That doesn’t mean that the laundry baskets at the dollar store didn’t cost more than $1 to make. The inventory of dollar stores sometimes comes from bartering r

That doesn’t mean that the laundry baskets at the dollar store didn’t cost more than $1 to make. The inventory of dollar stores sometimes comes from bartering rather than buying inventory. My brother worked in this industry for a few years and it was really bizarre. You’d have one company with several thousand cell phones that didn’t meet FCC standards, so they couldn’t sell them in the US, and they didn’t have the infrastructure to sell them overseas themselves. You’d have another company that had several thousand packs of last year’s baseball cards, but that also has some overseas brands that sell electronics. They’d come up with some sort of trade. The baseball cards would end up in a dollar store, and the cell phones would end up in Africa. Problem solved, no money changed hands.