Yet contemporary dollar chains are a class of their own, not quite grocery, housewares, or hardware store because their inventory in each category is far thinner than you'd find in a store with a more singular focus.Įven from the point of view of size, they occupy their own niche. The dented cans and off-brand products have largely been replaced by the same national brands that fill the shelves of full-service grocery stores. In his book 'My Father's Business,' Cal's son, Cal Turner Jr., says the idea was to sell 'good stuff to rich folks,' but because that market turned out to be saturated, they wound up 'selling the cheap stuff to the poor folks.' Two years and 29 stores later the company was raking in $5 million annually.ĭollar General, like the other chains, now has shareholders, marketing departments, and Instagram accounts. That was the forebear of Dollar General, the store the pair opened in Springfield, Ky., in 1955. Unable to persuade retailers to buy the underwear, he and his son Cal opened their own store in 1939.

According to family lore, one day he bought a massive shipment of women's underwear dirt cheap. For example, many of us found that a dollar store might have only one brand of dish soap, or just single-serving containers of popular breakfast cereals.ĭollar General is now the biggest of the mega dollar store chains, but its beginnings were humble.ĭuring the Great Depression a man named James Luther Turner bought merchandise liquidated from bankrupt general stores and sold it to retailers. We had more trouble at dollar stores finding what we needed. While we all live near a branch of each dollar store chain-the Dollar Tree I go to most often is a 13-minute walk from my Brooklyn, N.Y., home-they weren't exactly convenient. So I was surprised that all of us CR shoppers found that a dollar store was less expensive, on a unit-cost basis, than supermarkets for our items.Īt least, that is, for those items we were able to find. Even as a third-generation dollar store shopper, I've been dubious about these stores being places to save. But this exercise was a real eye-opener for me.

We all had the same basic shopping list of common household items.Īs a 'cherry picker' who shops store to store based on price, I keep a mental spreadsheet of the best deals from week to week. Dollar General underscores the point, telling CR that pre-COVID-19, the average shopping tab was just $12.īut how good are the savings, really? To investigate, I teamed up with other CR staffers and secret shoppers in eight locations across the country to go to nearby outposts of each of the three leading national dollar store chains, as well as two local supermarkets. All three chains say their stores are best described as 'fill in' shopping options that supplement weekly trips to the grocery store. And Dollar General and Family Dollar, which have long sold many items for more than a buck, also still try to keep prices low.ĭollar General spokesperson Crystal Luce says the company aims for neighborhood stores with merchandise curated to make shopping simpler and more affordable. While the company announced in late September that it 'will be testing price points above $1 in select stores,' low-prices are still a major selling point for the brand. And until recently, just about everything at Dollar Tree really was a dollar or less, something that they could do by selling most items in travel or other smaller-than-usual sizes. Dollar stores, of course, play up their low prices.

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