How old do you have to be to remember a 5 and 10-cent store? Just by chance I decided to check on the inflation rate from 1959 to 2025 and found it is almost exactly 1,000%. One thousand percent since I was born. Well, look at that. Checking in with Wolfram Alpha 1000% of 10 = 100. Ten cents then is the same as a dollar now. Irony lives because a Dollar General store just opened in my neighborhood. Some things stay the same, and yet some things don’t. (Duh.)

Dollar General et al., seems to be the junk drawer of modern society. It might be sort of organized, but things end up in the oddest places, the selection is – pause while I search for a euphemism – eclectic, and yet it can be the best place to find the oddest things. Great for those shopping trips for something that only has to last for a day or a month. Sad to know that for some folks this or a thrift shop is as good as shopping can get, even for essentials. But, hey, if it does the job for long enough, then a buck may be good enough.

Flashback to the 60s. I’m not even a teenager. Our local 5 & 10 cent store wasn’t a chain. We weren’t poor, but we weren’t rich. It felt like we went there once a week. Mom would shop and ,for some reason, thought it was okay to let me run around the store. Of course, I’d gravitate to the toy aisle. To me, it seemed like a wonderous place. (Note: Selective amnesia may be at work after fifty years.) I even remember a soda counter in the classic style: sundaes on a long formica counter with padded swivel seats of chrome. (More modified memories?)

I don’t expect a food counter in the modern equivalent. If there was any food, there’d be branding outside. I would expect to find kids bumping around in the aisles because kids are kids. I also don’t expect to shop there. I don’t buy much. When I do buy something, it tends to be new if I want it to last, or from a reuse/recycle store. Where I live now, Port Townsend, has an excellent reuse store. A visit is like a treasure hunt, and a place to also give up some stuff rather than toss it or donate it to a mega-non-profit. (Their CEO gets paid how much?) My previous address, Whidbey Island, had an outdoor version. It could’ve just been a junk yard, but they organized it so well that it looked like a supply yard for future sculptures or for customized, though possibly not permitted affordable housing.

The 1959 store is probably gone. Yep. Just checked. According to the internet, it’s gone. So is the artistic yard on Whidbey, taken over by a firm that may be more organized and functional but not as much fun. 

And I suspect Dollar General may be about to encounter difficulties or have to change its name. Real, artficial, or imposed inflation could ramp up all those prices past a dollar. (A ‘Buck or Two’ store?)

Why do I bring this up? Sometimes, I’m not sure either. Such is the nature of writing. Inspiration doesn’t always deliver itself with labels and instructions. Here’s your raw material; build something from it.

Voopa Voopa Voopa. Ding. Here we go.

Oh yeah. Now I remember. Scale things up a bit, and shift over to the and of the ATM.

I dance. I dance for fun. Local dancers know I certainly don’t dance for perfection or performance or competition. Few dances are free. Most are bare-bones productions, keeping prices low enough to let almost everyone be able to afford to dance. They typically don’t charge round numbers like $20 or $50, yet many ATMs seem to think the economy runs at that level. I pity the person at the door having to worry about having enough change when everyone comes in with $20s and $50s.

There are ways to get the right change. One is to let the organizer worry about it. One is to pay for regular shopping in cash. (Cash?!) And one is to celebrate a bank that has an ATM that offers to deal in dollar bills. Score! That may be enough to make me switch banks, but not yet. There are some potential person life choices which may influence that, but that’s another story in progress.)

At least one bank is not ignoring a segment of their customers and their needs. But they are the minority.

We’re witnessing a fracturing of society between oligarchs and the rest of us, of liberal and conservative, of logic versus emotion, of objective versus subjective. Dollar Generals et al. and ATMs probably won’t grab headlines, but they may be immediate evidence of who is and is not being included.

This blog is about personal finance. It is also based on the book I wrote accidentally (Dream. Invest. Live.) before the start of the Great Recession (the Second Great Depression, in my opinion.) Within the recent thirty year,s I’ve been middle class, a millionaire, and muddling by. I’m into the third edit of the book chronicling that ride through America’s wealth classes. 

I may not want to shop in a Dollar General or its cousins, but I also recognize the reality that sustains such stores. Cheap greeting cards? Why not? It’s not like they have to be archival. Toys that break easily? Childhood is temporary, and childhood whims are even more ephemeral. Decorations that have to survive most of a party at best? Sure, unless you are planning another 5th birthday or twenty-year reunion.

As I check on ideas while writing this, I find articles that Dollar General is expanding and closing stores. Maybe they can’t make up their minds. Maybe they’re confused, too, but on a larger scale than most of us. Cheap products stereotypically come from China, or at least from overseas, or at least locally across our southern border.

Ah, so there’s the idea that was rattling around inside my subconscious. The Five and Dime or Dollar General, et al., are bellwethers of retail. If Saks has problems, their relatively few customers have options. If a nice place like Nordstrom stumbles, shoppers have places to retreat to.

The Architect: “There are levels of survival we are prepared to accept.” – Matrix Reloaded

If places like Dollar General or the Dollar Store or the dollar-whatever fail, they won’t impact me, but like watching a weed wither, I’ll be seeing evidence of a drought. And I know it will be happening to people who may have few or no other choices.

I’ll be watching this new store down the street, watching its parking lot as I drive by, and wondering about kids in the aisle for whom they’re in their own world of wonder, at best.

Whatever happened to my Mom’s books of S&H Green Stamps? I wonder what they’re worth today.