Dollar stores seem to have a bad reputation in the public mind. Many people look down on them, assuming that they're all stocked with low quality, off-brand merchandise and cheap knockoffs. And then there's the fact that not all stores with the word 'Dollar' in their name actually price everything at a dollar. Places like Dollar General and Family Dollar qualify more as discount stores, since they sell things for a dollar and up. A lot of smaller, non-chain 'dollar stores' do the same thing.
The Dollar Tree chain of stores is what I would consider true 'dollar stores'. Everything they sell is priced at one dollar. I'll admit, some of the items they stock aren't the best quality. But if you need disposable party plates for a birthday celebration, or to use as palettes when working with decoupage medium the way I do, does it really matter what brand they are?
The thing I really love about Dollar Tree, however, is that sometimes they get old stock of name brand items.
Like these Harry Potter Backpack Buddies blind bag wands for example. These were made by Paladone, and if I remember correctly they were previously being sold for five dollars apiece at my local Five Below discount store.
The packaging states that there are 8 different wands to collect. I believe I've mentioned before that I tend to have bad luck with blind bags, so even at a dollar apiece I wasn't going to go crazy buying a bunch of these and risk getting mostly duplicates. But I did pick up one for my collection.
I ended up getting Ron Weasley's wand. Not one of the more elaborate designs, I'll admit, but it does have a decent amount of molded detail, considering the simplicity of the design. Just to clarify, the wand is made from a hard plastic. I know there was at least one other company making blind box wand keychains from metal, but that's a subject for another post. I'm also planning to replace the plastic clip on this with a split ring.
While I was at Dollar Tree, I picked up a Series 1 Lucky Fortune pack by WowWee as well. I forgot to photograph this in package, but each 'fortune cookie' came packed in a clear bag so buyers could see what color the 'dipped' ends were. The 'cookie' opens similar to a real fortune cookie, and inside you'll find a fortune plus 1 mystery bracelet. According to the packaging, Series 1 had 100 different bracelets that you could collect. However, it didn't really matter to me which bracelet I got, since I was more interested in the fortune cookie itself.
I ended up getting a bracelet with a unicorn charm that, according to the Collector's Guide, is Very Very Lucky. The bracelets are categorized on the sheet as either Lucky, Very Lucky, or Very Very Lucky. This seems to correspond to the supposed rarity of each charm. However, I don't know enough about this product to say for sure if there really are fewer of this unicorn charm than other charms.
Also, the charms are broken up into color coded categories that seem to match up with the different colors used for the 'dipped' ends of the fortune cookies. The categories are coded as follows: Adventure (light blue), Friendship (pink), Success (darker blue), Love (light purple), and Happiness (bluish green). The 'dipped' ends of my 'cookie' seem to be the Adventure blue color. However, according to the Collector's Guide, the unicorn charm belongs in the Happiness grouping, which again is color coded as bluish green. I wonder if this mix-up was a common problem for these Lucky Fortune packs, or if this batch was somehow defective and that's how they ended up at Dollar Tree. Or maybe the bracelet selection really is supposed to be completely random.
Incidentally, the gold tone ball chain didn't come in the pack. I added it myself to convert the cookie into a keychain.
And that's it for this keychain haul. I hope you enjoyed the post. And the next time you're near a Dollar Tree store, why not stop in and see what they have. You never know what you might find.
Signed, Treesa
(Note: This post has been in draft for longer than it should've been, and my neighborhood Dollar Tree store is already sold out of the two items I discussed here. I apologize to anyone who was planning to check the stores in their area for these specific blind bags.)
