You can still buy a chocolate bar for a buck.

At a dollar store, anyway. That very same bar costs THREE TIMES as much at the grocery store down the street.

The cost savings can be mind-boggling compared to bricks-and-mortar alternatives.

Yet Dollar Tree and Dollar General, two of America’s largest dollar store chains, are in big trouble.

Their stocks are plunging.

CEOs are walking away.

Sales targets are missed.

Dollar Tree wants to dump its Family Dollar brand.

The irony is pretty hard to miss: As people hunt harder for value after years of wild inflation, value retailers are somehow hurting.

These stores built empires through brutal efficiency. Lean staffing. Basic, cookie-cutter layouts. Limited selection.

No bells, no whistles, very little service. Just reliable daily bargains in those surprisingly low price stickers.

But today’s bargain hunters want more than low prices.

They want organization. Better service. Digital convenience. Quick delivery.

The experience matters.

That’s where Temu and its kind are winning.

They skip the costly retail spaces and deliver straight to YOUR door.

No life-sucking fluorescent lights. No messy aisles. No croaky-voiced cashiers who seem irritated to see you.

Just endless selection through an easy-to-use interface.

(For what it’s worth, I despise buying stuff on Temu. The crammed user experience, the false scarcity, the trashy products, the ceaseless pressure to keep adding more items. But clearly, pleasing folks like ME is not what Temu relies on to succeed!)

In I Need That, we explore how wants “flip” into needs when circumstances align perfectly. Dollar stores once flipped bargain hunting into a bona fide need — they were the only game in town for real savings on routine buys.

Now that flip has reversed. Savings alone aren’t enough to drive in-person store visits.

Those thousands of convenient locations might be concrete shoes for the dollar stores. Temu just needs warehouses and their app.

Action for today: Which of your traditional strengths could become tomorrow’s weaknesses?

Laurier

Product Payoff: Woolworth’s 4,000+ convenient locations couldn’t save the chain from Amazon’s ZERO physical stores. The future rarely looks much like the past.