Soap dishes slip on by dollar stores - Herald-Mail Media

An interesting story surfaced earlier this month, and I don’t know if it’s true or not, but as Sarah Huckabee Sanders would say, it could be true if it had happened, so that’s good enough for me.

In short, the story quoted a dollar-store CEO in an ostensibly private conversation gleefully talking about how great the current poor-get-poorer economy is for his company. It has created a sea of miserable, impoverished creatures who are forced to dine on oversized plastic bottles of cinnamon that they have scavenged from the shelves of discount retailers.

I myself visit dollar stores on occasion because I find them to be fascinating places. In a dollar store, you just never know. If you desperately need a left-handed moustache comb with the words to the nursery rhyme “Hey Diddle Diddle” printed on the back, you can walk into a dollar store knowing you have a shot.

So, too, is the clientele always of interest. Mostly, it’s people for whom shopping there is an economic decision, but not always. Every so often, you’d see a slicked-back guy in a suit hoping to score a 99-cent Faberge Egg, or the upper-middle-class housewife who wants to be the hero among her bridge club by announcing that the charming set of parfait glasses their eating out of RIGHT NOW came from the DOLLAR STORE.

In some social circles, having the bravery to venture out among the common clay and purchase a set of parfait glasses without any help, oddly enough, generates a level of respect normally associated with big-game hunters taking down a rhino.

But of late, I have been going into dollar stores because I need an item so basic and out of date that I cannot imagine it being carried by any other contemporary store. It’s a soap dish — not really a dish, but more of a soap rest — that is simply an oval framework of plastic with spines on the top and bottom that allow the soap to dry out between uses.

If you peeked into any shower in 1973, you would see one of these minimalist soap trays, but over the years, they stopped making them. Probably because they worked. It’s like in the legislature, how they always vote out the guy who gets results.

More likely, there’s no way they can make a buck off such a small amount of crudely molded plastic, so they have moved on to big, elegant, fancy soap dishes that sell for $12.99 — and hold enough residual shower water to immediately turn a bar of soap into a disgusting lump of slime.

So I know that it’s not going to be worth the time of Home Depot or Bed Bath and Beyond to sell these little items, but I thought for sure that they’d be perfect consumer grist for a dollar store.

But no. I confess, though I like them, I hadn’t been in a dollar store for a couple of years or decades. So right off, I was stunned to discover that everything in a dollar store now costs $8.99. And while they had a massive inventory of Tweety Bird soap dishes, there was nothing I wanted.

Except just now, I did a web search for soap trays to see if the one I have in mind has a real official name. And wouldn’t you know, the first link up on the search was a Bed Bath and Beyond advertisement for a soap tray that advised you could “Preserve your bars of soap with the Spectrum Soap Saver. This handy soap holder features a series of raised pegs that prevent your soap bars from sitting in water.”

So now how stupid do I feel? Just forget I wrote this whole column.

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