More shoppers feeling inflation pressure look to dollar stores for deals, retail experts say

Everything seems to be getting more expensive. Food, gas and housing prices are on the rise while paycheques are slow to keep pace. The CBC News series Priced Out explains why you're paying more at the register and how Canadians are coping with the high cost of everything.

Christina Drury knows her way around a dollar store.

Visiting multiple stores and monitoring prices is part of the Edmonton nurse's weekly routine.

She loves flagging good deals to other women through a financial literacy group. She tells patients about medical supplies available for cheaper prices. She even decorated her wedding venue with items purchased from Dollar Tree.

Lately, the stores she frequents have been more crowded, with empty shelves, especially in the pet food and home improvement aisles.

"Even in small towns, it's gotten busier," she told CBC News on Tuesday.

As inflation increases many Canadians' expenses, retail and food industry experts say they expect more shoppers to flock to discount stores for bargains on packaged food and household goods.

According to Sylvain Charlebois, the director of the Agri-Food Analytics Lab at Dalhousie University and a visiting professor at the University of South Florida, between 15 and 20 per cent of Canadians were going to dollar stores for groceries regularly before the pandemic. 

"When food inflation becomes an issue, we do believe that dollar stores will get more traffic because people are looking for better deals," he said.

Bailey Parnell, who runs the non-profit #SafeSocial and researches social media's effects on mental health, said do-it-yourself tutorials featuring dollar store items have become trendy on TikTok and Instagram.

More than 27,000 Instagram posts include the hashtag "dollaramafinds" and some Canadian Facebook groups dedicated to dollar store hauls have more than 100,000 members.

Parnell said young people struggling with the high cost of living could be driving the trend, posting about doing more with less as a way to connect with others in the same situation.

"The bulk of the people that make up the active social media trends are largely Gen Z and maybe a bit of Gen Y right now — and this is a generation that has been working longer for less money than ever before," she said.

Dollarama is Canada's biggest dollar store chain, with more than 1,300 stores selling items for $4 or less.