Kenya Slaughter put up with a lot when she worked at Dollar General. She says her starting pay at the Alexandria, Louisiana, location, one of the dollar-store chain’s nearly twenty thousand shops, was around $9 an hour. A woman once ran into the store with a butcher knife, locking herself in the break room and refusing to leave. Faulty air conditioning was a problem too.

“We can’t even control our own air,” Slaughter told me, echoing a complaint that is pervasive among the chain’s employees. When I spoke to David Williams, another Dollar General worker, last year, he described drinking two bottles of Powerade and a large bottle of water during his shift to ward off dehydration and heat strokes at his store in New Orleans.

There are other issues alleged by workers: rat infestations, fire hazards, and even, according to Slaughter, a lack of running water.