"DOLLAR STORES" Topic

Dear List

Dollar General is one of the only remaining TRUE dollar stores (everything is a dollar) along with DOLLAR TREE. Anyway, while going home last night I stopped there to get a few Anniversary Cards for my wife (yesterday was our 42nd anniversary. While I was there I saw a whole pile of small buildings and structures for those absolutely awful Christmas sets. There was a good selection and they also had gates and gazebos and small bridges and stuff. Probably it's 15mm in size, and this was woefully out of scale with the figures that went with them, which were more 32mm, but that is OK for me. I bought a pile both for my "Terrorists vs Tourists: an Al Kayda Christmas Carrol" but also for other things. They have things like fawns and deer in the forest, bear fishing in a stream and these will be used on terrain pieces like woods etc.

I bought a lot of the figures because they could be easily converted to tricornes and waistcoats with a little bit of body putty. You won't get any minis you can use in units here, but you will get lots of great stuff to use as details in modeling and scenic.

Dollar Tree is fantastic this time of year. I also get my superglue there.

Dollar tree for glue, some terrian, dice Also the have oversized playing cards for hidden movement, and dice lots of dice.

Dollar Tree will have those excellent pine trees in stock soon. Those are really great and I enjoy them a bunch.
Also, they keep Minutemaid Lemonade in the cooler next to the cashier. A big help in summer.
Plus our local store has a wonderful lady named Audrey working there. She's pretty, extremely helpful, and is possessed of an excellent sense of humor.

Way to get off the wallet for a card for your wife…

Lol

I don't know who owns Dollar General where you live compared to who owns it out here. But all the Dollar General stores I have been in are not TRUE dollar stores. They are cheap stores here, most of the time, but not dollar stores.

Dollar General is not a dollar store here, either. But yes, it is that time of year to hit the dollar stores for various scenic knick-knacks. I was going through some stuff in the garage and found 30 or so trees (still in the package) that I bought five years ago. You can never have too many trees for the F&IW and the ACW.

Dollar tree superglue is garbage. Less than half the active ingredients than good Loctite brad superglue. I would never use it. Waste your time trying to get stuff to stick together. Worth the extra money for the real thing.

I find the glue good for somethings,bu not for doing figures.For that I rely on the good stuff. I was in Dollar General today and picked up a few more MatchBox trucks for my 15mm Sci Fi.Thanks to the Dollar stores,I dont have foot sore troops.Dollar Tree had the little plastic spiders and ants for Halloween this year as well.I find that the modern Dollar stores are just a replacement for the old 5 and Dimes such as Ben Franklin.

Hmmm, our Dollar General has most of their stuff marked way beyond $1.00 USD per item.

Of course, it is in the People's Republic of California, so perhaps that is the reason why. Everything costs a lot more here.

Each October I stop by Dollar Tree to see that year's Cobblestone Corners' Christmas Village collection. I have no interest in their buildings, but most years there are some accessory packs with something I can use with my 28mm Victorians. Quite often I find a few figures that work well for 28mm but are just a little tall. They can be cut down to the right height (usually it's just a problem of long male legs and long female dresses) with no problem. The wonderful thing about them is they paint up well and help fill my busy Victorian streets for very little money. This year (yesterday) made my Dollar Tree visit and got two packs of figures… they will look great once they are rebased and painted. You can see my past years Cobblestone Corners' figure finds throughout my Victorian Gallery at link

Dear War in 15mm

I can easily convert them to 18th century. I agree on the store. I don't use their buildings in the same game, I use the Lithuanian Candle Houses which are bigger, in scale for the most part and look wonderful, like an 18th century house right out of a painting.

I agree with you on the Cobblestone Corners Christmas village. I can easily modify them by painting out the snow and adding a bit of vines and shrubbery, and the model Railroad flowers are great for this.

I do use some of the buildings as pure scenic effects on the terrain. For example my forests are made in the form of hexagonal boxes on hexagonal plywood bases, and on the "flange" around the bottom to give the illusion of depth, I frequently mount these animals or people to create little scenes. For example this year I got a small footbridge, and a small scene of two bears fishing in a stream. The stream will seem to come into the forest hex from one edge, and there I will put the gootbridge which will just fit into the flange area, and the stream disappears into the forest. I have a nice photo of an actual stream flowing n a forest from near my house, which I will decoupage onto the outer wall of the "box" and joining with the foreground where it Is modeled in putty and celluclete. Then it emerges on the OTHER side of the forst box and there will be the figure of the two bears fishing in the stream. The forest is constructed on a 12" wooden plate, 12" between the paralells of the Hexagon. A hexagonal "box" is glued inside this, 1 to 2" from the edge. It has a top flange which has twigs and branches of trees going to the base to underneath it, to resemble trees of the forest floor going up to the canpy and a domed "hat" with plastic Styrofoam dyed in various mottles of green which makes the lid of the box. You can put troops inside and the other side won't know about it.

I also always find interesting stuff at Dollar stores. once I found whole pile of birchbark canoes made from birchbark that were a little large for scale, but fit beautifuly for use in French an Indian War Games. I also found toy guns that with a little super-detailing were fine for my 20mm moderns.

Ya never know.

Otto

Our Dollar General isn't a true dollar store, either. Dollar Tree is.

I visited Dollar Tree a few weeks ago and found some cheap plastic robots with arms, heads and legs that disassembled from the torso. Viola – excellent parts to build a whole fleet of starships, and for about $5. USD