Look for the stuff that usually costs less than one pound. That’s where they make their money. In America we call em dollar stores (thrift stores are something else) and once you get in there you’re surprised at how many things cost only a dollar, that you either buy a whole load of it, end up paying for stuff that usually costs a dollar (e.g. bottle of dish soap) or paying a a dollar for stuff that costs less.
A dollar/pound store has a lot less overhead than a grocery store - they usually have less employees, don’t have perishable food like produce, have considerably smaller frozen sections (if any), they’re much smaller and they don’t do advertising. They usually don’t have a return/exchange policy, unlike a general store/drug store.
Canada has dollar stores everywhere now. They’re great for coffee mugs, candle holders, greeting cards, household stuff you don’t need to pay big money for. Hair scrunchies, spatulas, office toys. I am hesitant about buying any of the health/beauty products, though I’ve seen some ‘interesting’ toothpaste.
Thrift stores in Canada are used goods. Also great places.
A bit of a hijack but we have some knowledgeable people in here…
I always assumed that (US) “dollar stores” do make a good bit of their profit by selling stuff that is actually over-priced at $1. As a shopper, you’re so caught up in the bargains that you don’t notice when you throw something in your basket that you could most likely get elsewhere for 60 cents. True?
Just as an fyi, Snopes has an entry on dollar stores, specifically on toothpaste from dollar stores, and said to be careful because sometimes they carry packages from foreign markets that don’t meet US health standards. The article is specifically about toothpaste but I suspect the same warning could apply to other items from them as well.
Wow, Snopes has really gone to the dogs. That is the worst Snopes article I have ever read. Since when did they start bestowing a “True” status on spurious concerns about trivial things like non-American toothpaste? They think that “foreigners” are not concerned about what goes in to their children’s toothpaste?
Take a trip down your local Lidl. They have a very drinkable Pino Grigot for £2.99, and a Chablis for £5.99 (though the latter is always sold out in mine). They sell some weird beers that scare me a bit - I suspect they’re made with chemical fermentation - but also have Carlsberg and Murphy’s Stout.
But booze pound shops do exist: there’s an offie (liquor store) near me that sells just-or-nearly-out-of-date beers at an incredible £5 per 8x500ml Grolsch and Heineken. They somehow have a consistent supply of this stuff.
I sometimes pick up cheap stuff at a store called Big Lots (a lot of them in Georgia; don’t know how wide-spread it is). Often it’s name-brand cereal or something where the packaging is a little battered, or it was a particular flavor that didn’t sell that well in the regular supermarket.
And now I’m hungry for Maltesers – best malted milk balls ever, way better than Whoppers. When I visited the UK, I had no idea how much better the candy was.
See also Aldi’s. You can’t really expect consistency in their stock policy, but sometimes…wow!
A jar of artichoke hearts in treacly thick and gorgeous olive oil? 49 pence you say? Roasted peppers? The absolutely tastiest wild mushrooms ever? 49p?
I really wonder how they can do this. But I’m glad they do.
It’s odd because some manufacturers must make two types of pakaging. I found a love for these Wylers drink mixes. You can throw a packet in a bottle of “bottle water” they are 8 packets for a dollar. Right on the package it says “ONLY $1.” I go to the supermarket and it’s the SAME IDENTICAL paged of Wylers minus the “ONLY $1” and it sells for $1.99.
But I noticed stores like Walgreens and Jewel are now offering “dollar” sections where the brands are exactly the same brands as sold in DollarTree etc. Outside of the Wylers (which I now buy at Walgreens for the same price) I never really found anything worth buying at a dollar store. At least where I am in Chicago, you can always get it cheaper at a Wal-Mart or now Walgreens. Either that or (like with cleaning products) they are just junk that doesn’t work at all or nameless brands of potato chips you can’t eat.
I agree that stores like Family Dollar are worthless because IF they have a name brand it is always the same price as a “regular store.” <sigh> Ever since eBay and that stupid PBS antiques show, there are no deals anymore, everyone thinks their garbage is worth millions
Big manufacturers like Heinz print literally hundreds of different versions of packaging, both for themselves, their subsidiaries and the products they’re creating under licence. As an example, in the UK, John West tuna and Tesco Value tuna are one and the same (or at least they were for a time). The difference being that John West costs an arm and a leg, whereas Tesco value stuff costs about 30p (I spent days at a machine in the Heinz warehouse in Wigan peeling off misprinted John West labels and putting them through a labeling machine).
In the sense that you can’t count on those stores having the same set of products available each week when you go to fill your grocery list. In a regular grocery store, you will always find a selection of Campbells soups, including tomato soup. Every week.
But in the thrift store, you can’t count on that. It might be there one week, but the next week they only have chicken & rice or manhattan clam chowder soups. And the week after that maybe no soup at all, just beef stew and corned beef hash. There selection is random, depending mostly on what small lots were being sold off by other retailers. So while you can get the occasional bargain on items there, it would be difficult to depend on them for your weekly grocery shopping.
this is true, I needed envelopes one day and checked a dollar store because it was next to the subway I was eating at. then I checked the price at Safeway and it was about 75 cents…still worth the quarter just for the conveinience.
jjimm/Struan: we haven’t got a Lidl store nearby we we do have an Aldi which is a short drive away, I reckon it’s high time I paid Aldi a visit if only for the mushrooms :).
Baldwin : You aint just whistling Dixie when you talk about Maltesers, these are also available in Poundworld . Along with Twix/Mars/Bounty and a host of other tooth rotting tackle…I must stock up
Thanks to everyone for filling me in on the way these places operate.
Years ago, my sister-in-law worked for a company that made marshmallows. I don’t know if the industry is still that way, but 20 years ago, marshmallows were nasty, horrid things to make because they’re so sticky, and there were only three or four marshmallow factories in the whole country.
Anway… One day she comes home with a sack full of bags of marshmallows that were labeled entirely in Arabic. There was an over-run, and the customer was only buying however many thousand cases for export, so the company was stuck with a crapload of extra bags that had nothing wrong with them except the bags themselves. The local dollar stores soon had piles of cheap Arabic marshmallows that were actually made in Illinois.
It’s entirely possible that the foreign-branded toothpaste for sale at your dollar store was an over-run at the Colgate plant in New York.
Maybe not as cheap as 60 cents, but I recall many times when the supermarket had Coke on sale for 89 cents, and the dollar store was charging the usual 100 cents. Doesn’t happen too much any more (Coke is normally far over a dollar nowadays) but similar stuff happens on other products.
Maybe not as individual stores but some of them belong to enormous chains. In the US, Dollar General has over 8000 stores (IIRC, the most of any retailer in the US) with total sales last year of $8.5 billion, Family Dollar has 6300 stores and sales of $6.4 billion, and Dollar Tree has over 3100 stores and sales of nearly $4 billion, one buck at a time. These are not small players.
