At one point in the tour, Hamilton spotted patches of bare shelf space and was practically ashamed. His model store was committing egregious mistakes. “This is probably the worst aisle we’ve been down,” he whispered. He dashed to a single barren metal hook and pointed in horror. “They have an empty peg! People are thinking, I’m getting the last one!” The stuffed bins, the boxes on wood pallets sitting on the floor, the merchandise piled to the ceiling — all this breeds an excited sense that everything just got here and you’re getting to it first.

“You always keep things full,” he said. And always keep the higher part of the shelves engorged with product. “People buy at eye level,” he added. Hamilton advised that products should be hung in vertical strips so that in a walk up the aisle, the eye can distinguish one item from the next. We arrived to a back wall covered entirely in plastic, pillar after pillar of household cleaning supplies, a kaleidoscopic blaze of primary colors. Bob Hamilton was one happy man.

“Shopping is our hunting and gathering,” says Sharon Zukin, a professor of sociology at Brooklyn College who specializes in consumer culture and suggests that the dollar-store experience is a mere updating of our evolutionary instincts. “This bare-bones aesthetic puts across the idea that there is nothing between you the consumer and the goods that you desire. You are a bargain hunter, and it’s not like a bazaar or open-market situation in other regions of the world. It doesn’t require personal haggling between the shopkeeper and the shoppers. Right? The price is set, and it’s there for the taking. In many cases the cartons there have not been unpacked! You are getting the product direct from the anonymous large-scale producer. You have bagged the deer: you have your carton of 36 rolls of toilet paper.”

As strange as sociological metaphors sound in this context, this is very close to how the corporate chain executives describe the next stage of dollar-store evolution, as they try to please their new, more affluent customer. Both Dollar General and Family Dollar are moving toward uniformity in their design and layout, throwing off the serendipity that came of buying random lots and salvage goods and was so admired by, say, crafts bloggers. The new design has opened up the front of the stores “for those whose trip is all about, ‘I’m getting what I need and getting out,’ ” said Rawlins of Family Dollar. As a result, the design of the store is no longer catch-as-catch-can but built around groupings of products that all make sense for the mission-oriented hunter. Store designers call these groupings “adjacencies” and draw them up in fine detail in an architectural schematic called a planogram. Toys, wrapping paper and gift cards, for instance, are laid out in a logical sequence that has been revealed by elaborate customer research and designed with precision.

“A hundred percent of our stores are planogrammed,” Dreiling of Dollar General says. “We used to have what was called ‘flex space,’ and 25 percent of the store was where the store manager could put in whatever they wanted.” No more. “Everything is planogrammed now.”’

“Today we have very little in terms of closeouts,” said Family Dollar’s Rawlins. “Forty-five percent of our merchandise are national brands that we carry every day.” Even though the goods are still deeply discounted, the stores will begin to have a similar look and layout — like the higher-end stores already do. Same inventory, same layout, same experience — from coast to coast.