This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

So here we are in the 99 cent 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 U.S. 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 knickknacks that seem to have a sort of generic cheapness to the...

Lufas. Itas to very generic looking raisers little fake

plants do I want this chocolate toothpaste I don't think so, but...

Dollar stores aren't just a U.S. 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 cheap stuff that lines the shelves of these stores comes from one place

A market in China called the Foutian market the Fu-Tien market. The Fu-Tien market, where all this stuff comes from, it goes on for miles.

The Fu-Tien market, where all this stuff comes from. It goes on for miles, for miles and miles of just these tiny little stores.

...