Dollar Tree does not come to a county like Adams by accident. It comes because the population is low, the median income is low, the labor-force participation is the lowest in the state, and the alternatives have already been killed. It comes because the hardware stores are gone and the grocery store closed and the family-owned pharmacy sold out to a regional chain that then closed the branch. Dollar Tree arrives in the places that have been stripped to the studs, and it arrives with a business model that depends on keeping them that way.
The woman in court documents known as MR did not want to shop at Dollar Tree. She found the aisles cluttered, the shelves half-blocked by unopened freight, the staffing anemic, the other customers unsettling. She went anyway in early December 2023 — cheap Christmas props for a doggy daycare photoshoot in Houston, reindeer ears and Santa hats, in and out. She picked a location in an affluent neighborhood and arrived early to avoid the crush.
A man followed her through the aisles. He stood close enough that when she turned, she had to look up. He spoke in graphic detail about what he wanted to do to her body. She told him to get away. He did not get away. He stayed behind her at the register, eyes locked on hers for minutes. When he finally left, she thought it was over. Outside in the winter air, she felt something cold against the back of her leggings.
He had ejaculated on her.
Her friend wiped her down with towels. MR, 47, went home and stepped into the shower fully clothed — washing away the forensic evidence, not yet understanding that she was part of a pattern. A sister in law enforcement told her to retrieve the leggings and return to the store. She did. A clerk listened to her account, then turned to a colleague in the back and, assuming MR could not understand Spanish, called out: Tenemos otra. We’ve got another one.
Another one. Dollar Tree’s own employees knew the pattern. Management let it run.
I have stood in the Dollar General in Friendship, on the site where one of the town’s independent stores used to be, and watched a single employee try to manage a register, stock shelves, and handle a shoplifting incident at the same time. I have driven past the Family Dollar in Adams where the parking lot is full and the staff inside is two people. I have seen the freight pallets stacked in the aisles, blocking sight lines, blocking exits, and I have thought about what would have to be true about a company’s regard for the people in its stores for that to be the acceptable condition. Now I know what was true.
Within weeks of MR speaking to local television, attorneys Anna Greenberg and Ed Blizzard were fielding cases from Colorado Springs, San Diego, Miami and more than a dozen other cities. They collected police reports and media accounts documenting more than a dozen similar incidents at Dollar Tree or its former sister chain Family Dollar, some dating back to 2017. “We couldn’t believe how big the scale was,” Greenberg said.
Six months after MR’s assault, a woman at a Dollar Tree in Philadelphia captured her own attack on video. The clip went viral. Gary Miles, 35, turned himself in within hours and pleaded guilty to indecent exposure, open lewdness and indecent assault. A year later, in Knoxville, Tennessee, Dollar Tree employee Collin Miller was caught on security camera walking past the register with his penis exposed while customers shopped. He pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor indecent exposure charge. He was not fired. Eight months after that, he was accused of following a family through the store with a camera, taking surreptitious photographs up a 16-year-old’s skirt. Police found 25,000 compromising images of women on his phone. He pleaded guilty to two counts of unlawful photographing. Dollar Tree, when asked about his continued employment, said nothing.
In San Diego, Greenberg and Blizzard found evidence that the same perpetrator had assaulted one woman, ejaculated on her, and returned six days later to assault a third victim — all in the same store. Dollar Tree did nothing.
What made Dollar Tree the destination was structural. The company had spent years earning citations from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration for blocked exits, rat infestations, improper drug storage, and chronic understaffing. In 2022, an OSHA administrator publicly accused its rival Dollar General of valuing “profits more than the safety of the people who work in their stores” — a characterization that applied equally to Dollar Tree. The Biden administration brokered a settlement in which Dollar Tree and Family Dollar agreed to pay $1.35 million in outstanding safety fines and overhaul workplace practices without admitting liability. The conditions that made Dollar Tree stores convenient hunting grounds — the disorganized aisles, the unstaffed floors, the unsecured camera systems — were the same conditions the federal government had already been fining the company for.
Here is the pattern, stated plain: a company operates thousands of stores in low-income and rural neighborhoods where there are few alternatives. It runs those stores on skeleton crews. It tolerates hazards. When women are assaulted in those stores, it does not produce surveillance footage. It does not apologize. It does not alert other shoppers. And when sued, it argues in court that the victim suffered no physical harm.
In a sworn deposition, a Dollar Tree lawyer pressed MR on whether she had experienced damage from a man ejaculating on her. “My life is not the same since that incident,” she responded. “I totally was caught off guard. I didn’t have a chance to defend myself.” When asked what she wanted, she said: “You have to take accountability of what is happening in your stores. You’re causing pain to people. I don’t know if it’s because of the bottom line, or what, but it’s happening and you guys need to stop it.”
Dollar Tree’s legal strategy has been to treat each assault as an isolated event. In an August 2025 email to MR’s attorneys, company lawyer Wesley Welmaker described the attack on MR as a “one-off event at Dollar Tree in the River Oaks shopping center.” Greenberg responded by cataloging ten sexual assaults at Dollar Trees documented in the previous eighteen months, six involving ejaculation. By the time of the article’s publication, her research team had identified 63 officially documented sex crimes at Dollar Tree and Family Dollar locations — fewer than five per year before 2020, as many as eighteen per year after December 2023. Sixteen involved masturbation or ejaculation.
One-off. Sixty-three times.
The perpetrators found Dollar Tree through their own ecosystem. Greenberg’s team uncovered an online subculture of men who call themselves “gooners” — a pornography-fueled community built around obsessive masturbation, self-loathing, and escalating dares. Some operated in private. Some filmed themselves committing assaults in Dollar Tree stores and sold the footage. One individual going by the name “Goon-God” offered more than 200 sharking videos for $25 on an amateur porn site, including promotional footage that appeared to show an attack on an oblivious Dollar Tree shopper pushing a cart down a soap aisle. Another man caught masturbating at a Dollar Tree in Fern Park, Florida told police he did this regularly and uploaded the videos to an OnlyFans page.
I want to say something about the men who do this, because I live in a county where the rhetoric of masculine self-reliance is load-bearing. These are men who perform dominance over women who are alone, in stores that were designed to be understaffed, in communities where those women have nowhere else to shop. That is not self-reliance. That is predation, and the contradiction is one Berry has been naming for fifty years — the same culture that tells a man he is tough and independent and beholden to nothing can produce a man who films himself assaulting a stranger and sells the video for twenty-five dollars.
Sociologist Michael Halpin of Dalhousie University described the dynamic: “They’re not just doing this for personal gratification. They want an audience to engage with it, and they want other men potentially to do it too.” The online forums tracked view counts, comments, and praise from other men. “Damn that’s pretty cool,” read one comment under a 2018 sharking video. “How did he not get caught there lol,” read another.
Psychoanalyst Jamieson Webster of the New School in New York located the choice of venue in the economics of humiliation. “A dollar store is the most abject place, where people who are already at the bottom go because they can’t afford anything else. In some way this is about trying to get a leg up on the lowest rung you can fall to,” she said. The perpetrators targeted stores where women were least likely to be protected and most likely to be disbelieved.
Think about what that means in a county like Adams. The Dollar General in Friendship is one of two discount retailers left. The other is the Family Dollar in Adams. Both operate on skeleton crews. Both have freight stacked in the aisles. Both are in communities where the nearest alternative — a full-service retailer with adequate staffing, working cameras, and enough employees to keep the aisles clear — is a forty-minute drive on Highway 13 to Wisconsin Dells. A woman in Friendship who needs to buy cleaning supplies or school supplies or Christmas decorations has effectively one option within fifteen miles, and that option has been cited by OSHA for the same conditions that make these assaults possible. If Dollar Tree is not going to maintain those stores safely, no one is going to maintain them, because no one else is coming.
Dollar Tree, in its statement, said it was committed to “maintaining a safe and secure environment” and to “effective safety and security” including “ongoing safety education, regular policy reviews, risk assessment and mitigation activities, investments in physical security measures, and collaboration with local law enforcement.” When asked about continuing criticisms that it prioritized the bottom line over staffing and security at its 9,000 US outlets, the company had no comment.
The statement is notable for what it does not contain: any acknowledgment of the specific assaults, any reference to the women who were attacked, any explanation for why surveillance footage was not preserved, why employees did not call police, why a man caught masturbating in front of customers was retained on staff for eight more months until he was arrested again.
MR’s lawsuit, and a companion case in San Diego, argue that Dollar Tree should have maintained adequate staffing and security, should have alerted police to the assaults on its premises, and should have warned other shoppers. The legal theory is negligence — the most basic obligation a business owes the people who enter its stores. Dollar Tree is fighting it. Dollar Tree will keep fighting it, because it can, because it has more money than MR and more money than any of the sixty-three women its stores have failed, and because the communities where its stores are the only option do not have the political or legal infrastructure to make it stop.
Here is the Community Collapse Contradiction as I have watched it operate in Adams County: Dollar Tree arrives because the town is hollowed out. The town is hollowed out because the mills closed and the farms consolidated and the banks left and the independent retailers could not compete. Dollar Tree fills the vacancy with a store that runs on two employees and freight blocking the fire exit. The store becomes, by default, a community institution — a place where people buy things they need, a place where people go. When something terrible happens in that place, the company treats it as an event that occurred in one of its 9,000 stores, not as a violation of the community it serves, because it does not serve the community. It extracts from the community. That is the difference, and every woman who walks into a Dollar Tree in a county like ours is carrying the weight of it whether she knows it or not.
Two and a half years after her assault, MR said she had found no peace. “I feel like crying,” she said, “and then I get so fucking angry.”
The anger is warranted. Dollar Tree’s strategy works precisely because the stores are located in places where people have no alternatives, where the company can argue that an assault is a one-off, and where the women who were attacked cannot afford to fight it. The company made a calculation: that places like Adams County — and there are hundreds of them — are worth more as extraction sites than as communities worth protecting. The company made that calculation, and it is running on it, and the women who shop in those stores are the ones who pay.
Support is available. In the US, Rainn offers help at 800-656-4673. In the UK, Rape Crisis at 0808 500 2222. In Australia, 1800Respect at 1800 737 732. International helplines at ibiblio.org/rcip/internl.html.