Kids Want Cheap Stuff, and Lots of It. Five Below Delivers

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.

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.