How Other Stores Are Tricking You With Dollar Tree Food

Let's get one thing clear. Dollar Tree is a great place to shop. While unfortunate stereotypes may portray Dollar Trees and other cheap discount stores as peddling low-quality junk that isn't even worth the dollar you pay for it, many Dollar Trees strive to be clean, trustworthy, and, most importantly, affordable places for everyday people to shop at. This doesn't mean, however, that not all products you'll find there will be as good as you'd expect — especially if you're thinking about the food.

Best Life, for example, warns against buying frozen fish or steaks, recommending that you skip paying $1 for something a bit more expensive and higher quality. The cheese you'd find next to the lunch meat in the freezer section, food blogger Sensational Finds reports, isn't technically cheese. Instead, it's an odd combination of water, fillers, and stabilizers molded to look like the classic golden slice of American cheese. Needless to say, you sometimes get what you pay for at Dollar Tree.

If hearing stories about fake meat and lab-grown cheese has given you second thoughts about browsing your Dollar Tree, you may want to take your business elsewhere. Maybe you'll go to your local small business and stock up there, having more trust in your neighborhood mom-and-pop store than a big-name discount chain. But some employees report that, even if you shop at those places instead of Dollar Tree, you're still just buying Dollar Tree-brand products without knowing it.

Imagine that you're the owner of a small business, perhaps a gas station or mini-mart. You want to stock up on a selection of snacks and drinks for the front counter, but the regular suppliers charge a ton of money just for some chips and soda. You need to find someplace cheap where you can get a whole order of chips, candy, and soda without breaking the bank. Say, what about the local Dollar Tree down the road?

This is the mindset that some small business owners have when ordering their goods at Dollar Tree, which is confirmed by employees (via Mental Floss). These business owners treat Dollar Tree as a sort of "warehouse," loading up on cheap snacks and other easy-to-eat products for pennies on the dollar than what they would get from mainstream suppliers. One such example is a man who runs a convenience store and routinely loads on boxes of chocolate bars and soda. Event organizers also use Dollar Tree to supply them with party foods, ordering up to a hundred items at a time.

While some may balk at the idea of buying frozen meats for a dollar, Dollar Tree is well-known for having a pretty decent snack selection for a cheap price, per Spoon University.