Near our house, we have a Dollar General. For those of you who are not familiar with the chain, the Dollar General is a dollar store that has migrated from its roots, that is, it now sells other, higher-quality items for more than a dollar, such as clothing, detergent, and the like. Good for people that want to get cheap things for the house, but against the whole idea of the dollar store. Anyway, I digress, as the items described in this piece are still the magical price of only a dollar!

I am aware of all the moral problems people have with eating products like Jello and gummy bears, but if they were blindfolded and fed mystery gummy foods, they would agree that they taste excellent. At the time of this incident, I was but a young lad of 17, and I went out with my mother to the Dollar General to get some foods for a weekend trip that I was making down with the Quiz Bowl team to Portsmouth, Ohio. We were walking through the food isles, with all their off brands of soda and the like, and I had just given up on finding anything that seemed edible to me when I found the mythic Holy Grail - gummy dinosaurs! The dinosaurs were in a myriad of colors, their pressed faces looking through the bag as if to say "Eat Me". Along with a few other items I had picked up, we were checked out and we went back home.

Now, Saturday rolled around and we were on our way down to Portsmouth when we started smelling alcohol somewhere in the school's van. Turns out, it was one of our teammates drinking from a pop bottle full of Vodka in the van with two teachers present. This offense, if anyone would have told the teachers, would have landed him in some seriously hot water, even before he and I got busted for a senior prank later in the year. However, the vodka was by no means the most addictive substance on the van that day. Yep, that's right, those absurdly colored gummy dinosaurs would far outstrip even the most strong alcohols in pure desirability.

After we got into the hotel, we made sure to hide the bottle of vodka from our teammate and went down to the pool. The gummy dinosaurs are left alone in the room, smashed up against some Shasta pop and CDs in my book bag. I don�t know what happened to the gummy dinosaurs in the meantime, whether they were hit by cosmic rays or what, but they grew and increased in power. We all come up exhausted and decide to get in a round of showers before crashing before bed, and one by one, the team converges at the table where the gummy dinosaurs are at.

We open the bag of dinosaurs and start eating them as if it was life-nourishing food to castaways. It takes us no longer than ten minutes to eat the whole bag, a major feat if you consider that there were only four members on the team that trip. To this day I do not know what was extra in the gummy dinosaurs, but I can honestly say they were some of the most delicious, most addictive sons-of-guns that have ever been eaten by a connoisseur as myself. I still find the gummy dinosaurs amongst all the other overstocked candies that the store offers, but I make sure to eat the little beasts of heaven sparingly. It�s not fun to overeat with gummy dinosaurs.

While it may be lost somewhere along the long and meandering narrative, there is a moral to this story. I don�t know exactly how many people it will convert, as the audience that I usually write to already knows this, but dollar stores have also sorts of good merchandise, and at cheap prices. To those out there that will not step into a dollar store out of some weird principle or sense of honor, get over it. The fact is that you can get virtually the same things for a fraction of the prices that you get anywhere else. For those that think that dollar stores only get the old foods and broken stores of other chains, I am here to dispel that myth. Eating food at dollar stores is no more dangerous than eating them at an established chain store, clothing that comes from dollar stores will last just as long as clothing from other stores, and this goes for anything you can find at these stores. So get off your high horse and feel good about saving $50 or $100 on your weekly shopping bills by shopping at dollar stores!