1$

Spent some time in the dollar store yesterday while waiting for car to get done. Its a strange window into the universe. A sampling of culture based on price alone. Kind of like 3:16 samples the bible, its arbitrary but that doesn’t mean its non illuminating.

Its nice to see all you get get for a buck: pens, spaghetti sauce, pliers, books, and shampoo. I wonder what life would be like if we only consumed products that cost a dollar. But what really made an impression on me was that you could get a home pregnancy test there. It just doesn’t seem like the kind of product that you want the bargain version of. What if they sold birth control, would you buy that at the dollar store?

That reminds me of the purest demonstration of marketing I have seen. There was a company that realized that pregnancy tests had two distinct groups of consumers. People who hoped they were pregnant and those who didn’t want to be. They sold the same test in two different boxes. One was called “Conceive” and had a picture of a little baby on the front. The other was just a more generic medical looking package. If I remember right the Concieve version cost more.