The Dollar Ain't Worthless, Yet

I'm 34.83 years old and I just did go into my first *dollar store*. I checked out a brand new Dollar Tree in Weymouth, MA this afternoon.

I must say that there is definitely some good cheap stuff in there, I think. I purchased some Rubbermaid plastic containers for 50 cents a piece. I can't even imagine they're that cheap at Wal-Mart. Now I can tell my wife to throw them in the garbage after she eats her lunch at work - though she certainly won't. [I find these things, along with *Gladware*, a real pain in the butt to wash - oil and grease adhere to them, they get water stuck in the lids and don't dry off,....]

And there seemed to be other useful junk in there as well though I couldn't really focus. I had my two urchins with me and my son was wandering the store with his dollar bill. The store is a good teaching ground for my son since we're currently doing Kumon's Dollars and Sense book. Also, I'm trying to teach him the transitory property of money. In other words, if he spends his $1 on the water pistol at Dollar Tree then he won't be able to rent that DVD (Redbox) at the supermarket.

There were a bunch a books at Dollar Tree that had price tags on them for $17 or so. It was only on my way out, after asking the cashier, that I discovered those books still only cost $1. There were a ton of anti-Bush and anti-Iraq books to put it mildly. Standing out among them was this one:



You know why these *pamphlets* are getting liquidated for $1 each?

Because they were over-supplied and under-demanded to begin with. A full audit of book publishers *losses* would no doubt expose a mountain of *bias* in terms of what books got seeded and which ones made money.

This would be the ignominious risk of writing a book - i.e. seeing it at a *dollar store*, or, like Frank Rich's book, seeing it offered used for a mere 1 cent on Amazon!



As you can see from the above chart, *dollar stores* are, along with pawnshops, repossession firms, credit counselors, etc., one of the beneficiaries of the Greater Depression - for the time being anyway.

I do wonder about the business aspect of these retailers. Is their inventory all of the liquidation variety? Or do manufacturers, like Rubbermaid, develop products specifically for them?