Byline: FELIX CARROLL Staff writer
The famed 13th-century Venetian merchant Marco Polo wrote that the reason he explored the Far East was ``so that men might know the things that are in the world.''
Last week, Doreen Fleischman hopped a plane in Albany for Las Vegas partly for similar reasons -- to find cool stuff that shoppers have never seen before.
She's a wholesale buyer for the 40-plus store chain Just a Buck, known for its chaotic array of miscellany, both useful (dish soap) and not quite indispensable (plastic spaceships for gerbils).
In Las Vegas, she scouted among the displays of ditch-deep-discount merchandisers at a trade show -- through purveyors of everything from back scratchers and bags of confetti to tire repair kits -- looking for anything she could spirit back to her stores to sell for a dollar.
``I'm always trying to find something new and different,'' she says.
In many ways Fleischman treads a path blazed by Marco Polo, who …
No comments:
Post a Comment