Wednesday, July 22, 2020

Through the Lens of the Dollar Store



           This will be an essay about the great American institution of the Dollar Store, but I must approach my subject in a manner that an ungenerous reader might find oblique or even confusing.  Among the canonical crimes of boring people is their penchant for insisting that you listen to their accounts of various medical adventures, especially if they involve surgery.  I would never bore you with an operation I had.  Instead, I’ll bore you with one I hope to have.  This is the removal of a cataract from my left eye scheduled for Friday.

            This procedure was supposed to happen months ago, but the specialized surgical center was actually closed for a long period, creating a messy backlog.    In order to be allowed to present oneself for a bloodless removal of a cataract, it is necessary first to present evidence of the negative results of a very recent test for Covid-19 and a satisfactory report on a very recent general physical examination.  The logistics of arranging and then actually achieving these ancillary events has been nightmarish.  But I emerge from them with a vivid sense of the widely diffused disruptions or “ripple effects” caused by the pandemic throughout the whole medical structure, and with a yet increased admiration for our medical professionals.  Even as I write this, however, it is not entirely certain that all preliminaries will be in place.  

            I very much hope they are, because I am having trouble reading.  Dejà-vu, so to speak, as that circumstance precipitated the removal of a cataract from my right eye some years back.  But my serious dollar store career began probably years before that with deteriorating eyesight and the need for reading glasses.  I am very careless with glasses.  I lose them.  I break them.  I scratch the lenses.  Somebody told me you could get them at the dollar store for, of course, a dollar.  I started buying them in bulk.  I have a really large bowl full of them An honest doctor told me that from the optical point a view there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between dollar store reading glasses and the ones for sale in his practice’s own upscale optical shop.  I’ll admit that the Foster Grants are superior in style and durability—but are they fifteen or twenty times better, as their prices are fifteen or twenty times higher?  Doubtful.  They practically fly off the racks in the dollar stores.

            I was surprised a couple of weeks ago to find as the leading article in The New Yorker an essay about Dollar Stores*.  A dollar store, obviously, is a place where things cost a dollar, but there is a slight nomenclature problem here.  There are several chains of dollar stores, including even some that don’t actually feature the word  “dollar’’ in their name; but some smart guy got there first with a name patent on the capitalized version.  The article, which focuses on such stores in Dayton and on several armed robberies at them, in some of which store employees were killed, does not disguise its negative view; the subheading on the title page is “A business model that harms vulnerable communities.”  I am writing about the store as a fixture of low income American life, the uncapitalized form.  I already knew without reading this article that I didn’t want to work at a dollar store, which offers niggardly compensation for tiring work in a dismal atmosphere.  Yet in my opinion this article says more about the social pathology of Dayton than the chintziness of the dollar store chains—and that is really saying something.   If you tolerate living in a filthy rich country with a large underclass living at the subsistence level or worse, what do you expect?  Merchants are in business to make money, and a business specializing in selling stuff at bottom dollar is unlikely to go top-dollar in its overhead and labor costs.  But if the answer to armed robbery is to banish the stores that get robbed rather than the criminals who rob them, the current clamor from many of my compatriots to “abolish the police” is perhaps less wacky that it has seemed to me.  You would, of course, have to be prepared for the successors to the police:  war-lords, vigilantes, and star-spangled Second Amendment Patriots galore. 

            The author (Mr. MacGillis) assumes that few readers of The New Yorker are likely to frequent dollar stores.  That is probably a correct assumption, as is its reflex: few habitués of dollar stores subscribe to The New Yorker.  At best we view one another indistinctly and partially, as through a social ocular cataract.  Here is another slightly exotic pairing of tribes or “bubbles” in which Americans seem to have quarantined themselves with evident harm to civility, empathy, and political efficiency.

            Dayton is not all of America.  Dollar stores cater to the economically marginal and to bargain seekers, but they are by no means emblems only of urban blight.  There are several stores in my area, mainly in secondary shopping malls nestled among ethnic restaurants and big boxes.  It is true that they offer a glimpse of American life very different from that with which most middle class citizens are familiar and perhaps to some an uncomfortable one.  MacGillis leaves a reader with the impression that they are rather sinister places, and I have read other commentators who go so far as to say that they “prey” upon the poor, in whose neighborhoods they are often the only local emporiums.  But another way of thinking about them is that they offer opportunity for people who otherwise might lack it to exercise the national birthright of shopping.  In the South, where they are nearly ubiquitous, the stores often have a kind of folksy, friendly vibe, not unlike that of your local New York deli.  To a degree they serve the function of social centers.  In my experience the clientele is mainly female, but the extensive line in basic hand tools and some building accoutrements attracts men—at least this man.  From what I have seen I deduce that some people do most of their grocery shopping there.  I would not recommend this.  The shelves are bulging with sweetened drinks and junk food in many forms, and all sorts of empty calories that will fatten you, disturb your blood sugar levels, or rot out your teeth.  However, there are some undoubtedly salubrious bargains, mainly in the line of canned fruit and vegetables.  There are always some items that are alimentary equivalents of the amazingly cheap remaindered titles at the Strand Book Store, such as a ship’s container of Turkish sun-dried tomatoes that Whole Foods wouldn’t touch.   Soaps and common toiletries are also excellent, along with basic medicine chest items.  Also serviceable kitchen and table ware.  Even among the acres of Chinese plastic and tinfoil gewgags my granddaughters always find something to amuse them or to be put to some surprising artistic use.  But my top product remains a usable pair of reading glasses for a buck. 

            Of course you get what you pay for—sometimes.  Veblen’s still great Theory of the Leisure Class reminds us of the degree to which irrational expensiveness—that is, cost far in excess of what common sense would regard as actual value—is a part of upscale American commercial life.   It seems only fair that there should be a counter-market specializing in the cheap and nasty.
 

*Alec MacGillis, “The Dollar Store Deaths,” The New Yorker (July 6 & 13, 2020), pp. 20-26.

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