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Re:Dollar Tree says US$1.25 price point to become new standard by dragonwriter on Wednesday November 24, 2021 @02:53AM (#29327784)
> Dollar stores are a relatively recent phenomenon

Kind of, but only because of the brief interregnum of the ~1970s-1990s height of suburban shopping malls. Dollar stores are a revival of the general variety discount stores — “five-and-dime” or “dime stores” — that largely either fell to suburbanization and shopping malls or morphed out of the model into mega-retailers (Walton’s Five-and-Dime, for instance, is now known as WalMart) or did the latter but still ended up doing the fomer (e..g, Kmart); the new dollar stores were rising just as many of the earlier giants of the same model were taking their last breaths in the late 1990s and 2000s; at least one of the early dollar store chains (Dollar Zone) was a rebranding of a classic general variety discount store chain that had started as a literal dime store chain (McCrory’s).

The rise of dollar stores tracks pretty well with the decline of the malls that had marginalized the original variety discount stores. They weren’t so much a new phenomenon as something that went through about a generation of marginalization.

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