"Deals" (frequently typset as DEAL$) is an American chain of discount variety stores. Currently there are more than 180 stores throughout the 48 contiguous United States
Previously owned by Save-A-Lot, Dollar Tree, Inc. purchased Deals in 2006 and is the current owner and operator. In 2008, Deals launched its new e-commerce website (http://www.deals-stores.com). Deals-Stores.com sells merchandise in larger quantities to individuals, small businesses, and organizations. The company also advertises in-store events, specials, seasonal promotions, and featured products through the site. Users can locate a retail store, research information about Deals, and view product recalls.
Each Deals store stocks a variety of products including national, regional, and private-label brands. Departments found in a Deals store include health and beauty, food and snacks, party, seasonal décor, housewares, glassware, dinnerware, household cleaning supplies, candy, toys, gifts, gift bags and wrap, stationery, craft supplies, teaching supplies and books. Some Deals stores also sell frozen foods and dairy items such as milk, eggs, pizza, ice cream, frozen dinners, and pre-made baked goods.
The comic imagination deals in miraculous transformations and instantaneous casting-off of burdens and sufferings. It releases sudden floods of feelings and allows the purging of enmity in play. The comic sense can cause a sensation of wholeness and integrity of being, though one that is almost brief and passing. When we are in a festive mood and laughing, we seem to go out of our normally anxious, reflective selves into a different phase of being, and the comic flow within us dissolves our sense of limitation. Time stands still, and we feel ourselves to be the center of life. Mirth so intensifies the moment that it could be described as sanctifying life by the sheer unself-conscious vitality that it stimulates within us. No wonder, then, that the act of laughter and the surge of comic joy in a death-haunted, misery-prone creature could be, and sometimes has been, seen and felt as a natural intrusion of the miraculous into the self—as, that is, a religious experience.
— Robert M. Polhemus, U. S. educator, critic. Comic Faith: The Great Tradition from Austen to Joyce, ch. 1, University of Chicago Press (1980)