99 cents shops

I currently live in Jersey City, a multiethnic and largely working class city in New Jersey. All throughout Jersey City, one can find significant numbers of "99 cent" shops, such as 99 Cent Dreams, on Kennedy Blvd. in Journal Square (there is also one of these in the Tremont section of the Bronx). Essentially, 99 cent shops are general stores that sell general merchandise, such as food, beverages, health and beauty aids (such as Crest toothpaste from Nairobi), stationary, housewares, toys, etc. for $0.99, more or less. While some of the merchandise is quite decent, a lot of it is junky and/or an obscure brand (generic cereals with names like Fruity-Os and Cocoa Crunchies); you get what you pay for, after all.

In Jersey City, most of the managers and employees of the city's 99 cents shops are members of ethnic minority communities, such as Indians, Pakistanis, Vietnamese, and Hispanics. I am assuming that positions at such places pay around, or perhaps even below, a minimum wage.

If stores like Saks and Bloomingdales represent a kind of elite shopping stratum, and Sears, Target and JC Penny represent a middle stratum, and if even Wal*Mart and K-Mart (the Marts) are lower (middle) class/lowbrow, then the 99 cents store occupies its own lower class niche, representing the consumption needs of (primarily) low income inner city dwellers.

Nevertheless, I have come to develop a begrudging respect for the 99 cent store. I shop in them. And sometimes I just go in to browse. I find them no less fascinating a social space than shopping malls, and I find the products that they sell to be like little case studies of global capitalism. And like most people, I also enjoy getting a bargain.

On another note, I love shopping in ethnic food shops, of which there are also many in Jersey City, buying, for instance, meats, breads and cheeses in local Italian delis (salumerias), and Asian rice noodles, seedless dates, pita breads, bags of couscous, and Indian delicacies in the various ethnic foodshops in this town. I'm going to miss these when we move to Beacon, NY next month.