A documented pattern of 63 officially recorded sex crimes at Dollar Tree and Family Dollar stores since 2017, with the annual rate rising from fewer than five per year before 2020 to as many as 18 per year after a December 2023 Houston assault, sits at the intersection of two reinforcing mechanisms: a cost-minimization business model that structurally underinvests in store security, and an online subculture that gamifies and monetizes public sexual assault. Sixteen of the 63 incidents involved masturbation or ejaculation. Dollar Tree has characterized each in court as a one-off event; the company’s own frontline staff have recognized otherwise. The two mechanisms are not competing explanations. They operate as one machine, coupled through a content pipeline that moves at digital speed, faster than any institutional actor can respond. Interventions targeting only one gear leave the other intact. The pattern persists because the cost of maintaining it remains below the cost of fixing it.
A pattern that was invisible
A 47-year-old Houston business owner identified in court papers as MR reported that in December 2023, a man followed her through the aisles of a Dollar Tree in the River Oaks shopping center and later ejaculated on her leggings in the parking lot. She told a store clerk what had happened. The clerk shouted to a colleague in Spanish: “We’ve got another one.”
That remark is load-bearing. It documents that frontline staff had prior reports from the same location — reports that reached store level but never aggregated upward. Her lawyers, Anna Greenberg and Ed Blizzard, subsequently compiled 63 officially recorded sex crimes at Dollar Tree or its former sister chain Family Dollar across multiple states. The annual rate rose from fewer than five per year before 2020 to as many as 18 per year following MR’s assault. Sixteen of the 63 incidents involved masturbation or ejaculation. The cases include a freshly hired sheriff’s deputy, a Dollar Tree employee, and multiple incidents at the same store on consecutive days. The pattern crossed state lines, but it was never aggregated by the company, by law enforcement, or by any regulator. The 63-case dataset exists only because plaintiffs’ counsel compiled it from existing public records. No institutional actor required or performed that work. Without detection, the pattern does not exist for the company to respond to.
Dollar Tree paid $1.35 million in OSHA fines over safety violations, and in August 2023 the Biden administration reached a settlement under which Dollar Tree and Family Dollar agreed to overhaul workplace safety arrangements. An OSHA administrator separately accused Dollar General — a structurally similar chain — of valuing “profits more than the safety of the people who work in their stores.” In its lawsuit filings, the company has argued that MR is not entitled to damages under Texas law because she suffered no physical harm. Company attorney Wesley Welmaker described the assault in an August 2025 email as “a one-off event at Dollar Tree in the River Oaks shopping center.” In a public statement, Dollar Tree said it is “committed to maintaining a safe and secure environment” and takes reports of inappropriate behavior “extremely seriously.” Greenberg characterized the company’s litigation arguments as “a plethora of stupid arguments.” MR told a Dollar Tree lawyer during a deposition: “You need to take accountability of what is happening in your stores. You’re causing pain to people.”
Two causal threads
Two causal chains produce this pattern, and they reinforce each other.
The first is structural. Dollar Tree’s business model depends on minimal operating costs to sustain the low price point. Chronic understaffing is the proximate operational expression: fewer staff means less surveillance, longer intervals between employees on the floor, and more unsupervised aisles. High merchandise density and cluttered aisles obstruct sightlines and provide cover for perpetrators. The 2023 OSHA settlement and the administrator’s public characterization of Dollar General as prioritizing “profits more than the safety of the people who work in their stores” establish that these conditions are chronic and structurally embedded rather than episodic. The root cause is architectural: the cost architecture itself makes per-store security investment structurally unattractive when incidents are characterized as isolated and litigation costs remain low. The dynamic is self-reinforcing. Each round of underinvestment makes the next assault more likely. Litigation costs that result pressure further cuts. The pattern is a classic burden-shifting loop, in which the cost of doing nothing stays lower than the cost of doing something, year after year, until the equation changes.
The second causal chain is social and digital. Perpetrators belong to an online subculture whose participants call themselves “gooners” and refer to public ejaculation as “sharking” or “tagging.” Some post videos of assaults for audience engagement and monetization. A user named “Goon-God” offered more than 200 videos for $25 on an amateur porn site, with a promotional clip that appeared to show an attack on an oblivious Dollar Tree shopper. In a separate case in Fern Park, Florida, a man arrested after filming
Analytical techniques used in this piece
This analysis applies the methods below. Each links to a short, plain-English explainer you can read and reuse.
- Root-Cause Analysis
- Traces a symptom back along its causal chain to the conditions that actually generated it.
- Wicked Futures
- Explores a long-horizon, deeply entangled future with no clean resolution.
- Wicked Problems
- Treats a problem as wicked — no stopping rule, no clean test of success, every attempt consequential.