Julie Shapiro at Dollar Plaza Plus

 

As Julie Shapiro strolls the brightly colored, eclectic aisles of Dollar Plaza Plus, she’s clearly in her element. “I don’t know how you can’t consider this a delight,” she remarks, her trademark dry wit mixing with genuine enthusiasm. We walk past a display of ceramic plates with garish Jesus imagery, adjacent to plush yellow baby-chick dolls. “It’s a vacation for the eyeballs,” Shapiro says with a smile.

As Julie Shapiro strolls the brightly colored, eclectic aisles of Dollar Plaza Plus, she’s clearly in her element. “I don’t know how you can’t consider this a delight,” she remarks, her trademark dry wit mixing with genuine enthusiasm. We walk past a display of ceramic plates with garish Jesus imagery, adjacent to plush yellow baby-chick dolls. “It’s a vacation for the eyeballs,” Shapiro says with a smile.

She’s loved this style of hodgepodge shopping since her college days as a sociology major at the University of Colorado in Boulder, when she began thrifting. More recently, she’s reined in her scores from such excursions as a courtesy to her husband. “I used to have a lot more junk.” She catches herself. “Not junk,” she corrects. “Random impulse buys.”

Shapiro’s appreciation of “the aesthetic joys” of cheap scores was just one reason why we chose her to be our dollar-store explorer. The other reason grew out of her job as artistic director of the audio-documentary organization, Third Coast International Audio Festival: In 2007, she curated a six-month-long radio project that centered around dollar-store finds. (Full disclosure: She collaborated with TOC’s Books editor Jonathan Messinger on that venture, dubbed “Dollar Storeys.”)

Shapiro discovered her now-favorite markdown emporium some time after 2008, when she and her husband bought a home in Albany Park—a short walk away from the international bargain corridor that is Lawrence Avenue west of Kedzie. She’s browsed similar shops, such as the nearby Lawrence .99, but “Dollar Plaza is clearly superior,” she insists.

During our hour at the Dollar Plaza Plus, we see a wide variety of shoppers: An East Asian mom who’s preparing for a party buys a plastic table cover and half a dozen cans of generic Sterno. A Latino man walks in and announces his need for a calculator; he finds it and leaves, satisfied, in 90 seconds flat. This is the cheap-retail version of Mary Poppins’ bag: There’s no end to the number of magical things that emerge from its shelves.

“I usually find a combination of things I actually came for and purchase providence,” Shapiro says. Among the “very useful” items she’s procured are Velcro, batteries and plastic place mats (to put under her cats’ food bowls). On the down side, the expansive store is something of a plastic purgatory. “And some of the aisles become claustrophobic,” she admits.

By virtue of its longevity and popularity, the 17-year-old Dollar Plaza Plus is an anchor business on this bustling stretch of Lawrence, just west of the Brown Line’s terminus at Kimball. The store is open 12 hours a day, seven days a week, says the jovial owner Jyoti Patel, who runs the shop with her husband, Anil. They’re even open on holidays, when business is brisk because everything else is closed. “Christmas Day we tried to close at 5 o’clock,” Patel says. “We couldn’t make it. 6, 6:30, 7—finally at 8 o’clock we said [to the customers], ‘OK, we’re closing!’”

Patel recognizes Shapiro as a regular, and the two converse during checkout. Though some items are priced, many are untagged; Patel assesses each item on the spot. Shapiro’s analog wall clock-cum-letter organizer costs a whopping nine bucks (that’s the “Plus” part of “Dollar Plaza Plus”), but most things in her basket cost just one dollar.

Receipt in hand, Shapiro looks over her purchases and says, with a satisfied smile, “That’s a good haul.”

Visit Dollar Plaza Plus at 3513 W Lawrence Ave (773-604-4395). Shapiro’s “Dollar Storeys” is archived at thirdcoastfestival.org.

• More "Store explorer"
• More Shopping articles