About 10 years ago I worked the register at a Dollar Tree store for exactly 1 six hour shift. I almost didn't go back to pick up my paycheck it was so bad. The customer base of these stores is very very sad. For every artist that's browsing for materials and inspiration there are a thousand little old ladies buying shit they don't need with money they don't have.
And for the most part it is shit. The food is too suspect to feed to my pets, and the consumer goods are notional facsimiles of real products. Like the Wow brand ShamWow, or the dish rag that won't make it through a wash cycle, or the Nerf gun knockoff that doesn't have any moving parts. None of this stuff is worth lifting off the shelf, let alone paying a dollar for.
I spent 6 hours of punching 1 dollar, 1 dollar, 1 dollar pondering over the people bringing this garbage to my counter, demanding indestructible plastic cups be wrapped in a dollars worth of tissue paper, repeatedly asking how much products cost as if they had not yet noticed they were in a dollar store. "How did this 70 year old woman decide today was the day she needed 20 slightly deformed acrylic cups? Has she been cupless all this time? And why return 2 hours later to get a dozen fake flowers?" I think I attributed that hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach to some concern that all these fools were being had, or perhaps that I was contributing to their hoarding illness.
The dread I felt was spot on, but the attribution was faulty. These people are not fools. The products they buy aren't fake but symbolic. They brought these offerings to my altar so that I might perform the "glassware" wrapping and price-check rituals of consumerism. I thought I was taking a job working a register, when I was really stepping behind the altar to become the liturgist of the Enfield congregation of the Dollar Tree denomination of Consumerism.
I have never been much of a devotee of the Consumer way of life, and the Dollar Tree denomination is the snake handling denomination of Consumerism. The products in a Walmart or Target could conceivably fill someone's need or desire. I doubt that much of what they sell is sold to fulfill practical wants and needs--their congregation of faithful parishioners who come to worship and trample every Black Friday for the year's must have electronic gadget attend regularly on a more distributed schedule throughout the year as well. But there is still a semblance of shame in the Walmart and Target version of idol worship. Your car floormats are a little dusty and the ones with the really rad flames on them just happen to be on sale! Outside the dollar store we're not quite ready to honestly confront what we believe in, who we are. At 16, with the quickly fading inoculation of an upbringing in the values of Presbyterianism, hard work, and education I was certainly not ready to deal with what I found in that Dollar Tree.