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Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has accused the Fort Worth-based website Cheaper Than Dirt, which primarily sells firearms, ammunition and hunting gear, of price gouging at the start of the pandemic.
The AG’s office identified over 4,000 sales that involved price gouging and has directed Cheaper Than Dirt to pay $402,786 in refunds to consumers, according to court documents filed this month.
More than 100 people have complained to the AG’s office about Cheaper Than Dirt, the Houston Chronicle reported earlier this year.
Early on in the pandemic-fueled buying binge, readers were sending us screen grabs from CTD’s site showing cases of 5.56 ammo priced at $970. This was at a time when other retailers were selling the same ammo at somewhere around $450.
But that apparently wasn’t all consumers were seeing.
Additionally, the following weekend that Abbott issued the disaster declaration, Cheaper Than Dirt manually raised its prices outside of its normal schedule.
“Making these manual ‘real-time’ price changes caused confusion for consumers because the prices consumers saw on the website pages when selecting items for purchase were different from the prices that appeared in the final check-out cart,” the AG’s office said in court documents.
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