13 December—The New Hartford Planning and Zoning Commission has just by a three-to-two vote permitted Dollar General to build a store in that town. Thrilling. I actually went into a (the?) Dollar General store in Torrington several years ago. Can’t remember what I was looking for, but I didn’t find it. I couldn’t in fact find anything in that store and the staff were rude in addition to being useless.

What I did find, however, was that very few items in that Dollar General store were actually priced at a dollar. And I just read that the chain boasts—at least it says—that it sells about a fifth of its merchandise for a dollar. Only a fifth. That means four-fifths, or 80 percent, for over a dollar. So much for the dollar part.

Deceptive advertising? Your call. Remember Woolworth’s five and ten or five and dime stores of blessed memory that even in my antediluvian childhood didn’t sell much for five or ten cents? At least F.W. Woolworth didn’t use enticingly deceptive low prices in the company name.

And we got the expression “nickel and dime” from those stores. It means greedily or unfairly charging multiple small amounts for minor services, being small-minded, petty, piddling. Or, monetarily speaking, two-bit, penny-ante, twopenny-halfpenny.

That takes us to Dollar Tree, which has announced that it’s raising its one-dollar prices, which it’s been charging for most of its merchandise, to $1.25. Dollar Tree’s boss insists that the higher price point is a permanent move, not the result of “short-term or transitory market conditions.” He also says that the $1.25 price point will allow the company to offer a wider range of merchandise, including items that had been discontinued at the dollar level. He should be spinning for Biden.

People who regularly patronize so-called dollar stores often are unaware that many of the items found in them are merely offered in smaller quantity and/or different quality or composition than at non-dollar stores; and that ounce for ounce, they’d likely do better elsewhere. Same with hard goods. We won’t dwell on dollar stores’ (or anybody else’s) ungodly dependence on China.

That takes us, ever so briefly, to the self-proclaimed wholesale clubs. BJ’s Wholesale Club and Costco Wholesale Corporation and others we’ve never heard of. Wholesale? Really? As commonly understood, wholesaling is selling products, usually in bulk and at a discount, to retailers, who then sell the products to their own customers. At higher prices, of course.

The bulk part often applies to BJ’s and Costco. But they’re clearly retailers whose prices may not be all that great despite the quantities customers—sorry, members—are forced to buy.

The BJ’s and Costco corporate names are deceptive. So sue ‘em. And the club part, besides propping up their bottom lines with subscription dollars and motivating customers—er, members—to buy buy buy in order to make the costly subscriptions worthwhile, allows the retailers to do end runs around any number of consumer protections . . .