Here in the UK there are an abundance of thrift stores named “Poundland” PoundWorld" “PoundStretcher” and so on.
90% of the stuff sold in these stores costs £1, nothing is over a £1 in price.
Some items are 2 for a £, 4 for a £, or even 6 for a £.
I would hazard a guess and say that of all the stuff on sale at least 75% of it is branded, ie…Heinz, John West, Cadbury. The other 25% are store branded products.
Yesterday I purchased, among other stuff, a large jar of Gales honey, the label clearly says £2.29 which is the price I would have paid in Tesco supermarket, it cost me £1., less than half the recommended price.
6 cans of Coke for £1, 6 bottles of OJ…£1, all 250ml cans/bottles
How can these stores make money given that they can’t be buying from suppliers in huge quantities like the supermarkets do?
A lot of them go to bankrupt stock auctions, and buy big cases of random shit for very little. There’s also buying low-quality stuff direct from Chinese manufacturers or importers.
How close to the sell-by date are most of these goods? A lot of the “Dollar Store” type places over here sell food that is close to or past the sell-by date, or doesn’t have a sell-by date but has been on shelf for a while and has been superseded by a new design in packaging or somewhat.
chowder, you’re not getting me: “bankrupt stock” includes branded stuff. Retailer or wholesaler #1 buys tons of branded stock. Then the shop/warehouse goes bust. Along comes retailer #2 and purchases the stock as a job lot - often in a lucky dip style - for a greatly reduced price. Then they mark it up and sell it in their shop.
Let me tell you how I know this. I used to work in a hardware store that was next to a pound shop. We sold Brita water filters, and the Brita rep came to our store to assess our merchandising. I mentioned out of interest that the pound shop next door had the same filters for half the price we were selling them. He went ballistic and went to the pound shop. And came back a few minutes later, shamefaced, because they had been part of a bulk purchase of bankrupt stock, which is how the shop stocked itself, and thus were being legally sold.
Also, friends of mine got into auction purchasing and car boot selling - rabbit hutches and unclaimed stolen mountain bikes sold by the cops. The auction houses are full of pound shop owners or wholesalers.
In addition supermarkets ‘de-list’ stuff, and because they are a bit anal about how they use their shelf space, they just want to get rid of it.
The theory is that the average person will not park their SUV (UK miniature version) outside TK Max or Wilkinsons on the offchance that they can buy /exactly/ what they are looking for.
In some ways it is a way of beating branded manufacturers around the head.
Your store would be similiar to the dollar stores that are popping up everywhere in the US. When they first started showing up, most sold overstocks, near expiration stuff and other items bought cheaply so the can be sold cheaply. Dollar stores now operate on a different premise, buy large quanities in bulk and sell for a buck. Dollar General, Dollar Tree, and Family Dollar are all examples of these types of stores. I recently investigated opening a Dollar Tree store and received all the pertinent info about their franchising and how the stores operate. The secret to their success is volume, buy a lot of stuff real cheap and sell a lot of stuff real cheap. A typical Dollar Tree store is expected to make $8 to $10 a square foot a day. When you realize a typical store is about 10,000 square feet, that is a lot of merchandise going out the door every day.
The fact is many supermarkets do not purchase in large quanities. Supermarkets operate on the premise of carrying thousands of items. Your thrift or pound store likely carries just a fraction of the items carried by a typical supermarket. Using your bottle of honey as an example, a supermarket would be thrilled to sell a bottle or two each day, that would pay for the shelf space. Your pound store will likely have a lot more of the same honey and expect to sell 8 to 10 bottles a day. Each store will make the same profit per square foot. Also, your pound stores and many other smaller retailers buy their products through co-ops, a single co-op will supply 100 stores with the same product as the larger retailers and they can buy it at the same price. As I stated previously, your pound store and dollar stores here on the other side of the pond rely on volume selling to make a profit. With the recent proliferation of these types of stores, that sales model is working very well.
I understand what you say (mostly) but surely the large supermarket chains will buy a whole shitload of Coke/Cadbury Chocolate/Colgates/Campbells soups
As for the supermarkey just selling a couple of bottles of honey a day, if this happened they’d soon ditch it to make room for something that’ll sell much more, so yes I guess you are right about the shelf space.
All in all these stores seem to be doing very well and I have started shopping on a regular basis at them. I can spend £25-£30 and get stuff that would cost me over twice as much at any supermarket.
The only beef I have is that none of them seem to sell wines/spirits/beers…give it time, who knows
That’s what a thrift store is here: more specifically, a thrift store sells USED stuff that’s been donated - clothing, mostly, as well as old stereos, bicycles, tables and chairs, kitchen stuff, toys, paintings and decorations, etc.
A “dollar store” might be a place where the price varies, but most things are cheap. More and more, though, it means a place where everything is literally $1 (plus tax). Both varieties of dollar store might carry canned and dried foods, as well as condiments, breakfast cereals, etc. The biggest local dollar store chain around here has recently put in some frozen foods and even a few refrigerated “fresh” foods like milk and lunchmeat. They also carry office supplies, silk flowers, light tools, candles, picture frames, wicker baskets, clothing (I got some adorable little hippie skirts for my toddler at Dollar Tree this week!), cleaning supplies and cheap kitchen implements.
Dollar General and Family Dollar are stores where things are cheap, but not always $1. They tend to have more of the brand names than the “Everything’s $1” stores. They have a virtual tour on their website if you want to see what it’s like.
Dollar Tree is an “Everything’s $1” chain of stores.
My kid brother is in low-level management at a grocery store and explained this to me just a few weeks ago: the chains do buy a great deal of product, but keep it in warehouses. The individual stores “buy” the products from the warehouses when they do their daily orders. Being much better at math than I am, they’re able to make very astute estimates on how much of a given product they’ll need to stock all of their stores in a given time period. So while there are some things they surely get bulk discounts on, there are probably a whole lot of others they know won’t be big movers, and therefore might end up buying far fewer of than the pound stores do through random lots. Take something odd like bluing, for example. When they have it at his store, there are probably 6 bottles on the shelf at a time. There are about 60 stores in the chain, so that’s still only 360 bottles they need at a given time if every store is to carry it, which isn’t often the case. Even if they buy 500 just to be sure they have enough, that’s probably nothing compared to what’s possible to buy in a job lot.
If they do get the typical big movers at the pound store, it’s probably though pure luck as jjimm indicated.