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Re: Dollar Tree. Even in the pre $1.25 days or $1.50 or whatever they are now, it was well known that they made ends meet by deliberately padding certain items and in the process, preying on the poor people who shopped there who would be unable or unwilling to go to two different stores to complete their shopping trip.
This was primarily on packaged food products which are easy to comparison shop for if you have the means. Canned goods from them were the worst. They'd charge $1 for lots of things you could get at the grocery store at the time for 59 cents or 79 cents or whatever. And if that wasn't the play, if you checked the quantities on stuff you'd find that the $1 version they sold was inevitably a smaller can, bottle, or jar versus the $1.79 version from the grocery store. So even if one container appeared less expensive, it was actually a worse deal per ounce.
I think they also propped up their business an awful lot with disposable party supplies: Balloons, plates, cups, paper hats, napkins, and all that kind of stuff. I imagine that definitely was not a winner for them during Covid.
Dollar Tree has essentially always been like that. It was never really there for "deals" because of what you mentioned. Usually the items were just smaller packages of things which is why they cost less to begin with.
But it has always been fantastic for certain kinds of items:
Birthday/greeting cards. They are always simpler and of lesser quality than at other stores. But is anyone really going to keep your card for a prolonged period of time? If they do, it's probably because of what you wrote in the card to personalized it, not because the card was fancy. I've seen greeting cards go for up to $10 in some drug stores which is pretty wild to me. Yes, they are more elaborate, but does it really matter when the cheaper one suffices?
Gift bags. Same dealio as above.
Wrapping paper in very particular circumstances. They have significantly less wrapping paper in the package than at other stores. But I find sometimes it's a good thing if you only want to wrap a present or two with that style of wrapping paper. If you want to wrap many things or if you want to use more of the same paper in the future, then I'd buy elsewhere to get a larger quantity.
Letting kids pick out some cheap crap from the toy aisle.
For basically anything else, it's not worth it imo. But the above have always been where it shines.