Strange World

I was over at the dollar store in Tsawwassen today (one of the things you can’t buy in Point Roberts--at least today--is a 6x9 inch manila envelope). The dollar stores are one of the puzzling things in the world, as I see it. When I got my first job, at the age of 14, in December of 1951, it was as a Christmas extra employee at S. J. Kress and Company, which we called ‘Kress’s’, and which was one of three dime stores in our town (also, Woolworth’s and Newberry’s). But long before that, I had done a great deal of serious, childhood shopping at the dime store (birthday presents, Christmas presents, Mother’s and Father’s Day gifts, and occasional personal longings achieved) and they were a stable presence in my post-WWII world.

Maybe twenty years later, dime stores began to close, the whole genre to disappear, and then to become the subject of nostalgic songs (like Nancy Griffith’s ‘Love at the Five and Dime’). I guess they succumbed to more department stores; I don’t know, but it was long before malls showed up, I think, before Walmarts or Targets dominated the suburban scene. Maybe dime stores were just nailed to the ground in town centers, and couldn’t find any way to get out to the suburban malls. Anyway, twenty, thirty years (or more?) after that disappearance, the dime store reappeared as a dollar store, stocked this time by Chinese manufacturers rather than the Japanese and American manufacturers that stocked my childhood and adolescent dime store.

Now we have dollar stores everywhere; like the dime stores, you know there’s one nearby and you know exactly what you can get there. Currently, there are three of them in the little town of Sechelt up on the Sunshine Coast, and there used to be two in Tsawwassen, but now there's only one. Farther over the border in Richmond, B.C., where many Hong Kongese immigrants to Canada live, there is even a Japanese dollar store, but there everything costs $2 and is made in Japan. Endless variation on this theme.

The dollar store has become as familiar now to people as the dime stores were in the 1940’s and 50’s. I’ve seen several of them go out of business over recent years, though, so perhaps they will not be able to survive as institutions, either. Perhaps they will have to find another function to serve in addition to selling us small items made of plastic and paper.

A possible solution! At the end of today’s dollar store visit, I went to the checkstand to purchase my $1.50 package of 6x9 envelopes and noticed (for the first time) two hand-written posters. The first one announced that they would not sell lighters to anyone under the age of 19; while the second one announced they would not sell laser pointers to anyone under the age of 16. Strange to think that the dollar store is the source of protecting us from teenagers with laser pointers and lighters; stranger yet to think that we need protecting from teenagers with lighters and laser pointers. And why is it that we can trust a 17-year-old with a laser pointer but not with a lighter. How is he to light the candles at the dinner table, or on his birthday cake or in the Menorah should he be Jewish? How is he to go on a camping trip and light his little stove or his little fire? What conceivable reasoning in some legislature in Canada caused such a law to be passed?

But perhaps the dollar stores can become the sources of public information of this sort, even when it doesn’t involve something they’re selling. The border people could post changes in what we can and can’t take across the border. Income tax regulation changes could be posted there. A billboard of endless regulatory changes for our entertainment and information. Somehow, it would seem appropriate to have this information delivered in a dollar store with all the other flotsam and jetsam of our lives.