99% Invisible - 237- Dollar Store Town

Episode Date: November 23, 2016

Dollar stores are not just a U.S. phenomenon. They can be found in Australia and the United Kingdom, the Middle East and Mexico. And a lot of the stuff—the generic cheap stuff for sale in these stores—comes from one place. … Continue reading →

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. So here we are in the 99% store in West Oakland. Mm-hmm. Go into any dollar store in the United States, and you'll find the same kind of stuff. They've already got the Christmas stuff out, and like Santa stuff everywhere. Little Santa booties that you can put on your baby.

A little Santa costume that you can put on a wine bottle. In US dollar stores, there are grocery items and cleaning products, and some of them are name brand items. But then there's this other category of things for sale. Little bags of plastic festive gourds, a slotted spoon. It's just, yeah, everything's like this doesn't have a brand name, like where is it from? Toys and jewelry and knick knacks that seem to have a sort of generic cheapness to them.

Lufas. To the very generic looking razors. Little fake plants. Do I want this chocolate toothpaste? I don't think so, but... Dollars' doors aren't just a US phenomenon. They're in Australia and the UK, they're in the Middle East and in Mexico. They're all over the world. And a lot of that stuff, that generic cheap stuff that lines the shelves of these stores, comes from one place. A market in China

called the FUTION market. The FUTION market, where all this stuff comes from, it goes on for miles, for miles and miles of just these tiny little stores. That's documentary filmmaker Daniel Wheeling. The FUTION market is about 43 million square feet, or around 10 times the size of the mall of America. You could enter the market and walk around it for days and never see the same stall twice. Daniel and his co-producer, Tobias Anderson Ockervlum, made a documentary film called Bulkland about the foodtien market and the city in China where it's located.

Iwu. There's about 2 million people here completely dedicated to making this stuff for us, but no one's ever heard of it. The city of Iwu is about 200 miles southwest of Shanghai. It's a market city, so it's quite vibrant in parts, but it's not an incredibly livable city, an incredibly lovely green city. It turned from a sort of bucolic mountain town to what kind of seems a cookie cutter industrial city now. In the late 1970s Communist China began to open

itself up to capitalism. It would no longer be illegal to run private businesses in China. The province of Jojong, where Iwu is located, had a history of being a center for trade, and the people there were eager to join the new economy. The village has spent all their sort of life savings on cheap industrial equipment, and started producing items that were really easy to make, playing cards, or Christmas decorations, or wooden toys. And soon, a market opened up in the city of Iwu to sell these items. The market is just a street market. People started making Christmas decorations and

there's arts and crafts. More and more people started to come to this market and that's how it's grown up. This is Nigel Crop. He's a British trader who lives and works in Iwu and he originally came to this city just to have an adventure in teach English. So I started teaching at this English training centre and I was teaching adults and they were factory bosses and trading company bosses. So little did they know I was teaching them English but at the same time they were teaching me how to do the business here, how it all worked. I just do day trips to the food chain market and then just show me around. The street markets grew and grew and eventually came to encompass four huge buildings connected

by sky bridges and roads and parking lots. And each of the buildings is divided into different products. You'll have the jewelry building, the toy building, the arts and crafts building and the clothing building. Every day thousands of foreign traders visit this massive market in Iwu. They're haggling in Chinese, looking for things to buy in bulk that they can sell to dollar stores and other vendors in their home countries. Thank you. Thank you.

Once you get inside it's a lot different to a normal shopping center or shopping mall. It's thousands and thousands of market stores. These market stores are about five by five feet. So usually run by one person or two people and they're sitting in their surrounded by their products. And none of the products are for sale. You can't go in there and say, I want one key ring. You have to go in and say, I want 1,500 key rings.

That's exactly the kind of volume, Nigel, the British trader who lives in EWU, is looking for money heads to the market. And we need to find generic animals. The kind of ocean animals is okay. Also gecko, lizard. We go to the market and the supplier will give us a price and then we do the ordering. The goods are delivered to my warehouse. The niche I have is that I'm a westerner, I speak

English obviously, and I have the westerner, I know what products are not going to sell, I know the quality expected. It's quite an important thing, I think. I'm going to go to the market. At the Futeian Market, my business is mostly bulk sales of electronic Santa Gifts. This is Wang Xiaoyang. She has a stall in the FUTE-N market filled with hundreds and hundreds of plastic Santas. We started this business in 1992. That's when my dad started it.

Seven days a week, she's in this shop completely surrounded by Santas. Santas surfing, Santas climbing out of chimneys, centers, riding motorcycles with Ray Banzon. Back home in the coming days. Back home in the coming days. Before we started this business, I never heard of the concept of Christmas. I had no idea what it was. To me, Santa is a very kind old man who slides through your chimney on Christmas

and brings you gifts and happiness and good fortune. Christmas is a holiday for people overseas, but for us Chinese people, we don't get any time off for it. Wang Xiaoyang and Nidol are just two links in the economic chain that starts in China and ends at your local dollar store. The hub of that economy is certainly the food-tien market in Yuhu, but the whole Jo-jong province is involved. Neighboring towns to Yuhu all have their specialties. evolved. Nibburing towns to Iwu all have their specialties. For Halloween we export which brums, and there's one village that we will make these brums.

There's a town that just makes wheelbarrows. You go to a town for toys or wooden puzzles or Christmas decorations. Each town has its niche. And most of these little toys and trinkets are being produced in small operations. Maybe a family has been able to buy one piece of industrial equipment and hire a few workers. There's a scene in Daniel's film where some migrant workers are sitting around

in someone's garage making cheap costume jewelry by pouring molten metal into a machine that's setting it in a mold. And then they're sort of filing it down and chucking it into a container. And then later that day, a guy will probably come by us and grab that bucket of jewelry and take it to a different part of the town where someone will put it into packaging. And then the next day, he'll come back and pick all that up and take it to the market.

And for many people in the province, this isn't even their full-time day job. This is just a side business. Everyone from the age of sort of 20 to 80 or 90, they'll work in the farm and then they'll come back at night and start making witches' brims. A bit like the Coltons' Industry back in industrial evolution in England. That's Nigel Crop again, the British trader who lives in EWU. We're two great Britain, 200 years, it's taken China, 20, 30 years. And you can see the effects of this super fast growth in Iwo. The city grew so quickly that it still hasn't had time to build basic infrastructure.

You see, in Thai neighborhoods without roads, with no paved roads, because they just need people to immediately move into these buildings and start making stuff in the basements. A few years after moving to China, Nigel met his wife, Jessie, and he will local. When I started the trading company, she had a booth in the market selling bags and also she was one of my students. Jesse's family is one of many in EUU to benefit from China's turn toward a free market economy. You know, she wants me to go and eat something upstairs. I can look upstairs. Got any cold beer? I've always felt part of the family. I've always accepted me.

But I've always felt maybe very welcome. I've never felt any different. It got it, it's real. Nigel's wife's great grandparents can remember E. Wu before it opened itself up to capitalism. We've lived here since we were born. We built our own house. In the old days it was suffering. It was really terrible. That's Nigel's great grandmother-in-law, Gong Jin-sheng. Just mentioning the suffering time I feel so sad I could cry. Life was so tough that a single sweet potato was divided into pieces for several meals.

In the old days, there were no cars. Now, a lot of people can afford luxurious sedans. I am so comforted by the change. Of course, capitalism has also taken its toll on China. I think globalization is ruinous. When it's unchecked, like it is in places like Iwu, you see, a landscape almost completely destroyed. You know, the mountains are all dug out. There's people burning rubbish everywhere.

It's smoggy all the time. There's people burning rubbish everywhere. It's smoggy all the time and you're sort of like, for what? And then you see why? It's people who spent years almost completely malnourished now being able to sit around with a giant family and all eat and have a lovely time. But now people in China who have been able to move out of desperate poverty want more than to just make a living. And those people are demanding a better lifestyle. May I pay, may I pay, may I pay? We are at the market every day, every day, every day.

It never changes. That's Wang Xiaoyang again. Her business, selling Santas, has grown substantially since her father first started it in 1992. It's allowed her family to move into the middle class, but it's also swallowing up her existence. She's there seven days a week from Sun Up to Sun Down. Maybe everyone has some regret in their lives.可能是每個人走過的話都會有一些遺憾如果我自己做得到,我會獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自獨自� middle class Chinese people Wang Xiaoyang want something more. My dream is to travel all around the world. The first place I want to go is Egypt.

This is a place I've wanted to go ever since I was a kid. She doesn't want to just sell Santa's seven days a week until she's able to get her daughter to do the same thing and then continue on forever. For now though, Wang Xiaoyang just has to work harder because costs in China are going up, and her profit margin is getting slimmer. Our costs for workers in China is increasing yearly. Every part of production, starting from the smallest fitting part to assembly costs, it's getting more and more expensive.

As the cost of labor goes up, people seek out cheaper labor markets. Bangladesh, Vietnam, Laos, they're right there and they've got the facilities to do it and they're ready to take that work and they are starting to take that work away from places like Iwu. The Chinese government is also interested in moving the country away from its reputation as the world's factory. They don't want to be where all of our junk comes from. They want to be the next South Korea or Taiwan or Japan that makes computers and cars and solar panels and things like that.

But Iwu is the city that CheapChunk built, or really only half built. The city grew so fast that basic infrastructure has not caught up to the growth. In the coming years, the people of Iwu will have to find ways to finish building their city, and then new ways to survive as the global economy changes. The world's dollar stores will continue to be full of plastic sands and cheap trinkets of all kinds, but soon this stuff may be made in the basements and garages and factories of some other city. 99% Invisible Was Produced This Week by Katie Mingle With Srivius F. Avery Trouffleman, Kurt Coles, Stead, Sam Greenspan, Emmett Fitzgerald,

Taren Mazza, Delaney Hall, and me Roman Mars. The English voiceovers were done by Sean Wynn and Claire Schoen. This story was adapted from the film Bulkland by Daniel Wheelan, Antobias, Anderson, Awkarploon. The full film is about an hour long, including a bunch of other really interesting characters that we couldn't fit into this radio piece. You really should see it. It's called Bulkland. You can buy a copy of it on Amazon.com. Gentle touch, razors. Oh my god. Oh my god. Oh my god. Oh my god. There's a Justin Bieber. Um, toothbrushtoothbrush that will play.

Singing toothbrush? Uh-huh. It plays two songs. We are definitely getting that. We're getting that. They only come in Justin Bieber. We featured some music this week from our friends, Ok Akumi from the Always Fantastic Hell audio.

And right now, I'm speaking over a new song from our friend Melodium, who has an album out on November 29th on audio drags recordings. The album is called Low Gravity. Look for it and buy it and enjoy it. We are a project of 91.7KALW San Francisco and produced on Radio Row. In beautiful, downtown. Oakland, California. You can find the show in joint discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars at the show at 99PI Orc.

We're on Instagram in Tumblr too. for the next of all things 99PI is at 99pi.org. Radio TIPI from PRX.