It was a sure sign the economy is heading south. There was a woman, looked to be upper middle class, being interviewed by one of the national newscasters, telling why she was now buying her groceries at a 99 Cent store.

The newscast, and the people being interviewed, made it sound like shopping at a 99 Cent store (or a Dollar Tree as they’re known around here) is an indicator that you’ve sunk as low as you can go.

This particular story originated from California and in the cheap stores out there you can apparently buy refrigerated groceries. Now, you can go into any of these stores around here and buy potato chips, assorted candy, Hamburger Helper, basically stuff that doesn’t spoil. But I have yet to see a meat section in one of these places.

And I’m not really sure how these places can sell meat since they’re all based around being close out stores, places where stuff that didn’t sell but is nearing its expiration date can be dumped and maybe have the last 10 cents of profit wrung out of it. Most meat only sits on the shelf for a few days, a week at the most, before it’s expired.

Who knows, maybe they have their own production system and get the meat fresh. But I can’t imagine they’re only charging 99 cents or a dollar for a pound of hamburger when everybody is charging $2.79 and claiming they’re barely getting by.

But when it comes to everything else, I have to be up front and say I am a very big fan of these cheap stores. The top level of these stores is the Big Lots chain. We head to one of these stores every two weeks and always find some treasure to bring home. It might be something as simple as deodorant or paper towels for less than half the cost of a “regular” store, or some electronic gizmo that costs $40 everywhere else, but is $9.95 at the close out store.

As a matter of fact, I am currently wearing an $8 watch from Big Lots. It tells the same time as the one you spent $30 or more on at a regular store.

Next on the list would be the dollar stores. They appear to all be Dollar Tree stores around here, but I’m sure they have many different names across the country. And I’m not including places like Dollar General as they’re more of a regular store.

The lure of the Dollar Tree stores is that, well, everything’s a dollar. You can get some things, like candy bars or cans of soft drink for 50 cents, but everything else is a dollar. And while I’ve always suspected you could have some fun by holding something up and yelling, “This doesn’t have a price tag on it. Can you tell me how much it is?” I’ve never had the nerve to do it.

While the Dollar Trees usually have everything under the sun, almost all with company names you’ve never heard of and logos you don’t recognize, for me the attraction is their bookshelves.

Dollar books are like manna from heaven to me and if I wander into one of these stores and see some volumes I don’t have, then I’m good to go. There’s nothing quite like paying a dollar for a book and then seeing it on some bookstore shelf for $19.95 or higher. I feel like I’ve pulled something over on someone.

The final rung on these places is probably what are popularly known as “sundry stores.” These are the places that do things like buy stock from dying Kmarts and put it on the shelf without care for what the expiration date is.

I once thought I’d found a great deal on a bottle of multi vitamins at one of these places. Then I saw the expiration date was November 2005. I found the bottle sometime in 2007.

But if you can get past such things, and I always can, you can find some great deals at these places, especially on electronic stuff, as I’m pretty sure a lot of these people don’t quite know what they have.

For example, I once found a six-foot HDTV cable at one of these places. At a regular store, they retail for around $39.95. I would have considered it a bargain at $19.95. They wanted $5 for it. I grabbed that sucker without a second thought.

Once upon a time I felt a little embarrassed to buy things at such stores. But I was younger and believed what other people thought mattered. I long ago left behind that silly notion.

But now it looks like the rest of the world is catching up to me. If a woman can talk about buying groceries at a 99 Cent store with Palm Springs in the background, I can hold my head high when we take our Big Lots bags into the house.

michael.thomason@advocate anddemocrat.com | 442-4575.