They have plenty of brand name stuff. Is it damaged, out of date, sub-par somehow? Especially the groceries. They are VERY interesting. Some odd-ball brands, but some mainstream stuff, too. How does it wind up there?
As I understand it, most of the grocery products at the major “dollar store” chains (such as Family Dollar and Dollar General) isn’t out of date or damaged…it’s simply lower-cost products. Even when you find “name brands” there, the prices are often lower than you’d find at a regular grocery store, largely because dollar stores operate on even thinner profit margins than normal grocery stores.
sometimes damaged (at least packaging or the carton or case), some times past freshness. overstocks. maybe the liquidator type stores compared to national chain.
usually they buy from dime stores and mark it up. easy profit.
I can’t speak about groceries, but a lot of it’s overstock. I used to work for a company that made tools, and we’d pitch to Dollar General, Harbor Freight, that sort of place. Most of the items we pitched fit the price point the stores were looking for, and often they were discontinued items we had a wagonload of. We didn’t make a big margin, and sometimes we sold the lot at a loss, but it was better than paying tax and storage fees, etc. Not to mention it freed up space in our warehouse for faster turning merchandise.
Some or all of it comes from wholesalers like this one.
Neither Family Dollar or Dollar General are ‘everything costs a dollar’ stores. Dollar Tree is. Many of **their **off-brand food stuffs come from China or (even worse) New Jersey. Their pickle products come from India and I’m hopelessly hooked on their sweet relish.
I have a client who owns a couple of dollar stores - not the big chains, but a small regional operation although his two stores are very large and he sells just about anything, as long as it’s cheap.
He buys containers from China - like shipping trailers - without knowing exactly what’s in them; he bids on them at auction. Each one contains a wide range of products, anything from clothing and cleaning products and food to gift wrapping, silk flowers and knick-knacks. Some of it may be counterfeit, like fake name-brands such as “Crest toothpaste” or whatever.
I don’t think that is his only source for inventory but from the way he talks it’s a good part of it.
It certainly shouldn’t be “out of date” in the sense of being expired or no longer safe to use, but sometimes you’ll see stuff in the dollar store where that particular variety has been discontinued.
And some of the stuff seems to be there precisely because it costs a dollar. I’m thinking, for instance, of those 8-packs of fun-size name-brand candy bars. There’s nothing wrong or different about them, compared to what you’d get in a grocery store, but you wouldn’t expect to pay much more than a dollar for that particular item anywhere else.
I have no special knowledge, though; I’m just going by what I’ve observed.
A lot of the stuff sold is also established name-brand item that do zero advertising any more. Bon-Ami cleanser, for example. Still exists, but they don’t advertise and you can only find it at the $.99 stores.
I’ve also noticed that a lot of dollar stores have smaller versions of name brand name items than what’s sold at other places.
At the Dollar Trees where I live, for example, they have bags of Utz potato chips, one of the big name brands here in the South, but they’re smaller than what they carry in the regular grocery store. Same with Irish Spring soap. They sell it at Dollar Tree, but the bars are smaller.
This too. At Dollar Tree, they also carry Pear’s soap, apparently another one of those legacy brands that most people nowadays have never heard of.
joebuck20 writes:
> . . . Utz potato chips, one of the big name brands here in the South . . .
Not just in the South. Utz is based in Pennsylvania:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utz_Quality_Foods,_Inc.
Apparently they’re available all over the eastern half of the U.S.
Last time I was in a dollar store, there was a bunch of toothpaste of American brands with Arabic script on the labels.
I haven’t bought a lot of food at dollar stores but the stuff I’ve seen hasn’t been out of date… but some has been rather close. One time I saw a display of 2 liter bottles of Pepsi Twist that were “two for a buck”. But it was about a week away from the freshness date. For a bottle of soda, that means it was bottled about a year prior. I’m guessing they bought it at clearance from a wholesaler.
I am no expert, but on something like soda, even if it was a couple of months past the “Freshness” or “Best By” date, it would still probably taste just fine.
Meat, poultry, seafood or dairy products are obviously a whole different story.
I saw “Pepsi Spice” at 2 for 99 at the 99 cent only store.
A month later, it was 3 for 99.
I think a LOT of the stuff at the 99 cent only store is packaged just for them. The packages contain much smaller amounts than you’d find at Walmart or Target.
~VOW
If it’s diet soda, made with aspartame, it might be sketchier. Aspartame can quickly lose its sweetness, and was the reason that the big soft-drink companies began putting “freshness” dates on their products.
Exactly right. The local Dollar Tree has Gallon size Ziploc brand bags. And while they are just a dollar rather than the $3 or so they would be at Wallyworld, they also only have 7 bags per box rather than the standard 20.
This makes no sense to me. The Chinese are loading shipping containers with random assortments of low end retail dollar store type merchandise and these are being offered for sale as blindly purchased shipping container grab bags?
Well, why not? It seems to work for the Chinese to get rid of their surplus - what they haven’t sold at higher price to Walmart and their first-line customers -, and for the dollar store buyers, a container full of surprise grab bag can still be sold. They don’t especially need silk flowers over mini-sized bottles of shampoo, or must have Barbie over Kens; the only requirement is that the buying price is low enough to make a profit when selling it for 1$ a piece.
I mean, the stuff they offer in those stores is pretty jumbled and not a normal cross-section like a normal store. You don’t go to a dollar store to buy toothpaste, milk, bread, onions and detergent; you go there and look what’s available now.
Which is of course why dollar stores in general are such a rip-off, preying on people’s instinct for “A bargain! I will buy!”. Consumer advocates here warn against them: if you do the price per ml (ounces for Yanks) calculation, most non-food items will be more expensive than at a regular drugstore, and the smaller size of shampoo, toothpaste etc. are only useful if you are going to travel. (Even then, it’s recommended to buy one small bottle of shampoo, and refill it next time from a normal size if you want to save money).
I’ve never seen food like groceries there, though, only a few staple food like chips and some sodas.