Category: default, Local Businesses, Pointless Digressions || By

The first rule of shopping in dollar stores:

The larger the image of the "stars and stripes" on the package, the more likely that the product was made in China.

The corollary to the first rule:

If the flag has the wrong number of stars and/or stripes, the likelihood approaches 100 percent.

The second rule of shopping in dollar stores:

Brand names are meaningless. Most brand names are now slapped on junk indiscriminately.

. . .

Man, if you really want to get depressed about the U.S. economy --- and you probably already are --- wheel through one of the Mon Valley's many, many dollar stores.

It's not just the fact that so many of the products are made in China, it's that they're so appallingly, obviously cheap --- and people are still buying them.

And I'm going to guess that most of the people buying dollar-store shampoo or school supplies aren't doing it because they want to. They have to.

. . .

Now, I've long been an advocate of buying certain things from the dollar store. Wrapping paper at Christmas, for instance, or tablecloths for picnics.

Why spend big money for something that only has to look pretty for 10 minutes, and which is designed to be thrown away?

But dollar-store kitchen utensils, towels, shower curtains, kids' clothes and toys just feel and look awful in ways that even stuff from Kmart and Wal-Mart doesn't approach.

There was a story in the Detroit News last month claiming that "people in mink coats and Ralph Lauren wind breakers" are evidence of an increasingly "upscale" clientele at dollar stores. I'm sure that dollar stores do have a sort of "reverse snob appeal" to some people.

But I think that's a small subset of people. If you walk into fifth grade wearing a shirt from Dollar General, you might as well have a name tag that says "I'm poor!"

. . .

Despite this, or maybe because of it, dollar stores are one of the fastest growing segments of retailing. Although Family Dollar's sales are down 4.4 percent, it's still a Fortune 500 company (number 359).

Dollar General is No. 273 on the same list, ahead of Nordstrom's, Dillard's and Saks Fifth Avenue.

In a lot of ways, dollar stores are just a refinement of the old five-and-10 stores. There was nothing particularly upscale about Murphy's, Woolworth's or H.L. Green's, and the "fashions" those stores sold were often pretty awful, just like the stuff dollar stores sell.

On the other hand, those stores carried more of a variety (which is why they called themselves "variety stores") and usually offered better-quality brands alongside the bargain-basement stuff. You could get the Murphy's brand hammer, or you could buy a Stanley.

At dollar stores, you get one variety of an item --- chintzy.

. . .

And the old five-and-10s put a premium on --- for lack of a better word --- showmanship. The displays (especially the endcap features) were fun to look at. Let's face it, they put the puppies and tropical fish at the back of the store so that kids would drag their parents past the other stuff.

But dollar store merchandise seems like it's thrown onto the shelves. Sometimes the packing cartons double as the "displays."

I don't know what shopping in the Soviet Union was like, but I have a feeling the experience was similar to, say, Dollar Tree. ("In Russia, dollar store shops you!")

There can be some unintentional comedy at times, too. Though the chain stores are dreary and look pretty much the same, up at Olympia Shopping Center, in the old G.C. Murphy Co. store, there's a store called Warehouse Outlet. It used to be located at Eastland Mall.

. . .

Warehouse Outlet carries a lot of the same imported stuff as the big dollar stores --- bolts that don't quite fit the nuts, misshapen serving spoons, questionable extension cords.

But it also buys up closeouts from defunct retailers. That means Warehouse Outlet could supply auto-body touch-up paint to most of the Tri-State area. Unfortunately, it's mostly in '70s colors like orange and lemon yellow.

If you've got a 1974 Dodge van and need avocado paint, well, they're your go-to guys.

They've got an entire endcap that's stocked with toy trucks emblazoned with the Pitt Panthers' logos ... to be more specific, the disliked, discontinued logos from 10 years ago. They're labeled "LIMITED EDITION ... 1 of 5,000." By my count, about 4,975 are still available, so act now.

Also in the toy department: A stack of helicopters in New York Giants colors. Yeah, if you want your kid to get a beating from the children of Steelers fans, buy him one of those.

. . .

As of Saturday, back in the paperback book department, they still had plenty of copies of Bill Clinton's "Plan for America's Future" for $1. There were also guides to operating MS-DOS, and the TV department was well-stocked with prerecorded VHS tapes of public-domain cartoons.

The stationery department was offering great prices on Memorex five-and-a-quarter-inch floppy discs and line-feed labels for dot-matrix printers.

At some point, I suspect that it's more expensive to store (and dust) this stuff than to just throw it away. But it's got great entertainment value, if you're a little bit sick, like me.

. . .

Still, it's pretty depressing to look at a shelf full of paper products labeled "Made in China" and realize that it's apparently cheaper to ship even bulky items like paper napkins and notebook fillers from overseas than to make them here.

When we can't even crank out toilet paper profitably, there isn't much left for us to do.

Sometimes I wonder what they sell in the dollar stores in China. (Or do they call them "yuan stores"?) Maybe there's some guy wandering around those saying, "Why do they keep shipping this 'Made in the U.S.A.' crap over here?"

If you're that guy, email me. I can get you a great deal on touch-up paint and toy trucks in the Pitt Panthers' 1997 colors.