepancies after getting home and looking at her receipt.

Rural Utahns already cutting costs

In Nephi and other rural communities, rising costs are forcing families to rethink what they can afford, from grocery trips to how often they leave town.

For Aubrey and Darren Messick, that has meant relying on food donations from a local church, cutting back on trips to the grocery store and changing what they feed their four children.

The family used to make regular trips to the Walmart in Payson. But because their cars run on diesel fuel, even a short drive has become costly. Now, they make the trip to Payson about once a month and rarely leave Nephi otherwise to save on gas.

Aubrey Messick said she no longer fills up her tank, instead putting in about $20 at a time to get by.

“We can’t even afford to do a full shopping trip anymore,” she said. “We go and get a few loaves of bread, some eggs and some milk. We’re struggling a lot.”

Fresh produce has also become less common in their home, she said. When she buys bananas or apples, her children eat them quickly. More often, she buys frozen fruits and vegetables, along with canned goods, pasta and oatmeal so their groceries last longer.

As rising costs force families to cut back on expenses, the lawsuit argues, even small overcharges can make it harder for low-income shoppers to get by.

“The consequences of these overcharges fall most heavily on shoppers living on razor-thin margins — families who carefully budget every dollar and rely on accurate, transparent pricing simply to meet their day-to-day needs,” the filing states.

It alleges Dollar General failed for years to put safeguards in place to prevent overcharging, “shifting the burden of its own operational shortcomings onto the very communities and consumers who can least afford it.”