If you’ve ever lived in a town where one of your main shopping choices is one of the “Dollar” stores, this should be the least surprising news ever:
Dollar Tree/Family Dollar and Dollar General will pay the State of New York $1.2 million as part of a settlement for selling expired drugs and obsolete motor oil, the N.Y. Attorney General announced on Monday.
As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been spending a lot of time (months) in the small town in the Dakotas where I grew up, to help with my aging parents. When I was growing up, there were plenty of clean, well-lit places to do retail shopping. As time went by, more people went to the “big towns” to shop at discount stores, and a lot of those local merchants dried up. But we could always count on the local Shopko Hometown store, which was no Wal-Mart (laugh if you will), but was still well-lit, clean and decently stocked.
Shopko went bankrupt recently, so all of their stores have closed. With Shopko leaving the scene, the last national retailer that tried to keep up the facade of even a modicum of customer respect has left town. What’s left is a few local retailers, a Dollar General and a Family Dollar.
I remember hearing a co-worker who had once worked for Dayton-Hudson (Target’s parent company) say that Target tried to compete with Wal-Mart by keeping stores cleaner, better lit and better stocked. I’ve been in some grim Wal-Marts here in bigger cities in New York, yet most of the Targets here are still pretty clean and bright. Out West, however, if a small town is big enough to have a Wal-Mart, it is generally about as nice as a Target, and the employees are relatively intelligent and helpful, since a Wal-Mart job is actually a decent one by the awful standards of our time. In other words, Wal-Mart at least tries to keep a pleasant store.
Not so at Family Dollar and Dollar General. Dollar General, in my experience, is the worst. The cookie-cutter stores are built like caves, with few if any windows. The aisles are barely wide enough for two carts to pass. The lighting is dim. The floor is bare concrete. Stocking is spotty – it is very common to have stocking trays partially blocking the aisles, and many items are often missing from the shelves. There’s often just one or maybe two employees visible, and they work the till. Most of the stock is the lowest of low-end shit from China.
When you walk into a Dollar General, it is crystal clear that you are involved in a take it or leave it proposition. They know that it will take a pretty long drive for you to find someplace with a better selection and nicer displays, so why bother with either? Expired ibuprofen is better than no ibuprofen: so either fucking buy it, or don’t let the door hit you where the good Lord split you.
I’ve driven over 10,000 miles this year, a lot of it on back roads through small towns. I’ve started using the presence of Dollar General along with the absence of other retail as an index of decline of a town. Instead of going to the local diner to interview folks on a Trump voter safari, maybe the Times will send their next expedition to a few Dollar Generals. They might at least learn a little bit about what it means for citizens of a town to feel like they’re lost and left behind.
ranchandsyrup
Now Here is Nowhere
Sab
Our local Dollar Store pretty much routinely has armed robberies, because there are so few employees on site.
Unfortunately, they are the only thing that keeps us from being a food desert.
TenguPhule
I have perhaps seen one of the stupidest marketing ideas ever.
Soft drink containers……designed to look like Star Wars grenades
Delahaye 135
Yeah, the thing that many people don’t understand is that there are lots of communities in rural/semi-rural America that would be greatly IMPROVED by having a Walmart.
When we go on long roadtrips in our RV, we scout out Walmarts beforehand to restock on things.
Yes, Walmart is horrible. But they’re also great.
opiejeanne
Off topic, but has anyone heard from Ruckus?
TenguPhule
@Sab:
I’m not sure what they sell even qualifies as food unless they got a special waiver from the FDA.
opiejeanne
@TenguPhule: I have no idea what a Star Wars grenade looks like.
Yarrow
I always wonder what I’m getting at those Dollar Stores. I usually buy things like gift bags and wrapping paper, binder clips, brooms–hings like that that don’t expire. Even with that I wonder what toxic dyes and so forth I’m getting.
kindness
Motor oil becomes obsolete? Learn something new every day. I try to buy my things at local retailers but sometimes out here in CA that means choosing between which big box store is ‘local’.
TenguPhule
@opiejeanne:
It now looks like a can of coke.
TenguPhule
@kindness:
Age comes to all things.
HalfAssedHomesteader
Really surprised Take It Or Leave It hasn’t been used for branding one of these chains.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@TenguPhule: That’s at Disneyland in their new Star Wars themed land. It was on the local news last night, the TSA is confiscating them.
??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??
I was at Save-a-Lot in Atlantic City about a month and a half ago on my way back home. Was picking up ice for the cooler and some candy. Everything you described about Dollar General could be applied to that shitty store. A huge chunk of the freezer section was completely empty and it was a dingy place. However, there were some employees at least stocking the shelves and a few of the checkout lanes were open (the store was busy at the time)
I know the grocery store I work at is severely understaffed. Several of us on the front end have been working straight 8s several days in a row. My supervisor had a few interviews lined up but nobody showed up to them.
Even a unionized store like mine, you’re only starting out 30 cents above minimum wage and the only full-time positions available are management and people that have worked there forever.
Roger Moore
@kindness:
It will at the very least have an expiration date, and those things are supposed to be based on evidence. Modern motor oil is much, much fancier than the stuff grandpa put in his jeep in WWII. It contains all kinds of additives to control the viscosity, maintain performance as it fills up with water and other gunk from the combustion process, and so forth. Those additives have a limited shelf life, and they limit the shelf life of the overall product. Expired motor oil will still lubricate your car, but it won’t protect it from wear as well as new oil does.
hells littlest angel
Every now and then I go to a dollar store for the few genuine bargains they have (I can’t bear spending six bucks for two D batteries, for instance). They tend to be grubby little places, but I’m always surprised at how polite and friendly the staff are. It’s definitely not a place where I’d want to buy food (some of the bigger places actually have a — *shudder* — meat department), but expired aspirin? What does “expired aspirin” even mean?
?BillinGlendaleCA
@opiejeanne: Here ya go.
??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??
@opiejeanne:
Apparently it looks like this
Roger Moore
@HalfAssedHomesteader:
My favorite (fictional) name was Try-N-Save.
mrmoshpotato
@opiejeanne: He commented in the Brexit post at noon today.
Link
hells littlest angel
@??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??: Those places are just plain creepy. Like a Simpsons parody of sub-bargain stores selling sub-generics like Cokey Cola and Frute Lupes.
mrmoshpotato
@HalfAssedHomesteader: Welcome to What F’in’ Choice You Got, Punk?
redoubt
@HalfAssedHomesteader: That would be Big Lots.
Old Dan and Little Ann
I think I’ve seen at least 2 dozen different dollar stores driving all over NY, PA, OH, and NC this summer. They depress the hell out of me. I’ve been in a couple for random reasons in the last 10 years.
TenguPhule
@hells littlest angel:
It means you pays your money and takes your chances.
TenguPhule
@?BillinGlendaleCA: Of course.
??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
NGL, those do look pretty cool. No idea why the TSA has to confiscate them. Run them through an x-ray machine and you should be good to go. Of course, the TSA has to at least make an attempt to justify its existence and I guess taking some little kid’s souvenir bottle is as good as any
Betty Cracker
@Roger Moore: I’ve always been partial to Linens-N-Shit…
schrodingers_cat
@HalfAssedHomesteader: Our town recycling station has a take-it-or-leave-it kiosk. You put the stuff you want to get rid off but is in good condition and you bring home what others have left. I got some good terra cotta planters from my last trip.
There is also a space for books, clothes and shoes.
ThresherK
@Roger Moore: It’s specs, not age. “Investigations found…a type of motor oil, DG SAE-30, which is not suitable for engines built after 1930.”
Our two cars total 390k miles, so I don’t have to worry about SG, SH, whatever. But this is a shock.
hells littlest angel
@TenguPhule: Do you have to take four of them? Will it fail to prevent heart attacks? Does it not work at all? Will it make you sick, or kill you? Come on, I need to know, before I splurge $1.39 on WalMart’s aspirin.
Roger Moore
@hells littlest angel:
Chemicals like aspirin degrade slowly over time. Aspirin, for instance, will hydrolyze to acetic acid and salycilic acid. Part of getting a drug approved is a degradation study, where the drug is subjected to tough storage conditions and its condition is constantly tested. They check how long it takes to degrade to the point that it is no longer considered safe and effective- which could be because it loses its claimed potency or because the degradation products are harmful- and use that to set an expiration date for the product. The expiration dates are typically pretty conservative- the FDA tends to be very conservative in this kind of thing- so that expired aspirin is unlikely to be really dangerous, but manufacturers and retailers still aren’t supposed to sell the stuff.
ThresherK
Target tried to compete with Wal-Mart by keeping stores cleaner, better lit and better stocked.
In the southern New England suburbs this is how it runs.
(Dollar stores) know that it will take a pretty long drive for you
In my area this isn’t the thing because of little-state geography. RealMurka, sometimes not so much.
I’ve started using the presence of Dollar General along with the absence of other retail as an index of decline of a town.
The only thing more depressing than a locale where Wal-Mart has driven out the preexisting stores is a locale which Wal-Mart has abandoned after driving out the preexisting stores.
hells littlest angel
@ThresherK: Use genuine DG SAE-30, and see how easily your car’s crank turns!
Roger Moore
@Betty Cracker:
Mega-Lo Mart is also good.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??:
Because they look like fucking grenades. Also, if you have a MacBook Pro, you might have difficulties flying with it.
dnfree
My town is big enough to have a Menards and a Walmart, as well as a Farm and Fleet (if they don’t have it, you don’t need it), and several Dollar stores, but we really miss Shopko. It was the Target substitute for small towns. Yet another business loaded with debt so it couldn’t pay its bills and went bankrupt, leaving a big gap in many smaller towns.
ThresherK
Where are my italics? Bolds?
A Ghost To Most
When I was going to college, I vowed that I would do well enough that we would never have to shop at K-Mart again.
Now my goal is to make sure we never have to shop at a
dollardespair store.ThresherK
@hells littlest angel: I know! I can put it in my ’28 Model A, but not my ’31!
NotMax
Walmart* stores are purpose built shabby.
*The company dropped the hyphen on signage some time back.
Mike in NC
If you live in the South, these things are everywhere. We have multiple Dollar Trees, Family Dollars, and Dollar Generals within spitting distance. I like that everything in Dollar Tree costs a buck. Just bought four pairs of gloves for doing yard work.
oatler.
There’s a guy with a Youtube channel who regularly reviews dollar-store food. Long, detailed analyses.
pluky
@hells littlest angel: the active ingredient in aspirin (acetylsalicylate) decomposes in the presence of water into acetate and salicylate. Basically, if you open the bottle and smell vinegar. it’s time to get a fresh batch.
JanieM
@opiejeanne:
Ruckus comment from earlier today
ETA to delete repetition
Mary G
We have the 99.99 cent store. It’s not fancy, but not that grim either. The produce is a great buy if you get there before it runs out. Same brands as the grocery store at a quarter the price. Delivery is irregular and I belong to a network of olds that call around when a fresh batch arrives.
NotMax
@hells littlest angel
Never opened a bottle of aspirin and gotten a noseful of acrid vinegar odor?
SiubhanDuinne
I visit the Dollar Store maybe once a year. They’re the only place I can find any more that stocks Lavoris red cinnamon-flavor mouthwash, which is my favorite. Target and Walgreen and CVS all used to carry it (also cinnamon toothpaste) but for unknown reasons none of them stocks it now.
Jager
My grandparent’s North Dakota farm was only 18 miles from a city of 35,000. The little town where they got their mail was a few miles from the farm. In the 50s the little town of fewer than 200 people had a 2 block main street. It had a bank, a good little restaurant, a drug store with a soda fountain, a locker plant, a phone company office, a small hardware and general merchandise store, a bar with a package store and three pool tables, 2 gas stations and an implement dealer with a big repair shop. There were three grain elevators, the post office and a Northern Pacific railroad station. Today, one gas station, a grain elevator and the bar. The post office is still there. The school has been closed for 60 years. Back in the ’30s my Gramp’s brother had a medical office there, he closed it when WWII broke out and he went off to serve in the 3rd Armor Division. (He practiced in San Francisco after the war)
??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??
@hells littlest angel:
To be fair, a lot stores have their own off-brand stuff they sell. My own company does that, and they’re known for their quality. But yeah, I get what you mean.
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
Well, sure but they’re obviously not. Are they afraid they might cause panic on a flight or something?
@ThresherK:
Yup. My local shopping mall had a Sears until recently. It closed and now there’s this huge empty store space that will never be filled again. I can see the mall closing in 10 or 15 years. My community’s economy is highly dependent on brick and mortar retail and I worry what’s going to happen in the next 10 years.
NotMax
@SiubhanDuinne
Mmmm, red dye #2.
:)
SiubhanDuinne
@NotMax: Back in the day, uncoated aspirin would go all vinegary, but I’ve never had that happen with my coated Ecotrin.
SiubhanDuinne
@NotMax:
I don’t care. It tastes DELISHUS!
??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??
@oatler.:
Would this channel’s name happen to be BrutalMoose, by any chance?
Jeffro
@ranchandsyrup:
…is an excellent debut album by The Secret Machines. Or was, rather.
WhatsMyNym
The floor is bare concrete
Funny you should say that, most of the bigger stores (not box) here are switching to that.
ETA: my town doesn’t allow box stores. They limit the square footage and parking for new stores to keep them out, and county rules also makes it hard for them to setup in unincorporated areas.
schrodingers_cat
@oatler.: I have never brought food or anything perishable in a dollar store. Closest food related thing I have bought are the huge roasting aluminum foil pan. I have used to make a chicken curry in the oven.
ThresherK
@Mary G: “The 99.99 Cent Store” should be way too close in concept to the 33-Cent Store on that Simpsons’ episode from 20 years ago. How badly does a chain want to remind people of that?
Sab
@TenguPhule: They have a pretty good grocery of canned goods. Not a single molecule of fresh food, but canned food is still food.
I met the second to last grocery owner in the elevator of my dad’s nursing home today. She was with an activities director. They ran a great store for twenty plus years. She sold it to an idiot that no one knew was an idiot.
If you don’t talk to the customers of the successful business you bought you are a special kind of idiot.
trollhattan
@kindness:
I’ll SWAG it’s oil made to a standard superseded by newer, tighter standards. The SAE number or what have you.
As a grossly overstated example, oil made for a carburated, low-compression, V8 gasoline engine would be badly unsuited for a modern, high-compression, turbocharged engine with port injection, or a turbo-diesel.
They probably got themselves a yuge bargain out of some dusty warehouse and just put it out there on the shelf.
Interestingly, unopened motor oil typically is very stable and can be used for a long while. Just mind what it’s made to go in.
Roger Moore
@Jager:
The big change is that the little town you were describing used to be surrounded by dozens of small farms, so that the local population of the town and surrounding area was enough to support all those businesses. But North Dakota farming has become heavily mechanized, so the farming population has probably dropped by a factor of 10 since your grandfather’s day, and the population just isn’t big enough to support the town anymore. Not to mention that the roads and cars are enough better today that the farmers aren’t going to balk at driving 18 miles to the nearby city when they need the services they used to get in town. Those trends have been killing small farming towns in most of the country.
ranchandsyrup
@Jeffro: that’s precisely what made me think of the phrase. wish they were still together.
Jager
@Roger Moore:
Yep, my farmer relative has consolidated 7 farms into one.
dm
I’m guessing the Coke-cans get confiscated by TSA because they contain more than 3 oz of liquid?
Is TSA confiscating empty ones?
NotMax
Project for the day completed this morning, replacing the surge protector under and at the rear of the desk..
Much creaking and groaning ensued getting down on the knees and crawling under there, not to mention eventual success at getting back up again. Untangled the thicket of wires and cables and arranged them in an orderly fashion (including removing some old ones which were no longer connected to anything at either end), cleaned the dust hippos and detritus which had accumulated. Sweaty job in this heat.
Like the new unit very much, as it includes two USB ports (what doesn’t nowadays) plus has sufficient outlets intelligently placed so as to plug in the bricks which some plugs sport without impeding access to other outlets at all, but especially because it has little sliding shutters which one can shut over unused outlets to prevent dust and dirt from getting in. The unit I replaced was so old it included ports for telephone jacks. No longer have to take up a USB port on the computer to power the small fan I have sitting under the desk used to help cool the lower part of this old bod.
quintillian
This seems like a relevant piece.
Excerpt
joel hanes
@hells littlest angel:
I can’t bear spending six bucks for two D batteries
If you have a Walgreen’s in the vicinity, you should know that Walgreen’s branded alkaline batteries are quite reasonably priced, nearly as good as the premium brands (so close as to be indistinguishable in most applications) and that they very regularly have 2-for-the-price-of-one sales.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@NotMax
I did that a couple of months ago with the area behind my monitors.
Robert Sneddon
@ThresherK: My motorbike runs straight SAE-30 oil. Of course it was built in 1959 based around an engine designed in the 1930s. It’s tricky for me to source SAE-30 these days, the vintage bike enthusiasts in my area occasionally make a bulk purchase from somewhere and resell to owners of old bikes.
I wouldn’t put SAE-30 in any sort of a modern engine though, they have much higher tolerances, compression ratios etc.
C Stars
I’ve noticed and remarked to my spouse about the same thing–there’s something particularly depressing (and pervasive, in rural parts) about a town where the only mercantile option is a broken-down dollar store. And yet…in my tony bay area city, there’s a 99 cent store within a mile radius of at least four other grocery stores and judging from the couple of times I’ve been in, quite a lot of folks go to the 99 cent store for groceries. This particular place has meat and produce, and none of it looks fantastic, but heck, it’s groceries, and it’s cheap. And the store itself is clean—pretty much just looks like a Safeway with a somewhat weirder selection of items. It’s actually a great alternative to having your family go hungry or go into debt, right? I think if you shop there regularly you probably get used to checking the expiration dates. When I was last there to stock up for a kid’s birthday party, about half the items were expired.
ETA: I did not in fact purchase expired items and feed them to little children… just noticed about half of the items I picked up were past their date.
Jeffro
@ranchandsyrup: Awesome – glad we were on the same page!
You probably already know, but one of the two Curtis brothers (2/3 of the band) died from cancer a few years ago, so – although the remaining brother and the drummer look like they might be reactivating their efforts – it won’t be a complete reunion.
ranchandsyrup
@Jeffro: did not know that! thanks for passing along and i’ll keep a look out for the reformed effort.
Omnes Omnibus
Shopkos were pretty decent for what they were. A couple of years ago my brother got me a pair of Grinch pjs from there.
More seriously, they appear to be keeping many of their pharmacies open. I think some are going to become stand alone operations.
debbie
@Delahaye 135:
You’d almost think Walmart would have come up with some kind of mini-ish Walmart outlet model for those underserved areas.
Howard Beale IV
Wal-Mart announced the closing of their St. Paul MN store yesterday. The store was on University Ave, and they were close to a Super Target which is still staying open.
Howard Beale IV
@Robert Sneddon:
Just about all cars these days use synthetic oil (0W20 and its close relatives)
Roger Moore
@C Stars:
I suspect that a big difference between the nice 99 Cent Store in your neighborhood and the broken down dollar store in small town America is the size of the local market. There are a lot of people within easy shopping range of your local 99 Cent Store, enough that it probably turns over its merchandise pretty quickly. Because they have turnover, they can afford to keep the place stocked, staffed, and maintained.
The dollar store in small town America is drawing from a much smaller market, and even though they’re the primary local shopping destination, they probably have lower turnover than your 99 Cent Store. They need to be big to have space for all the stuff they stock, but that means their turnover is low and they have to cut corners in staffing and maintenance to break even. That’s why you see half-stocked shelves and barely enough people to run the cash registers.
Howard Beale IV
@dm:
They are also confiscating in checked luggage.
TenguPhule
@Omnes Omnibus:
Does not compute.
mrmoshpotato
@??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??: I think he’s talking about YouTube channel TheWolfePit.
NotMax
@C Stars
Not a dollar store, there was a store when was living in very rural northeastern Pennsylvania which we described as the “what fell off the back of or else came from a truck which broke down on the highway this week store.” Never knew on any given trip what would be on the shelves or available upon asking from the walk-in fridge. Yet they always had unbranded cans of sardine flavor cat food, at a nickel a can, which I’ve never seen any place else and which the cat people swore their pets loved more than any other store bought feline grub (the aroma when the can was opened was enough to clear the stuffiest sinuses in nothing flat).
Also, if one timed it right, could pick up a big mesh bag or two of fresh clams for a song.
They ran out of room on the storefront, so the sign read DISCOUNT GROC’S. Naturally, we all ended up pronouncing and calling it “Discount Groks.”
LivinginExile
@Roger Moore: You seem well informed on the mechanics of expiration. Any thoughts on Trump’s? Also, here in rural Illinois the thriving little towns have been long gone. The only reason the town I’m in has any retail is because it’s the county seat. Still, no walmart, but an awful dollar general.
ThresherK
@Robert Sneddon: I hear that unleaded gas is a problem with vintage engines because of valve seating or something. Is that something you’ve found for your bike?
Jeffro
@Roger Moore: @LivinginExile: Thinking of badly run/shabby looking Dollar Stores makes me think that there must be one, somewhere, that is just gleaming and neat and the clerks are happy and the customers really enjoy shopping there. But I am probably thinking of a Hollywood rom-com version, where ‘boy meets girl over tiny bottles of dish soap in aisle 7’
C Stars
@NotMax: Discount Groc’s!!—you’re not paying for the “erie”
Yeah, we lived near a discount grocery store once–it was similar, but slightly different beast than a dollar store–and it was always an adventure. People swore there were incredible bargains to be had in the cheese and wine departments, though I never really noticed anything spectacular. I remember there were always odd and somewhat intriguing ice-cream flavors, like “Lucky Charms” flavor, or “Snickerdoodle cookie dough.” Obviously didn’t make it in the regular market. We tried one once, (Arnold Palmer flavor?? I dunno, something weird) and it was not great.
@Roger Moore: Yes. There are simply more people wanting to buy groceries here, and some percentage of that (large) population will want to buy them at the 99 cent store, so it is a viable business.
LivinginExile
@Jeffro: Most likely any movie involving a dollar store would be mega boy meets mega girl as they trip over piles of crap in the aisle and fall into each other’s arms. They then race to his place, his mom’s basement, in his four wheel drive monster truck, filled with bags of Cheetos and mountain dew to watch Fox news. The end.
LivinginExile
@LivinginExile: @LivinginExile: mega not mega
Omnes Omnibus
@TenguPhule: That’s your problem.
LivinginExile
@LivinginExile:try again Maga
MoxieM
@NotMax: In Eastern MA those were known as Bldg 19; Bldg. 19 1/2; Bldg. 19 3/4 and so on. The first one was in a place called Building 19, and they just kept the name with minor additions. They’ve been out of business for a while now, but the heyday it was fun. I don’t know how much fell off the truck, but they definitely had stuff from warehouse fires, stuff that was 3 or more years old (like house wares, or kids’ books…or calendars! useful, those). You could get reading glasses for $.50 if you were willing to spend the time pawing through a bin of highly random eyewear. Eventually, after Walmart and all that, they started selling crappy Chinese garden tools, and exploitative Indian rugs. And then they went under.
For the real Massholes among us, there was Spags out in Worcester … also gone. It turned out that Spag had goons, as an old BF’s band name was The Spags (tribute band! really!), and some tough guys came and told them to lay off the name.
And of course, still going strong: Ocean State Job Lot, the pride of Rhode Island. (Raise a glass to EFG. He would have known Spags too.)
Cameron
Damn. I live at the intersection of Old Fart Avenue and Strip Mall Street a couple miles north of SRQ Airport, and y’all make me feel like I live in a penthouse in Sarasota. Winn-Dixie behind me, Publix across the street, Target at the other end of the Publix strip…..this retirement thing must be better than I’ve noticed.
oatler.
@mrmoshpotato: That’s the one! I forgot the name.
Roger Moore
@LivinginExile:
I don’t do stability testing myself, but I do work in a different corner of pharma testing, and I’ve known people who work in stability testing.
Gin & Tonic
@MoxieM: Building 19 was great!. Job Lot (“the home of adventure shopping”) is good, but it’s a pale shadow of Building 19.
mad citizen
@Jeffro: The one in Sling Blade that John Ritter’s character worked at. Not a Rom-Com but Dwight Yokum and even Vic Chesnutt are in it.
I liked this thread, so interesting that so many jackals live or visit ‘Murica’s hinterlands. I enjoy our local Dollar Trees for fun browsing, but am in probably the wealthiest Indiana county (Hamilton)
Roger Moore
@NotMax:
Back in the good old days, Trader Joe’s would sometimes have incredible bargains. They’d find a lot of some item that was either too small for big chains to deal with or otherwise problematic for their competitors, buy it for a song, and pass the savings on to the customer. Looking for those things was one of the big attractions of shopping there.
Mainmata
@Delahaye 135: When we are at our rural farm, the nearby choice is either a Food Lion (which are almost always in small towns in the Middle Atlantic, at least) and Walmart. The Food Lion is smelly and has fairly limited choices compared to other urban supermarkets and certainly compared to Walmart, which has a lot of other things besides food. Unlike Food Lion, they also carry organic products and a full line of Hispanic foods. So, yeah, they’re a horrible, right wing company but they do have good product standards.
Lee
Havard has this paper that shows that on most class of drugs they are good for a decade after expiration date here
chopper
@ThresherK:
fuck that! i’ve been using SAE 30 as gearbox oil for my vespa for 25 fuckin’ years. y’all aint getting rid of that shit no-how.
LivinginExile
@ThresherK: When the gas became no lead we had an old tractor that the valves would stick unless we added a quart of diesel fuel each time we filled the gas tank.
chopper
@ThresherK:
IIRC that was a 99 cent store, and they were selling furs and grand pianos.
Roger Moore
@Lee:
I would take that paper with at least a small grain of salt. The key is that the drug companies are running stability studies under very unfavorable conditions- the rough equivalent of storing your medication in the glovebox of your car or a vacation home with no air conditioning- while this counter study is looking at drugs that have been kept under very good conditions. Also, the drug companies will typically not test beyond 3-5 years, so even the most stable drugs won’t have an expiration date longer than that.
I am more inclined to take the conservative, drug company values. Most prescription drugs shouldn’t be kept after whatever you got them for has passed, if only because it reduces the chance of somebody taking them who shouldn’t, and most OTC drugs are cheap enough that it doesn’t make a lot of sense to try to cut corners. There are some obvious exceptions, of course. A good one would be a drug like Plan B, which may be difficult to get for political reasons; you shouldn’t trash that because its expiration date is past unless you can replace it. Given how expensive epi-pens are, I can understand people holding onto them past their expiration date to try to save money. But it’s foolish to try to save a few bucks by keeping around expired Tylenol.
Another Scott
@ThresherK: You have to use [em][/em] for Italic, here.
(Dunno if that was the problem you’re having.)
Cheers,
Scott.
Sloane Ranger
We have Poundland over here which works on the same principle. All the stores I’ve seen or visited look as clean and well lighted as the other shops. They don’t seem to carry any regular lines however. Just whatever their Purchasing Department can pick up for a song, normally bankrupt stock or new lines the manufacturer wants shot of as they didn’t sell. I’ve never seen anything actually out of date but occasionally things are pretty damn close.
Lee
@Roger Moore: drugs at our house are stored in a temperature controled environment and in the dark (cabinet). So drugs can last a bit longer than their expiration date.
Omnes Omnibus
@Lee:
Sure, but you can’t do anything with them on the secondary market.
J R in WV
We actually bought stock in Dollar General, and they’re doing better than Walmart stock is.
Don’t hate me for having a financial advisor who is able to pick a stock that then does very well !!
Here locally Dollar General has new and clean stores, with well stocked shelves. I mostly buy ice there on the way to picnics, as I’m into town once or twice a week to stock up a little bit.
NotMax
@J R in WV
Ah, but is it expired ice?
;)
barbequebob
@schrodingers_cat:
On Cape Cod we have them at our town dumps (transfer stations) and call them “Swap Shops”. Run by volunteers, they are a high point in the life and culture of the town. It’s the place to find treasure and meet everyone you know from town. We do all our Christmas Shopping there.
Tim in SF
This is not a great post. It’s predicated on the myth of medication expiration, which mostly isn’t true.
Don’t take my word for it.
I wouldn’t take expired antibiotics, but ibuprofen is good for a long time past the date.
barbequebob
@MoxieM:
Loving Ocean State Job Lot here on Cape Cod. But, the “Crazy Deals” are not as good as they used to be, unless you want to buy at massage chair for $6999.99 and get a gift card for that amount in exchange. My thinking is they figure you will lose that card long before you spend it.
Robert Sneddon
@ThresherK: Soft valve seats (well, soft meaning unhardened steel rather than actually “soft”) were lubricated by the tetraethyl lead in regular fuel before lead-free became a thing. Using modern fuel without taking precautions will etch away the valve seats and lead to loss of compression — I had this happen on an old van I was driving, I got a head swap after the camshaft failed and I didn’t realise the donor was from an older engine with soft valve seats. Hilarity ensured and a lot of repeated valve work before I realised what was going on.
There are two workarounds, one is to get the cylinder head reworked with new hardened valve seats, the simpler patch is to use a lead-substitute additive in the fuel every time I top up the tank. It doesn’t take much but I do have to be religious about it.
Jay Noble
@debbie: Walmart has tried smaller stores over the last few years called Walmart Neighborhood Market. Overall they haven’t done well.
Chris Johnson
This whole thread:
Me:
Omnes:
Fuck off, fuckwit :D people use ‘scare quotes’ around economic insecurity because they are in denial about the circumstances all over this thread about Dollar Generals and such things. I’m not claiming Trump voters are not racist when they’ve been trained to be for years and years. What I am claiming is this: the conditions we’re experiencing, both here and in the UK ever since Reagan/Thatcher, which I am happy to call neoliberalism, are intense population-wide desperation going completely unaddressed.
I absolutely hate when people mock and scare-quote desperation and sneer that it’s just a bunch of racists who deserve what they get. Democrats have no business ignoring all this. It is generation-wide failure to cope with these conditions (because hey, ‘the economy is so good!’) that sets people up for their turn to racism: if people weren’t so desperate they would have so much less of a need to cast blame.
It’s Fox and the rightwingers who devote all their efforts to blaming the ‘other’ for the problems, but it ain’t just Fox who set up the problems.
tam1MI
@dnfree:
My town is big enough to have a Menards and a Walmart, as well as a Farm and Fleet (if they don’t have it, you don’t need it), and several Dollar stores, but we really miss Shopko.
I went to high school and college in a town in Central Wisconsin. It had a Fleet Farm, a KMart right next to the college campus, and a Shopko. The Fleet Farm is still there, and the town now has Target and Walmart and Staples and strip malls galore (it is, thankfully, thriving), but the KMart and Shopko are gone. Every once in a while I feel a twinge of regret for that. I liked Shopko.
steverinoCT
I routinely go to Dollar Tree to get the large-print word-search puzzle magazines my MIL craves. Out of several brands they carry she prefers just one. I go to a specific store in Gales Ferry b/c they are distinctly clean and well-organized. Compared to other DTs, the puzzle books are sorted and neatly in their racks. The whole store is tidy, and the staff takes pride in it. Even the restroom was spotless.