SFX: Traffic, street sounds.

NARRATOR:

We’ve all been in one of these stores before, right? Photographer Andreas Gursky said when he drove by this 99 Cent store in Los Angeles, it called to him.

SFX: Screech of brakes. Rapid footsteps approach. Door swings open to the interior of a 99 cent store. Musak. The murmur of customers, the clatter of carts, and the monotonous chirp of a register, ringing up the same amount, over and over and over… 

NARRATOR:

Let’s pull back for a minute, and think about all these little packages and where they actually come from… 

SFX: A steam-whistle blast — a factory floor, industrial sounds 

NARRATOR: All this stuff. All of it made by…somebody. In a factory churning out mountains of packages like these. The packages travel on huge container ships across the ocean.  

SFX: Clang of a container hitting the dock, its doors swing open. For the next section, a building sea of sounds piling on top of each other — shipping sounds, plastic wrapping, the chugging of a ship through the sea, workers offloading, the beeping of a forklift, etc. until it all becomes an unintelligible cacophony. 

NARRATOR:  

— each containing boxes! Boxes full of boxes!  

SFX: Beep of a forklift backing up. Crack of a crate being pried open  

NARRATOR:  

With smaller boxes inside them, and inside those boxes —   

SFX: Boxcutter zipping through cardboard. Various hard tiny objects spill onto a vinyl floor.  

NARRATOR:  

Brightly colored candy, tiny plastic toys, flimsy disposable goods. And Gursky captured it here … 

SFX: Back to the 99 Cent Store interior

…in all its dazzling excess, neatly stacked and ready for purchase. All for the low, low price of… you guessed it. 

SFX: Chirp of the register