HALIFAX, Nova Scotia (CU)_Everything seems to be getting more and more expensive. From food and gas to housing, prices are on the rise, while paycheques are failing to keep pace. As many Canadian households face the burden of inflation increases, many consumers are expected to flocking discount stores for bargains, according to experts.
Before the pandemic began to ravage the lives and livelihoods of millions of people, 15 to 20 per cent Canadians were regularly going to dollar stores for groceries, Sylvain Charlebois, the director of the Agri-Food Analytics Lab at Dalhousie University, said. “When food inflation becomes an issue, we do believe that dollar stores will get more traffic because people are looking for better deals,” he added.
According to Bailey Parnell, who runs the non-profit #SafeSocial, do-it-yourself tutorials featuring items purchased from dollar stores are becoming trendy on TickTok, Instagram and other social media platforms. There are over 27,000 posts on Instagram which include the hashtag “dollaramafinds”, while there are Canadian Facebook groups, with over 100,000 members, dedicated to dollar store hauls.
According to Parnell, many young people struggling with increasing cost of living are believed to be driving the trend, connecting with others in similar situations. “The bulk of the people that make up the active social media trends are largely Gen Z and maybe a bit of Gen Y right now — and this is a generation that has been working longer for less money than ever before,” she said.
The biggest dollar store chain in Canada is Dollarama, which have over 1,300 stores across the country, selling items for $4 or less. The spokesperson for the retail chain told CBC News that over the past five years, the company had opened 60 to 70 new stores and is aiming to operate 2,000 stores in Canada by 2031.
Willy Shih from Harvard Business School says that these stores are able to offer products at such a low price owing to low overhead at small stores and few staff. “It is really targeting a less well-to-do market, and they try to serve that with convenience and everyday necessities,” he said, although it does not mean dollar stores are only attract people with low incomes. “In one that I went to visit, there was a customer buying greeting cards, and when the customer left the store, they got into a Cadillac Eldorado,” Shih said.
