I Adore the Dollar Store

If you like shopping, there’s almost nowhere you can have as much fun with a few dollars in your pocket as the dollar store. You’ve just got to love a place where every item is a dollar or less!

It’s a particularly good place to take young children for a treat. Imagine how you’d feel if you were a kid and your parent told you that you could buy “anything in the store”!

Dollar stores are also a great place to buy items for the house, the yard and the car.

In fact, I make it a rule when going out on Saturdays to run errands (which includes buying items on my “to do” list) to stop at the dollar store if there’s any chance at all that items on the list might be found there. If they’re not available there, then I go to a nearby discount store for them.

Dollar stores have brand-name medicines, foods and beauty products; household needs; office supplies; gardening tools and seeds; kitchen gadgets; greeting cards; cleaning supplies; drinks; health products; frames and much more.

Dollar stores also have party supplies — and they are, without a doubt, the absolute cheapest place to buy helium balloons. And the balloons often last for weeks! You can show up at a party or to celebrate someone’s birthday with a bundle of five big, colorful balloons, and look very generous for a mere $5.

I’m kind of particular about the safety of health and beauty products, and food (anything that goes in or on my body) and won’t normally buy anything at a dollar store that isn’t produced by a well-known manufacturer, to avoid any potential problems with items produced in foreign countries that don’t regulate or inspect things the way the United States does. But there are plenty of name-brand items available.

If you’re planning a low-cost or do-it-yourself wedding, dollar stores are a great place to buy items for the reception. I planned and coordinated my son and daughter-in-law’s wedding and wrote a Kindle ebook called “How to Have a $30,000 Wedding for Less Than $10,000” — and a number of tips involve dollar store purchases.

After buying items at the local dollar store, I almost always search for the same items at a discount store like Walmart as well as other stores, to make sure I truly saved money. And inevitably, the same items cost two or three times more elsewhere. Yesterday, I bought several pieces of foam-core posterboard at the dollar store for $1 each and saw it right next door at the Michael’s craft store for $2.97, and also saw it at another store a week earlier for $4.98. That’s a pretty good savings!

I regularly stock up on Wyler’s Lite drink mix packages, and they can sell for as much as $3.98 each at area grocery stores. The local dollar store sells brand-name bread, too, which is much less expensive that buying it at a grocery store.

Over the years, I only remember two or three times when items I bought at the dollar store could’ve been purchased at another store for less than $1. The enormous savings over time definitely outweigh a few

cents in losses!