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.
