Amar Sinha served as a major in the Indian army, then moved halfway around the world to live in America, the land of opportunity. Toby May bought his first real estate, a duplex, at the age of 17 and opened his own business at 21. Put that much drive into one business, and it’s not surprising that the two partners plan to add several stores to the one they opened last winter in Pleasant Hill.

Sinha is the president and May the vice president of MaySin LLC. Their first move was to open Dollar City, a low-priced retail store, in a strip mall at 1225 Copper Creek Drive. They plan to open a second Dollar City in Waukee on July 25 – the day thousands of visitors will hit that town during the annual RAGBRAI bicycle ride. By the end of the year, they hope to have a third store open in Urbandale in time for the Christmas shopping season.

“Our goal down the road is to become a franchise operation,” Sinha said “We want to be the Wal-Mart of dollar stores.”

Sinha came to the United States in 1994 and began working for CITGO Petroleum Corp. as a supervisor, then a district manager. After a few years, he switched to the hotel industry, working in sales and marketing.

May, a Fort Dodge native, opened May’s 18-Hole Video in Ankeny about 14 years ago. “We made every possible mistake we could,” he said, and the business didn’t last. He entered the hotel business as convention services director at Embassy Suites on the River.

The two men met when they both worked for Four Points by Sheraton, hit it off and eventually began talking about going into business together. “We looked at franchises,” May said, “and we looked at hotels, but the capital outlay there is substantial.” When they researched discount stores, they decided they had found a niche that’s large, growing and unaffected by economic slumps.

They took their business plan to a bank and found the financing they needed without much trouble, Sinha said. They also put some of their own savings into the operation. “You can open a dollar store for between $200,000 and $300,000,” May said.

Their Pleasant Hill store occupies about 4,000 square feet and has a customer base that’s about 65 percent female. The proximity of four restaurants in the building has helped build foot traffic. MaySin strategy calls for locating future Dollar City stores near Fareway grocery stores. Unlike most supermarkets, Fareway primarily focuses on food, so May and Sinha figure the chain’s shoppers will be likely to come to them for other items.

“We’ve got some pretty aggressive plans,” May said. “We started with the mindset of opening more stores, but obviously success will determine whether we can do that.”

Dollar City carries a wide variety of products, from holiday decorations to candles to cleaning supplies, and the owners say 80 percent of those items are priced at $1. The hottest-selling item? One-dollar sunglasses. The other 20 percent of the inventory includes backpacks priced at $7 and salt rock crystal lamps that cost up to $75.