If you’re ever in Houston, you can take a drive down Harwin Drive. It’s the wholesalers district. There are blocks of warehouses that are sell cheap goods - but not to customers off the street. They sell in bulk to discount retail stores.
I assume plenty of other cities have similar businesses.
Sure. Half Price Books gets pallets of new books, software, movies, and music this way, too. Most of these items are closeouts. I bought a copy of the first Farm Frenzy game. There’s Farm Frenzy 2, and FF 3, FF 3 Ice Age, FF 3 Pizza Party, and I don’t know what else. But apparently someone had quite a stock of FF 1, and it was part of a pallet of software. Now, HPB sells mostly used stuff, but if they can buy a pallet of discontinued software or remaindered books at what they consider to be a great price, then they’ll do it, and they’ll probably be able to move the merch out if they price it low enough. But they don’t get to specify what they’ll get, other than something like “PC games” or “Recent hardback bestsellers”. So they can specify the category, but not the specific titles.
So I imagine that dollar stores can order stuff like “toiletries”, “makeup”, or “paper goods”, and they’ll just take whatever they can get.
Yeah that’s common here too. Soft drinks with ever so slightly different labelling, and then the small print is in various languages with the products coming from Eastern Europe or Asia usually.
The 50 cents wholesale outlet
A lot of the things they sell are just marked up a little bit less than usual. For instance, many of the children’s, and party items you’ll see therer for a dollar are actually 30 cents or less at http://www.orientaltrading.com/ . Anyone can buy there if they are willing to buy in bulk.
Contrast that to www.alibaba.com where you can get a silk wedding dress for 50 bucks, but you’d have to have a business liscense to re-sale. Well, maybe $100.00 This product is no longer available. or maybe you’d prefer some West Man Toothpaste ?
I’d be concerned about foodstuffs and drugs from China-is any of this stuff inspected?
The Chinese are known to use substandard ingredients, and I’d hate to use toothpaste componded with wood alcohol.
In general, “dollar store” merchandise is cheap and low quality-avoid the batteries in particular.
Apparently so, according to someone who owns two large dollar stores.
I imagine the containers are full of stuff tailored to end up in dollar stores so it’s not like he’s buying them completely blind.
It varies. I once drove by a no name dog food factory and noticed a Dollar General trailer at a dock. A lot of their stuff has their own name on it or lately Rexall. A lot of what I buy there is commodity type stuff where the technology is well known. How much does their brand of aspirin vary from anybody else’s? I have checked their prices. package sizes, and price against Walmart and Walgreens. In some cases the package may be smaller, but the unit price is still less.
I quit watching TV when Remington Steele turned into the same trash as everything else. Ads are easy to ignore in print and I manage to pay little attention to banner ads on the net. No I haven’t seen a ad for Bon Ami in a long time or Ajax, Spick and Span, Old Dutch Cleanser, or whatever is paying for everybody’s news and enertainment. I will accept that Bon ami doesn’t advertise much.
Dollar General cuts costs different ways. They advertise less and sell a lot of stuff that isn’t advertised much. They have shorter hours, smaller stores with less selection, less fancy decor, and some of their stuff is cheap junk. Still, I can get in, get out quickly and cheaply, and with quality that meets my needs for many things.
I don’t buy food and consumables there but I do stop in once in a rare while and buy stuff like cheap (ultimately disposable) “Tupperware”, laundry baskets and similar bric-a-brac. A slotted spoon is a slotted spoon for my purposes.
They also have greeting cards for 50 cents each which is great to stock up on for kid’s parties so I don’t wind up dropping $3.00 on a card some five year old will tear open, check for money and throw over his shoulder.
Not only greeting cards, but gift bags, too. TheKid made blankets for gifts last year, XL bags were $6.99 at Target. Nope, stocked up at the dollar store. Granted, they weren’t as pretty as the Target ones, but who cares? When TheKid was little, Santa shopped at the dollar store for stocking stuffers, too.
TheKid and her friends go there for munchies - they’re all teenagers, really do not care about quality, generic cheese doodles taste the same to them. They also love the 3l bottles of soda.
I work for one of the dollar store chains mentioned in this thread. We are not one of the stores where everythin is $1 – most stuff is a couple dollars. I’m not sure we have anything more than about 8 to 10 bucks.
In our chain we do not sell damaged goods or odd lots. We do sell mostly regular brand names for lower prices, or older brands with low advertising costs (like Rexall drugs or Bobby Brooks clothes). Because we represent a large segment of the retail market, manufacturers are often willing to shave their margins to get on our shelves. We also sell inexpensive (cheap) stuff from India and China and the like, although not generally in consumables like food.
In other words, the Crest toothpaste or Haines underwear or Stovetop stuffing mix or Coke you buy at our store is exactly the same you would get at a larger store, but we have a lower markup and a more convenient shopping experience. What you give up, mostly, is selection – we might only have 2 brands of bar soap at any given time insead of 8 you might find at Wal-mart, because our stores are about 5% the size of theirs.
Very informative! Thanks!
If you’re a senior citizen on a budget, living alone, The Dollar Tree will become your home away from home. Things may be cheaper if you buy in bulk, but who needs a giant tube of toothpaste, a bale of trash bags, a hundred baggies, a family size bag of cookies/chips/candy? And they aren’t going to tote home a gallon of shampoo from Costco to top up their little bottle. … I would point out there are dollar stores and convenience stores with the word “dollar” in their name that definitely are NOT all that much cheaper than a supermarket or Walmart. Family Dollar and Dollar General look cheap, but they aren’t, really. … I saw in a Real Deals in the food section plastic bags containing some broken cookies, a cup of brown applesauce, a bag of no-name candy, and a napkin and plastic spoon. Wish I’d taken a closer look to see where that came from, it looked like some kind of emergency rations you’d hand out to poor people who are stuck on a broken down train or something, in a third world country.
I don’t know… wasn’t there a big to-do about counterfeit toothpaste containing lead and excessive amounts of fluoride being sold at discount/dollar stores not too long ago? Counterfeited products are huge. I am wondering how Skammer knows for sure that he or she is selling authentic product - it’s not like TPTB are going to be open about the sourcing when it comes to the peons who ring up the stuff.
Here’s just one cite out of thousands:
I rarely shop at dollar stores for this reason - I admit to having a bias against Chinese-made products, or things made from Chinese-sourced ingredients and do my best to avoid them although I know it’s damn-near impossible these days. I can assure you I will not buy anything edible, or anything that may come into contact with mucous membranes, at a dollar store.
For most domestic products, our merch is shipped directly from the manufacturer to one of our large distribution centers, where it gets put on trucks and delivered to the stores. So we know the Crest toothpaste is real Crest toothpaste because it came from the people who make Crest toothpaste, on their truck to our distribution center.
High turnover products or stuff with a short shelf-life are delivered directly to the store by the brand distributer – candy, soft drinks, beer, milk, bread, etc. So the Coca-cola comes on the Coke truck and the beer comes on the Budweiser truck and the chips come on the Frito-Lay truck to the store.
I’m not sure what the delivery model is for imported stuff. We source the stuff overseas and they somehow get to one of our import centers, and from there to a DC and then to the stores.
I don’t ring up the stuff, I work at the corporate headquarters.
You can find Bon Ami at any chain grocery store. It is what I use. In fact, I bought a can at Publix just last week.
Many of the items at outlet stores, such as Burke Outlet (which just opened a store two miles from me) contain items that have some minor irregularities. I just bought an 8-pack of athletic socks (NB) for $6.50. The tag stated that they have some minor irregularities. “Tuesday Morning” a similar store in the same shopping mall has had similar items that Burke has, and I suppose many have slight irregularities also.