Dollar Store Toy Box

I’ve mentioned several times that it seems most of the really entertaining stuff ends up in the American dollar stores, but then again, I find some stuff I can’t seem to find anywhere else online so either no one has posted it or it isn’t around.

I tend to avoid any food isles the dollar stores might have in favor of the toy section, but maybe I have to start taking a closer look since Joe Eskenazi came across boxes of cereal from Israel at a One $ Store in San Francisco.

He comments on how the staff didn’t want to go into the details of how they got it, but with some investigating, it seems it may not be from Israel. The cereal was manufactured in St. Louis by a company that owns Post, the well known cereal maker, and it gets imported to Israel by Monday, Ltd. Monday is the most prominent word on the box, dwarfing even the name of the cereal, Coco Crunchies, and at the very top.

The store staff did say that the cereal is very sweet and sells really well, and why not, it looks like Cocoa Puffs or Cocoa Pebbles.

At least they weren’t called Caco Crunchies.

Posted on January 26th, 2010 by Mike
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According to the Financial Post, with Dollarama taking control of the “bargain basement retail segment”, it could quite possibly double it’s store count.

With new stores immediately adding to earnings and generating new cash flow, in addition to being at the top of the “bargain basement retail segment”, they see no competition in expansion so they plan to increase the density of Dollaramas in other provinces like they have done with Quebec.

They also plan to incorporate “not a real dollar store” pricing by selling things for more than a dollar with three additional pricing scales, $1.25, $1.50 and $2.00. That’s probably the only thing that could hurt them since many shoppers bash dollar stores when merchandise is priced more than a dollar and it’s likely people would be turned off by the new price points. There’s already a dollar store with items costing $2.00, it’s called Buck Or Two.

Anyway, store chains expand when they do well and it’s not surprising with the current economy that people are trying to save money so they shop at dollar stores. There are plenty of good buys there if you know what to look for. Just remember to avoid things like vitamins, batteries and anything electrical as they are well known to have issues.

Posted on January 24th, 2010 by Mike
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I have posted my fair share of bootleg/knock off toys over the years, but all in all, I just show toys you can get at dollar stores. Some of them are bootlegs, some of them aren’t.

If you want to see more bootlegs/knock off toys, and I mean some really bad ones, you should check out bootlegactionfigures.com. It’s all bootlegs, all the time.

I thought I had some pretty funny bootlegs, until I went here. Mine are still good, and seemingly undiscovered, but there are so many bootleg toys here it will keep you busy for hours.

The chest light found on a few of the toys I have shown isn’t an isolated occurrence. Many toys shown there include that for some reason.

There are several categories of toys including Batman, Superman and Spiderman meaning there are several toys found with the likeness or obvious similarities to them and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. You can’t help but laugh seeing the Spidarmen or Patman, yes Patman with a ‘P’, toys. Another great is the Imitator toy, a bootleg of the Terminator, but I can’t ruin all the surprises.

I always knew all the good bootlegs are in the USA or Mexico.

Do yourself a favor and go check out the Bootleg Action Figures website.

Posted on October 1st, 2009 by Mike
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Despite the recession, some store chains are reporting a better second quarter compared to last year’s second quarter for different reasons.

Dollar General has been doing very well so far this year with an increase in sales by over 8 percent in the second quarter and over 11% for the year. There are plenty of useful items you can get cheaper there and it seems people are spending more time at discount stores to save money.

Toys R Us has also announced an increase in profit, even with a loss of total sales compared to last year,  just by streamlining margins and cost control. They have been able to turn a profit while the economy is down, showing they can handle the downturn. Increasing sales doesn’t always increase profit, sometimes you can increase profit just by lowering expenses and cutting costs.

It will be interesting to see if this trend continues when the economy gets better or if people will fall back into the bad habits of overspending and not saving for a rainy day. I’ve always tried to get sales or the lesser price anywhere I could to save money. Why pay more for the exact same thing somewhere else?

Have you started shopping at discount stores to save money?

Posted on September 18th, 2009 by Mike
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I was running an errand down at the plaza where the Buck or Two, or one of the Buck or Twos in the city in case there’s more than one, is located so I decided to stop in to see if they had anything new and/or interesting and to my surprise, the store was closed down, completely closed!

The store was completely cleaned out already and there was no sign or indication that the store was being move to another location. There were just several “Store Closed” signs on the inside of the windows. It’s kind of a surprise after reading several articles about how dollar store profits are up during the current recession.

Well what can you do, some locations just don’t work for certain things and it’s not like there aren’t any Buck or Twos around anywhere else.

Some of the toys I got at that particular store include the Bricks Set Sets(tough to say), Fighter Robots, Skateboard Racers, Pirate Figures and the Wildlife Collection Sea Creatures in addition to other toys I have yet to post.

It’s kind of the same thing as when the Food Basics dollar section got cleared out. I got a bunch of good things from there including the 11 inch army guy, Labyrinth Game Challenger and, toy that started it all, the plastic bowling set.

All good things must come to an end.

Posted on September 14th, 2009 by Mike
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This is it, the 100th post for Dollar Store Toy Box. I thought I would have hit that mark a long time ago, but this is only a side project. Regardless, I finally made it.

It’s kind of cheesy to announce a milestone posting on a website, I mean it’s not like a TV show lasting 100 episodes without being cancelled, but you only hit the 100 post count once per website under normal operation. Besides, how is this post any cheesier than the toys?

Looking Back
The site was originally going to be about the silly toys you get at the dollar stores. Unfortunately, it was shortly after setting up this website that many toys were starting to get recalled. I started posting some toy recall information and other toy news of note that caught my eye, like the toys being made into movies announcements.

For a laugh, this is what the site used to look like.

I figured it would fit the quality of the toys and such, a dollar design as it were. Then I got frustrated because I couldn’t get the side bars to work right so I found the current design.

All of the toys are cheaply made to keep them at their low price and many of the toys are bootleg, knock off or rip offs of popular toys to capitalize on the success of the toys they’re copying. It’s funny to see what cheap bootlegs you can find at the dollar and discount stores.

Moving Forward

New Look
I’m looking into changing this design to something else if I can sort out what I want, so don’t get confused if the look changes. I just want to get something that helps people find stuff easier. A design with two or more sidebars should help with that.

Toy Videos
It’s tough to really get an idea on how something works just by reading what I say, even with pictures. I have a few toy videos up on how some of the toys work so far, but they are mostly toys with sounds instead of uploading sound files to listen to individually.

I plan on putting up more videos of the toys in action and some original videos.

Flash Games
Hopefully you’ve tried out the Labyrinth Flash Game Challenger, based on the Labyrinth Game Challenger. It truly captures the frustration of playing with the real thing. Unfortunately, it’s the only game I’ve made so far, but I’m hoping to add more to that list.

Those are just some of the things to look forward to moving on and as always, constructive feedback and suggestions are welcome.

I hope it doesn’t take another couple years to get to 200.

Posted on August 16th, 2009 by Mike
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I finally got around to taking some video clips of the gadget toys. It’s hard to just talk about the cellphones and the BlackBerry when the sounds are a large part of the toy.

With the Spiderman cellphone, I posted the individual sounds that came with the toy, but people had to click on five different links to hear each sound. With the Batman cellphone, they were for the most part unremarkable except for one silly one I posted in the review and the BlackBerry sounds were all average so I didn’t even post any sounds clips in the review for it.

Now that I have the means to make videos of the toys, you can be sure I’m going to be posting many more videos, informative and funny.

Posted on July 21st, 2009 by Mike
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It was always a treat when you were taken out to a fast food place by your parents. You would get the kids meal and sometimes they would come with the toy. You got the adventure of eating out and souvenir to take home with you. Sometimes they would have a set of toys to collect and it would be frustrating when you would go with a couple siblings and you all ended up with the same toy instead of different ones. I remember when they had Gobots as a toy one time and we all got Leader 1.

A prosecutor from Brazil wants to have toys included in kids meals, dollar store toys younger sibling, banned since they are obvious marketing ploy by the fast food chains to bring in customers. On the surface it sounds like someone just trying to ruin things for kids, but really, it’s someone thinking of the children.

The argument is that fast food is part of the obesity problem, since the food has little to no nutritional value, and kids want the toys included in those meals. That makes for a pretty good argument to have that stopped. I think one of the big chains had Transformer toys included when it came out and one big chain will most likely include a toy related to the new Transformers 2 and GIJoe movies coming out soon.

Although a sound argument, it might not pass since it will open the door to other products with toy inclusions that offer no nutritional value, for example cereal.

Cereal is one of the most well-known products that will have toys included to boost sales, but while the occasional box of Corn Flakes might have a toy, so will Fruit Loops and other various cereals with high sugar content. One could make the same argument with that and perhaps Kinder Surprise, the chocolate egg with a toy inside.

You won’t be able to get a toy inside anything that isn’t jammed into a vegetable by the time they are done!

If toys are banned from fast food, other products with toys will most likely follow, but I don’t see that happening. If it does, the prosecutor is in Brazil and it will probably only affect kids in Brazil.

Do you think toys should be banned from kid’s meals at fast food restaurants or is that just another scapegoat in the fight against obesity?

Posted on June 16th, 2009 by Mike
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Ok, so I’ve made my rounds to many a dollar store and seen many action figures, most of which have high lead content in the many layers of paint they add to them, and I don’t recall seeing so much as a single action figure that could be remotely classified as a villain, real or knock off.

Where are all the villains?

Where are all the guys that the City Nimrods and Batman Evil Killer are supposed beat up?

Nimrods and Evil Killer ready to fight….. no one?

I’m surprised I haven’t come across a single villain type action figure. Well, there was the pirate play set, but they aren’t action figures and they’re quite small, combat army play set small. The blue Nimrod could be Venom, but it could also be a two pack regular and ice Spiderman. I also have some transforming construction vehicles which could be compared to the Constructicons from Transformers, but they are more Bob The Builder than sinister.

Imagine this, you’re a kid and you get the new combat Army Pete action figure and he’s got no one to beat up. I’ve got the City Nimrods and Batman rip off action figures, how about an Om-nom or The Jokem action figure?

Many kids have their favorite super hero, but it’s the villains who get most of the attention, so why not make the villains? For every good kid who wants to be Superman or Spiderman, you got some other kid wanting to be Darth Vader or a Klingon. Villains work either way, as the primary or secondary figure. I may not have seen any true villains yet or they may not exist.

Anyone see any villain action figures at a dollar or discount store, real or knock off?

If so, how about sending a picture of it and mention which dollar or discount store you got it from?

It would be interesting to see what is out there and I can show them in a future post.

Posted on May 19th, 2009 by Mike
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It’s been quite a while since I have posted anything to the site really. Been too busy with other things and haven’t been able to update as much as I wanted to and thought I would have.

That’s not to say I haven’t been working on it. I have now added seven new pages and they are split up into two new sidebar sections. The first one is called “The Armoury” and it will hold any pages related to the toy guns and other artillery items. The second one is the “Media and Games” section and it will be home to any pages related to the video clips and online games I make or want to show.

I plan on getting back into regular updates and posting new videos and games, so keep an eye out for new additions.

Posted on February 23rd, 2009 by Mike
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