An Introduction to Outlet Grocery Shopping - Part 2: Bad Food Stores and The Rules

Here we begin the discussion of those Outlet Grocery Store shopping categories I was telling you about the last time... This trip: A two-fer! Salvage groceries... and the rules I made up to help you.

Salvage Groceries

The salvage grocery is not so much a store as an experience. Like many of the strange and wonderful things I have uncovered in Mooville... well... this is one of them. They are mostly Amish-run and this one shrewd buncha folks... among their Old Country ways comes some fairly space-age concepts like, save the fuel, use things up before you throw them away, waste-not want not and all that... plus they are really good at making a buck and they understand that volume cures a multitude of sins...

Graduates of the Harvard Business School could take a page outta these books... and if they did, the Amish salvage grocer would sell that book with a page out of it for a dime and both parties would be as happy as a pig in hog heaven about it...

These stores... warehouses... garages in some cases, are run by people who gather up the shelf-pulls... the returns... the stuff that has been sitting on the conventional supermarket shelves a little too long... and they organize them a little bit and sell them for so little money it makes your eyes water...

Sometimes.

Sometimes they're just a little store in the middle of nowhere and they know they've got you. If you need a jar of olives out there in East Bejeezuz, you're pretty much going to pay what they ask or drive 30 miles to The Giant... but not the ones I'm going to reveal to you here... these are the real deal: Pallet stores... Real live discounted salvaged groceries... outlets for food that you really just have to get into like you learn any other language... total cultural immersion.

Go to one of these places and see what life is like on a planet where stuff is banged up a little but, hey! So are most of us by the time we reach a certain age. In people, we call it character. In canned goods we call it inventory for the Bad Food Store.

Pays your money, takes your choice.

How They Came To Be Known as Bad Food Stores...

So, there I was... out in the wilds of Cumberland County... drove through all the miles of countryside where you can't imagine what on god's earth people living there do for a living... fought past all the traffic congestion at Newville (when you get to Newville... and you know you're gonna go... you will see what high comedy I am crafting here...) made it past the Greenspring community grove and the Cumber-bland County Landfill (yeah... THAT'S where they put it...)... you are OUT there when you go to B.B's-Newburg, I'm telling you... and turned there at the Red Wing Shoe sign to FINALLY get to my high value target.

As I was wandering through the parking lot I overheard a woman who must have had the network following her around because anyone with a half bar of cellphone service in that part of the world isn't using ATT and she was obviously trying to explain to the other party where she was...

Do You Do This? Well, Stop It.

What exactly is up with the first 5 minutes of every cellphone convo in this space-age bachelor pad universe we inhabit? Why is the first sentence always, "Where you at?" What on earth does it matter where you at unless you're on your way in the front door and the one you're speaking to is upstairs in bed with someone they will have difficulty explaining away? Is the point of mobility not that it just doesn't matter where you at? But I digress...

Where She Was At

So, there I was listening to this woman explain to her party where she was at and after trying "BB's... you know... that place out in the country... with all the cheap stuff... you know..." she finally gave up and said it: "The bad food store!" And with that she was able to continue her conversation and I had the core description for these places that are like nothing else you have ever seen. Despite my best efforts... and that is what you are getting here... my poor powers cannot really come close to the experience itself. Like so much of life, 99% involves showing up. You just have to be there.

I mean! Where else can you spend $20 for hours of non-stop amazement and come home with a trunk full of cheap food?

Only at THE BAD FOOD STORE!!

What They Are Not

Now I have read some comments from folks saying they just are too proud to venture into one of these places.

And I suppose they aren't for everyone. They ARE for people who don't mind banged up packaging and stuff that has gone a little out of date sometimes... all right, ALL RIGHT... sometimes a LOT out of date... but you pull up your big girl panties in this world and make your own decisions about whether or not you're too a-skeered of 99 cent peanut butter to save $3 for, no-lie, Crazy Richard's all-natural organic peanut butter that goes for $3.99 at The Giant in my snooty Camp Hill neck o' the woods...

My dog won't eat his vitamins in the morning if they aren't coated with peanut butter, ok? We won't debate the relative spoiled rotten-ness of my dog at this exact moment but I have 6 jars of 18 oz., $3.99 organic peanut butter that is all perfectly within its Sell By date that has not one smidge of hydrogenated coconut oil in it for Shadow the Wonder Dog that set me back 99 cents a piece and YOU don't!

Sorry. I don't mean to gloat but that's what happens after you've been in a couple of these places.

I got the Minority Report at my house in the 'hood on Saturday... Get this: The Patriot News takes all the aging classified ads and engagement notices for people you don't know and photos of things that happened the month before and wraps them around the ad inserts for the Sunday edition and throws them on the stoops of poor people's houses in the City here in Mooville...

No sense in stirring poor people up with the news, right? And how is a newspaper supposed to get its circulation up far enough to justify their sky high advert rates in this day of declining ability of people to read and the damned internet if they won't give a few thousand away, huh? But I digress...

...and I went a-looking through the ads for The Giant and The Weis and The Wegman's out there in Anglo Heaven, I mean, Silver Spring Township... and I WAS APPALLED!!!

Who PAYS these kinds of prices?! Well, now you and I both know: people who are too proud to go to the Bad Food Store!

The Rules

So here's Rule #1 - Get over yourself! If you hit the Powerball for $197 million, would you turn your nose up at it because you only paid a buck for the ticket? I didn't think so.

Rule #2 - This ain't your weekly trip to The Giant, that shrine to the brightly lit, football field sized footprint with 70 kinds of everything and all of it lined up nice on the shelves with Buy One Get One Free loss leaders advertised to get you to show up and drop the rest of your cash on that dreary list of things your household manages to consume like Pavlov's damned dogs over and over and... ["It's Tuesday"... *buzzer buzzes*... "I want spaghetti." Bah.] NO! This is high-adventure, people. At The Giant, you KNOW what you're gonna get... at the Bad Food Store... you NEVER do!

Rule #3 - When you've been to one Bad Food Store... you've been to ONE Bad Food Store. Most of them are NOTHING like any other one you have ever seen. This is some honest to god cultural diversity going on. Some have bags and some you gotta bring your own bags. Some take debit cards and some take credit cards. Hell, the Amish-run B.B.'s won't use Englisher electric company power but they've got an ATM on-site and for a $2 surcharge they'll let you get at your own money so you can hand it over to them!

They pretty much all accept American money so you'll be safe if you bring that.

Next time: The Germans