They ARE fun because it’s like going to a garage sale – you never know what you’ll get. It’s a graveyard of new products that crashed and burned. Coffee-floured soda, chocolate beans, hilariously misbranded ‘energy’ food, food with jokes written on it, just the most random things. Unlike the boring grocery store it’s different every time you go!
Daiso is a good example of how the dollar store concept can still be pretty high quality.
Never been, but it sounds like Dollar General is aiming for this level?
Safeway has a pretty bad rep, no? I haven’t been to one in 30 years.
My daughter put it nicely, I think: “At the Dollar Store, everything in the store is a dollar. At Dollar General, everything is generally a dollar.”
Here in Northern Virginia/Maryland there is a chain called “Lotte” that started out as a Korean supermarket some years back, but they’ve largely expanded to become sort of an all-purpose “non-Anglo” market, stocking a bunch of Indian, South & Central American, Chinese and Japanese stuff. If I ever come across an ingredient that the local (mainstream) supermarket doesn’t have, there is an excellent chance that Lotte will have it… along with, you know, dried pickled squid.
My kids used to trek there on the weekly basis because showing up to lunch with something from their (extensive) Japanese candy isle was a sure way of gaining status at school.
H-Mart is my favorite grocery store at the moment. It’s not really any cheaper than bougie chains like Kroger and Harris Teeter (to say nothing of outright absurd richie-rich joints like Whole Foods or Fresh Market), but the enormous selection of fresh, well-maintained, well-organized Asian and subcontinental fare is just mind-boggling when compared to the haphazard, dingy, disorganized explosions of expired food that are typical at most of the other Asian grocers here in the Raleigh-Durham area. I mean those other places have their charm, for sure, and cost way less than H-Mart in general, but man. . . sometimes a man just wants to choose from sixteen varieties of perfectly shrink-wrapped doenjang and not fee; judged for it, dammit!
I hate to write a rant-post making me sound like a snob but I hate dollar stores. To me there is literally not one product in the entire store worth owning for any purpose, under any circumstances, but I STILL end up buying things. They just draw you in to a purchase with a ridiculous low price. A tape measure for a dollar? Sure, even if it’s crap. Two plus sized Coffee Crisp for a dollar? Sure, even if they’re oldish. A spatula, flipper, and ladle pack for a dollar? Huh, I wonder if it will poison my family… I’ll just get it, and not use them on anything too hot. See the mentality? All shit I don’t want or need. THIS FUCKING SOAP DOESN’T EVEN LATHER! There’s no bubbles! Now I have to work my way through a pint of this shit! :)
That’s how I am with Steam bundles. You say I can have twenty games, and they’re just a dollar? How can I resist!
Everything we’ve ever bought at a pound store here in the UK has either fell apart or not worked at all. Like the scotch tape doesn’t stick, the pencil crayons have no color and the leads are broken, the scissors don’t cut. Anybody buying shit here will be buying it again and in the end spend wind up spending more, or are just living amongst useless products that fail. And I don’t want to know how things like their batteries will fail. These places are a giant scam on the poor. Maybe it’s good for like… paper? Spatulas? But I’d half expect the paper to be recycled wax and the spatulas to melt in your pan and the fumes to give you cancer.
My mother-in-law loves to brag about being next door neighbors with the family that started H-mart back in the 80s.
Apparently they were all living in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia(!) at the same time as part of Samsung’s expat population as part of their construction business
We have a large Hmong and southeast Asian population here now and there are several large Asian grocery stores, but I don’t think any of them are chains. I went into one once looking for soy sauce I think and I was just too overwhelmed to go back in.
Dollar stores are all over Houston too but I never thought they were depressing in the way that article makes them. I just thought they were another kind of discount store.
There were a couple conveniently next door to my old gym so I’d pop in after a workout to grab a sport drink, they do have some recognizable brand names.
So I know someone in food sales. Her primary accounts are Family Dollar and Dollar General. They are nearly a completely different market as to what they want and what they sell to end customers. Family Dollar would be far, far above Dollar General in the quality of items sold, as well as the cost they want to pass to end customers.
There’s a reason. Lots of the crap these stores sell ISN’T normal stuff in super-extra clearance. It’s purpose made, bought and labeled for this kind of market.
If you want to know more, there’s a really good 99% Invisible show about the Chinese city that makes a huge quantity of this crap:
Diego
Wow that makes a ton of sense. DG as the frontrunner for direct-to-USA low income goods made purposefully at the lowest possible quality and price levels, in China.
Thanks for the interesting link. And for introducingme to that site… looks like some great reading there.
They opened one on Rte. 15 between Jericho and Underhill here, a while back. Sparked something of a controversy, as the area is sort of split between affluent or relatively so professionals who want more green space and more house than they can get downtown for the equivalent mortgage (or who just don’t want to be downtown with two college campuses cheek to jowl), and the more indigenous population of semi-rural folks who have lived there for generations and who used to work in agriculture but now work in service, retail, or construction and the like. The former group was aghast at the evil suddenly in their midst. The latter was pretty happy to have something close by that wasn’t hipster boutique priced.
I’ve been in the store and those like it. Sometimes I’ve found something more or less useful. Mostly not. I do think it’s a fascinating discussion about their impact. As an outlet for surplus goods, I have no problem with 'em. As an outlet for made to spec junk, I’m more conflicted.
I rarely go to them, but I find them useful for buying field supplies for lapidary stuff, like spray bottles and buckets to put specimens in. :)
The dollar stores are handy for one time use kind of things like party banners, streamers, that sort of thing although I’ve also found that other stores will sometimes sell those for less and as a larger package too. The Hot Wheels I occasionally buy my nephew are less than a dollar as long as I don’t buy them in a dollar store.
Yeah, Daiso is super fun.