Sign of the Times: Bringing those Dollar Store Prices to a Store Near You

FD: I have heard a lot about people shopping for food at a dollar store.

You find websites and news stories about it. Like this one ... http://www.stretcher.com/stories/09/09apr06f.cfm

Never thought of going grocery shopping in a dollar store. Then one day a few months ago, I walked into a dollar store near my home and figured that I would pick up a few food items that I needed. As I walked through the store and threw items in the hand basket, I calculated the amount of money I was saving then if I had purchased the items in a grocery store.

I'm not going to lie. I was incredibly leery about eating the food items. I double-checked the expiration dates and was even a little hesitant to take the first bite of the food as it was on my plate. It's from a dollar store, so how good could the food be? My favorite brand of pickles is now from my local dollar store as opposed to the other pickles I spent $3.50 for in a grocery store and didn't like half as much as the ones from the dollar store. I no longer buy candy from the grocery store. I pick up my favorite brands of candy at the dollar store and spend a third of the cost that I used to spend. Two bags of chips and two jars of salsa cost me $4, which is a little more than the cost of one bag of chips at the grocery store.

Today I noticed that the local Albertson's had noticed the trend and had an aisle set up for $1 priced shelf stable food items. There was no header or title for aisle #13, they might want to call it " Everything just a dollar" or maybe "Todo es apenas un dólar."