Shop Till I Flop - shopping discount stores - Brief Article

Kiplinger's Personal Finance Magazine, June, 2000 by William Giese

LAMB AMONG THE LIONS | What do you mean it's OUT OF STOCK? I'll find it.

MEN AREN'T supposed to like shopping, and for years that was true for me, too. But I've come to enjoy the hunt. In fact, it might be said that I'm carrying this newfound love of shopping too far. I don't know. For instance, what would you do if, like me, you want to fix your boots with a hot-glue gun but your gun is firing blanks? For me, it means a trip to the dollar store, one of those humble shops that stock all manner of stuff for just $1 or thereabouts. Much of the merchandise is commercial ideas gone wrong--free-market mishaps sold for a song.

Cheap thrills. The first dollar store I try doesn't have glue sticks. But I walk out with a six-pack of made-in-China toothbrushes, a can of motor oil, shaving cream "not manufactured or distributed by the Gillette Company" and a Lumident. A Lumident is like a dentist's mirror, only with a little battery-powered light in the handle. You stick the mirror in your mouth and look into the bathroom mirror to check the backs of your teeth. Or you would if the little mirror didn't always fog up. There's a reason the Lumident costs just $1.

I try four more dollar stores without finding the glue sticks. A lesser person would take the boots to a shoe-repair place. But not me. Instead, I look for the source. Dollar Tree Stores, headquartered near Norfolk, Va., is the country's largest dollar-store operator, with 1,400 outlets in 33 states. The people there say sure, I can visit their warehouse, and off I go.

What I find is a building larger than four football fields and about as clean as my kitchen, with storage racks 26 feet high, a computerized conveyor system and robot work vehicles capable of moving 65,000 cartons a day. I see Kit Kat candy bars, dog chains and eyelash curlers. I learn that store inventory turns over an average of 4.5 times a year. I see peach drink, Pringles and colored-glass things shaped like flat jelly beans. I learn that Dollar Tree stores stock more than 1,600 items. I see marbles, bibles and bleach. I learn that a typical customer buys $6 worth of stuff, divided about equally between necessities, such as shampoo, and impulse purchases, such as Lumidents. I find just about every dingus for which anybody might ever discover an irresistible desire. But I don't find glue sticks.

Eureka! I keep looking. Finally, roaming around the far suburbs of Northern Virginia, I come to a dark, cluttered little, place in a strip mall, which is clearly not a spiffy Dollar Tree shop. The proprietor strolls to the back, grabs something off a wall rack, and flips me a plastic pack of things the size and shape of milkshake straws. They are my glue sticks, l0 inches long (instead of the 2 or 4 inches suggested for the glue gun), but no matter. I go home with ten glue sticks for a dollar, along with three fly swatters for another dollar and some Palmolive soap (with wrapping printed in Russian) for a third dollar.

Mission accomplished. My boots are good to go for another year.

William Giese is a freelance writer whose experiences are shared by many other people but whose opinions are his own. Reach him at lamb@kiplinger.com.