Dollar Store Chic

As a snob, I try to pay as much as possible. You get what you pay for, and it’s not worth the time to ferret out the exceptions. However, I shop at dollar stores for some everyday items: paper towels, containers, simple tools, rubber gloves, and the latest Power Rangers merch. Consumers in Quebec are highly price-conscious (read poor), and stores like Dollarama have done brisk business here. No surprise when you tally up what they have to offer: the single price concept, no frills, and a wide selection from the best sweatshops in Asia.

Dollar stores are ahead of their time in most respects, so I wouldn’t want to speculate too much on whether or not the staff are actually paid $1/hr. I’ve found the employees friendly and knowledgeable about the prices and what aisle the pens might be in. The security guard, the chubby one in the disposable shirt, always keeps his eyes on me, so I never feel ignored. On the whole, it’s hassle-free shopping for all our mundane needs.

But yesterday my understanding of the dollar store as an unostentatious oasis of five-and-dime functionality was shattered. I was humming along to the piped-in Corey Hart, waiting in line with my armload of sponges and flatware when I spotted the young couple at the register. He: 18, hair bechromed with product, shit-catcher jeans, swooshless sneakers. She: younger, possibly strung out, painted-on top. In their shopping cart they had socks, sunglasses, stockings, music CD’s in paper envelopes, and copious bling. The cashier counted it all—un dos tress kwatr sink syet och nuev. And then, just as she was about to ring them up, his hanging lips wobbled as his shopping list came back to him. He lifted his hand and pointed at the display behind her.

“Et une boîte de cologne.”

Just like that! The brand is Jean-Philippe. These boxes feature a model who looks disturbingly like Billy Ray Cyrus, arms crossed jauntily over a floppy red shirt. Behind flies the stars and stripes. The motto:

Jean-Philippe: Famous Scents for Fewer Cents!

So what we have here is a smell you buy and apply to your skin to the degree you wish to make yourself fragrant and endearing to others. It’s manufactured in China, boxed with a French name, an American flag and an image of Mr. Achy Breakie photoshopped just enough that they don’t need to pay him, sold everywhere in the civilized world and in Québec. All hail the marketing maven who spawned that scents/cents pun, but might it not have been more euphonious and true to the target market to say less cents?

But who am I to criticize these entrepreneurs? No matter how much it might smell like diesel, Jean-Philippe’s dollar store line of Sino-Franco-American odours is an outstanding value: it’s sixty times cheaper than regular cologne, but probably only twenty times worse. Economic advantage times three. I realized that this couple before me were the darlings of economists everywhere: they were behaving with perfect rationality, stimulating the economy and getting the maximum for their money. Any aesthetic item can be diluted and atomized until it’s worth someone’s while to package and sell it for a dollar, and at that price you can’t get ripped off. From there I opened my clairvoyant third eye on the future: more and more dollar stores swarming into cultural hegemony, selling one dollar clothes, one dollar shoes, one dollar prints, one dollar first editions.

Space Battle for the Radioactive Tombs of the Rigelian Bondagelords!

A Jean-Philippe Novelization based on the brain fart by TM.

Famous lines for less dimes!