Kids want cheap stuff, and lots of it. Five Below delivers

(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- I remember very little about Little House on the Prairie, but I remember this: On Christmas morning, Laura and her sister each receive in their stockings a tin cup, a peppermint stick, one heart-shaped cake and a shiny new penny. “Think of having a whole penny for your very own,” the book reads. “There had never been such a Christmas.” Even at 6 years old, I remember understanding that this was very exciting for them, given their time and place, their wholesome-seeming simplicity and Protestant work ethic. I also remember thinking, guiltily, “I would not be excited by this.” Later in the book, she is given—and thrilled by—a decorative comb.

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Standing in a subterranean Five Below in Downtown Brooklyn, inspecting a package of fidget toys shaped like butts, I think about Laura, who would, in contemporary times, be in Five Below Inc.’s target demographic. Five Below, a kids’ retail giant, isn’t simple and is only debatably wholesome. It doesn’t sell tin cups. It does, however, sell a wide selection of oversize Stanleyesque tumblers. Neither a toy store nor a dollar store, it’s a wonderland of stuff, most of it imported, much of it plastic and almost all of it $5 or less. (Last year the company began integrating higher-priced items, once relegated to their own special “Five Beyond” section, onto the regular shelves.) It seems they’ve tapped into the youth psyche. Five Below will end the 2025 fiscal year with more stores than ever: 1,921 stores in 46 states. The goal is to top 3,500 over the next decade.

When the first Five Below opened outside Philadelphia in 2002, the brainchild of two toy store alumni—David Schlessinger had founded the 1990s kid chain Zany Brainy; Tom Vellios had been a top exec there—it positioned itself as a tween and teen destination, a store for 8- to 15-year-olds with allowance-friendly prices. In late 2024, Winnie Park, fresh off a stint at Forever 21, took over as chief executive officer of the company, whose stock price was, at that moment, slumping. One of her mandates was to expand the target demographic. The stores have always reached a lot of little kids, Park says. “So instead of dancing around this, why don’t we actually lean into it?” The store now caters to “the kid and the kid in all of us,” meaning customers from 5 to 19, but also everybody else. As its corporate mission statement attests, Five Below, unlike the cold, hard world outside, “makes it easy to say YES!”

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Here’s a random sampling of things a shopper might say yes to: Spalding basketballs, a duck-shaped shower speaker, wireless earbuds co-branded with a variety of breakfast cereals, faux fine jewelry for dogs, a 10-piece “pout perfection” hydrating lip set, Play-Doh, pickleball equipment, 100% polyester sweatpants, dumbbells in several weights, a $35 gilded mirror, an impressive array of mystery boxes containing (I think) collectible figurines, a paint-your-own ceramic doughnuts craft kit, Homer’s The Odyssey, a compendium of “true-life encounters” with Bigfoot, Hello Kitty-branded instant noodles and Haribo gummy frogs. Much of the merchandise is built on existing intellectual property—Bluey bracelets, Wicked lotion, Shrek snow globes—and with the exception of a robust collection of travel toiletries and a few bottles of Clorox all-purpose cleaner, very little of anything for sale here would qualify to anyone, of any age, as a “need.” On the other hand, there’s an entire aisle devoted to different types of slime.

I watch a mother say yes to a rocket-shaped piñata that her preschool-age son has chosen. “Oh my God, this one only has two teeth!” a tween squeals, holding a pocket-size stuffed monster called a Fuggler. She says yes by trotting off to pay $5 at the counter. I watch a middle-aged woman say yes to two large packages of Nerds.

Yes appears to be working. As of early February, the stock price is up more than 100% from a year earlier. After an especially rocky period over much of 2024 and early 2025—the result of adding stores too quickly, a muddled product offering, a customer base that was feeling less spendy, an overreliance on Squishmallows—the company refocused. Under Park, Five Below simplified its pricing structure and got smarter about what was on shelves, hitting trends hard at the right time. Revenue for the fiscal year that ended in February 2025 reached $3.9 billion, up from the year prior and more than double what it was pre-pandemic.

Comeback Kids | Five Below share price

Kids have always loved cheap junk. It’s a core tenet of childhood: acquiring stuff that defies the tastes and preferences of most supervisory adults. This is the premise of Happy Meal collectibles and birthday party goody bags, but also, as far back as the mid-1800s, penny candy and cast-iron figurines. Working children might have been expected to bring their earnings back to the household, says Wendy Woloson, a historian and the author of Crap: A History of Cheap Stuff in America, but often, whether secretly or with permission, they skimmed a little spending money off the top. “For a long time, we have defined ourselves not in terms of what we make but what we buy,” she says, “and we consider ourselves full citizens to the extent that we can freely consume what we want to consume.” For kids, then, acquisition is a form of independence. Whether the money involved is earned or given matters less than the freedom it allows. The point is not just having slime; it’s choosing the slime yourself.

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This ought to be trivial, but there aren’t all that many places to choose slime in person these days. Unlike Shein or Temu or Amazon.com, Five Below, despite its e-commerce platform, exists primarily in real life. Gen Alpha in particular is hungry for the brick-and-mortar experience, says Lan Nguyen Chaplin, a marketing professor at Northwestern University who studies children’s consumer behavior. “They appreciate going shopping together.” Five Below offers “this whole experience. I’m going to shop around, I’m going to go through this maze they’ve set up for me with all these deals, and I’m going to find the dupes I’ve seen on TikTok.” Although it’s (loosely) organized by theme—departments include “room,” “candy,” “style,” and “create”—it’s less department store than treasure hunt. It’s not unlike TikTok itself, feeding customers a constant stream of new stuff they didn’t know they wanted.

Accordingly, the store is brimming with copycat products. There are hand sanitizers that ape Touchland, cream blushes packaged exactly like Glossier and Sol de Janeiro body mist dupes sold under the brand name Solar Flare. “Look how cute this LoveShackFancy headband is,” I watched a youthful influencer coo on TikTok, holding up a padded floral headband from Five Below that wasn’t LoveShackFancy. I knew this, and she knew this, and her followers knew this, and in fact its dupeiness was part of the appeal: Hunting for affordably priced lookalikes is the trend. “I don’t think this has anything to do with the fact that they can’t afford the real thing,” Nguyen Chaplin says. “For a while, it was cool to be able to spend a few hundred on a handbag. But what’s cool now is finding the dupe.”

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Kids love to mix high and low, says retail analyst Neil Saunders. “They definitely like brands, and they definitely like influencers who promote brands, but then they tweak it to their individual selves,” he says. “They take bits of identity from lots of different places.” It isn’t that they’re disloyal, he argues, it’s simply that “they don’t hang their identity on any one particular thing.” This tendency is somewhat of a necessity today, as trends move faster than they ever have, simultaneously more global and more niche. “Now there are so many different signals, it’s like, well, what from the patchwork do I want to pick?” At Five Below, you can pick and pick again; the investment is minimal. And when it no longer suits—when the Fuggler loses its luster, the T-shirt is cringe, the headphones break—that’s fine, historian Woloson points out. “You can just go to Five Below again.”

(Corrects timing of fiscal year in sixth paragraph)

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