Mouse-infested warehouse lands Family Dollar Stores with record $41M fine

Family Dollar Stores was this week ordered to pay $41.6 million for using a rodent-infested warehouse to distribute food, cosmetics and medical devices to more than 400 stores across the South.

The largest criminal penalty of its kind comes after a U.S. Food and Drug Administration investigation found "live rodents, dead and decaying rodents, rodent feces, urine, and odors, and evidence of gnawing and nesting," at the company's distribution center in West Memphis, Arkansas, the Justice Department said in a statement.

The company — which has 8,000 stores across 46 states and was bought by rival Dollar Tree in 2015 — pleaded guilty to one misdemeanor count of causing goods to be "adulterated while being held under insanitary conditions" at a federal court hearing in Little Rock on Monday,

The department said the fine was the largest ever in a food safety case in the United States. As part of a plea agreement, both Family Dollar Stores and Dollar Tree must meet " robust" corporate reporting guidelines for the next three years.

"When consumers go to the store, they have the right to expect that the food and drugs on the shelves have been kept in clean, uncontaminated conditions," acting Associate Attorney General Benjamin C. Mizer said in the statement.

The plea agreement said that in August 2020, the company first received reports of "mouse and pest issues," although deliveries continued to 404 stores in Alabama, Missouri, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas and Tennessee. The company admitted that some employees were aware in January 2021 that the conditions at the warehouse were illegal.

Yet, it continued shipping goods from the warehouse until January 2022 when the FDA's investigation revealed the extent of the