If you don’t care about brands, meat, fresh vegetables, and you don’t crave the eye-glazingly hypnotic experience that today’s modern superstore short-circuits your cortex with, then dollar stores are just fine.

Do the math: A jar of spaghetti sauce for $1.00, spaghetti for $1.00, that’s good for two days, so that’s a month’s worth of eating for $30.00, and who cares about brands? And we haven’t even gone for the luxuries like Canadian cookies ($1.00) or Romanian shampoo ($1.00) or cheap, bad light bulbs ($1.00) or Russian tsotchkes you can stock your hutch with or even sell on E-Bay ($1.00). If you’re in a city—if Philly isn’t famous for its dollar stores, it should be—different stores specialize in different varieties and flavors of detritus from the global supply chain, so you can even shop around.

As for vegetables, you can grow your own in the summer, and buy potatoes, turnips, and winter squash in bulk when the cold comes. And last I checked the supermarket actually had cans of beans at four for $1.00 which, in a pinch, is four meals.

As for meat, some of the dollar stores do have Spam…

Anyhow, dollar stores saved me when my personal economy crashed and burned after the dot com bubble burst in 2000, and I ate that way for quite some time. I got thinner, but that was partly because of all the walking I did, and I didn’t get sick.

Of course, there’s one assumption hidden in this survival strategy:  Read more