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Monday, January 19, 2015

Let’s Hear it for the Dollar Store

The other day I bought some picture frames as part of an on-going picture-hanging exercise caused by a move that, while it seems to have taken place just yesterday, actually already goes back almost seven months. The cost of frames astonished me. I began looking at arts and crafts stores like Michaels and Jo-Ann Fabrics; then, needing smaller frames, I thought I’d find them at CVS. Find them I did, but the cost of these frames was not noticeably lower at the drug store than at the art stores. Then an inspiration came. One of my routes to one of the Krogers we now frequent takes me by a Dollar Store—or, more formally, a Dollar Tree. There I went.

There I went but—that having been a rather grey sort of day—I was quite convinced that Dollar wouldn’t have any frames. Imagine my surprise when I found a whole rack of them. Moreover, there was actually a yellow sign above them with the word Frames on it. I walked out of there a short while later with ten frames of various sizes. These frames, by the way, were of the same quality, decorative variety, and technical features as those in other stores where, typically, they were priced at multiples of six to twelve of the price I paid here.

I noticed while in there that the clientele had a large admixture of foreigners, immigrants, and other newcomers to the Land of Plenty. One of them was a big man in middle years who had no English at all. I saw him questioning another man about the whereabouts of—well, he was making shaving motions with his hands. The man he was consulting didn’t know how to deal with the problem and told him to go up front to ask, which that man did not exactly understand. The foreigner, incidentally, had been at the entrance to the store when I went in, hesitating there. Was he building up the courage to enter and encounter American Consumerism for the first time ever? Anyway, I resolved to help the gentleman as soon as I’d picked my last frame. As I headed out, one of the store clerks was coming down the aisle. I asked here where shaving gear was stowed. “You too?” she asked. Evidently she had been told about the problem by someone else and was coming to help my foreign gentleman. All was well. He’d have his razor and his razor blades in just a minute for a mere $1.

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