Archer Family Of Brooklyn

The Dollar-Store Economy

Heather Mann writes a blog called Craft Dollar Store, which evolved from his occasional trips to dollar stores discount extreme near his home in Salem, Ore. His players admired his gift to buy stuff really cheap and then do something cool and beautiful from the stack. His knockoff "alien abduction lamp" is property from a lesser light, two plastic bowls (flying saucer), a clear acrylic cup (tractor beam) and a small plastic toy cow (abducted) - all purchased about five dollars.

As we entered her favorite store, a Dollar Tree in Salem, Mann warned me that I’d have to hustle to keep up with her. “Look at these,” she said. “Cute.” Before I could even examine her find — a rack of smushy yellow chickens on sticks (plastic toy? Garden ornament? Edible peeps?) — she had ricocheted down another aisle, where I found her studying a prominent display garishly pushing a superabsorbent shammy. Mann noted that this was not the famously kitschy ShamWow! but a very cheap imitation called, merely, Wow. The display boasted, “As Seen on TV.”

“As in, you’ve seen the real ad on TV,” she said.

All around, the stacks of products and aisles of merchandise screamed a technicolor siren song. I found four AA batteries for my tape recorder for a dollar ($5.49 when I spotted them the next day at RadioShack), and dish towels that might have sold for $5 elsewhere were just a buck. Mann now brandished something called a “wineglass holder” the way Jacques Cousteau might have held up a starfish. It was a small aluminum device meant to clip onto your plastic picnic plate “for hands-free dining and socializing.” At a price of four for a dollar, it’s a good deal if your world is overrun with miserly wine connoisseurs.

When I looked up, Mann was already around the corner, having fun with a bottle of discount detergent boasting a “bingo bango mango” scent. Just up the way was a bin of brown bags marked either “A Surprise for a Boy” or “A Surprise for a Girl.” Mann’s 5-year-old niece accompanied us on our tour and was crazed with excitement over these, and the truth is, we were all in the same exact mood. All around us, strange things hung here and there, urging us on an unending treasure hunt. Perhaps, like me, you have driven by and occasionally stopped in a dollar store and assumed that there were two kinds of customers, those there for the kitschy pleasure of it all — the Heather Manns of the world — and those for whom the dollar store affords a low-rent version of the American Consumer Experience, a place where the poor can splurge. That’s true. But current developments in this, the low end of retail, suggest that a larger shift in the American consumer market is under way.

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