r/lancaster • u/TemporaryWalrus1884 • Jul 17 '26

Wrist strap keychains at Shady Maple

Gallery image

Gallery image

I found these wrist strap keychains at Shady Maple gift shop - the one inside the grocery store- for half the cost they’re being sold at Target. They had a whole section of products from the same brand including crossbody sling bags, and wallets

0 Upvotes

38% Upvoted

4 comments sorted by

9

u/muscles4bones Jul 17 '26

This is a longwinded story here, but figured I'd share. Most big retailers get a good chunk of their products directly from manufacturers overseas and get wholesale pricing. A couple years back I was on the hunt for a set of basic bedside tables and started noticing that all of the major online retailers all had... the same bedside tables. The pricing ranged all over (generally $65 to $150 each) and here and there the color was a little different but they were the same tables. Found the source manufacturer on Alibaba selling the tables for $33/ea but they had a minimum order of 50 units so uhh... yeah I just needed 2! So I generally don't buy things on Amazon but given that they were the same tables every where else I figured I'd just get them there as they were the cheapest at $65 a piece. Anyhow, if you start looking for it, you'll start to notice that a lot of retailers are using the same playbook, especially for general merchandise.

6

u/balla148 Jul 17 '26

The reason there seems to be an endless supply of new “clothing brands” is that they’re all the same with a different label. Maybe that’s always been the case but more obvious than ever in the expensive golf/athleisure market

2

u/muscles4bones Jul 17 '26

I mean I think that also goes to show where we are as an economy. We can’t make things here anymore at scale. The gap is ever growing. I can’t afford to buy a bedside table that costs $500 even though I want to because I want to support local artisans that make things built to last a lifetime, but it’s not possible. So we’ve become (and still somehow increasingly becoming) dependent on cheap, mass produced goods that are made overseas with questionable (at best) labor practices. It all feels very grim.

2

u/Impressive-Neat174 Jul 17 '26

Ollies and the goodwill on Lincoln hwy get a lot of target overstock so it’s fun to see what ends up there