Outlet Grocery Review: D and K Surplus Grocery, Red Lion, PA

A real live outlet grocery/ scratch and dent shopping experience heavy on the international fare deep in York Co.

D and K Surplus Grocery
757 Delta Rd.
Red Lion, PA 17356
717-244-9398
Hours:
Mon. - Wed. 8 a.m.- 6 p.m.
Thurs. - Fri. 8 a.m. - 8 p.m.
Saturday 8 a.m. - 5 p.m.
Sunday Closed

Accepts: Cash, Visa, MasterCard, Discover, Debit and personal checks drawn on PA & MD banks w/ a valid driver's license and matching addresses. They'll bag your groceries or find some empty boxes if you'd rather.What $15 Looks Like at D & K

This Place Is Only a Little Tricky To Find
From Mooville find I-83 S to exit 18; go L on PA 124/Mt. Rose Ave. E; Go R on SR-24/ Cape Horn Rd. - there's a Tom's gas station on the corner and you'll go another 5 miles after the turn to the next turn so don't get nervous; once you are into Red Lion proper go L on SR-74/Broadway E. and you'll see the sign before you see the turn onto Delta Rd on the left.

The cross road before the turn is Camp St. If you get to Windsor Rd., you've gone too far.

What's In There
Gawd a-Mighty, all kindsa stuff. Your regular off-label canned goods but lots of name brands, too. A lot of these are not brands you've ever heard of but I'm sure they're popular in Australia (frozen fruit pop things @ $1.19 a carton), Israel (ALL kinds of things from spices to chocolate bars REALLY cheap) and Spain (HUGE cans of black olives and, NO LIE, a FIVE POUND bag of Gummy Bears... the sour kind I love SO... $4.99!)

Lots of Italian tomato sauce and pesto... like, 6 oz. of Scarpetta pesto for 50 cents a jar. Indian chana masala which you have GOT to have if you're going to make Indian chick peas in sauce and you can't get that stuff anywhere... I've looked. Here it is in a 100 gm. container at 2 / $1.00!

This Israeli spice shaker came in 4 different shades including leafy salad and Mediterranean salad mix for 79 cents for a 1.75 oz. packed in the coolest pyramid... seventy-nine cents!

Baktat sun-dried tomatoes in oil... 11 oz. for 79 cents and all the way from Turkey... Raphy's white eggplant salad which I have no idea what it is but it was 99 cents for a 23 oz. jar and it looked kinda like baba ganoush. It says on the label "If you like Paris, you'll love Raphy's Food"... also from Turkey so I'm not going to be able to pass judgment until I open this baby up and get a spoonful of it...

Oh, please. There's plenty of Ah-mur-iken stuff in here too... Kraft dressing for 99 cents a 24 oz. bottle, Organic Valley quarts of half and half in aseptic packaging that will last until the cows come home at 2 / $1.00 and Knorr's bouillon cubes in vegetable, beef and chicken at 5 / $1.00

A nice bunch of candles and some 10.5 oz Lemonade scented soy ones in glass jars for 99 cents.

I picked up some Buffalo Guys buffalo jerky for Shadow the Wonder Dog since he waited for me to come home on his Columbus Day off... 2.2 oz. of pretty nice looking jerky for 79 cents. It's people jerky but they had some regular store brand dog and cat food and treats, too.

Lots of things to drink... including something that billed itself as Pomegranate 7-Up at $1.29 a 2 liter bottle. Cool sodas I've never heard of in really excellent flavors... Costa Rican Pineapple and Raspberry Lemonade... Lots of mixers and I was forced to pick up some Freshies Bloody Mary mix and Stirrings Watermelon Martini and Lemon Drop sour mixes all at $1.59 a quart just because I'm pretty sure I'm going to need a drink if I can get through the week at my nutball office with only 4 days to fix 5 days worth of going wrong...

There were A LOT of cookies and crackers... Keebler and Cheez-Its... some of the boxes were mashed up pretty well and still weren't priced much better than you would see at a regular grocery but some of them were priced really cheap and LOTS of pretzel type things which one comes to expect in a Mooville grocery... even in the weirdness that is a surplus grocery store... so...

Here's what I want to know...
who is eating all these sliced bamboo shoots and half gallon containers of pitted black Israeli olives and Turkish sun-dried tomatoes and Indian masala mixes? I found 5 or 6 cases of Naan mix. Boxed flour mixes to make the delicious tandoori oven-baked Indian breads that will send you straight to Nirvana when they come to your table at a good Indian restaurant. I looked at the boxes. I picked them up and read the directions. I'm not going to make yeast breads I don't care how delicious the exotic outcome will be. I know it. You know it. We all know it.

Next time I want some Naan, I'm going down to Passage to India and they'll sell me some and it will be off-scale excellent and I won't have to lift a finger except to get it from the plate to my mouth...

And I'm a food snob. If anyone is going to buy a box of Naan mix, it's me. The standard Mooville cuisine of fat, flour and salt is not my general cuppa. I don't eat meat so you know I'm going nuts in this place. I wriggle with joy when I see shelves with this stuff on them but I saw who was shopping these aisles with me... "god bless 'em," Joe Biden's grandma would say, "they're the salt of the earth but they wouldn't know basmati rice if it bit them on the ass"...

Sorry. Its true, though... or maybe it's not and these Central Nowhere denizens have me fooled.

I don't care. I found Weil Genmaicha loose tea in an 80 gm package for 2 / $1.00 and a 15 oz. can of Tiger Tiger Green Curry sauce for 50 cents a piece.

I love Mooville.

The Mystery Cans Revealed

Ok, ok, ok... so you can't stand not knowing what was in the label-less cans from the $5 Banana Box procured from the Pallet Grocery Outlet last week. Me, neither.


They were:

#1: Mandarin orange segments in light juice. Very tasty if I do say so myself.

#2: Whole berry cranberry sauce. About the only kind of cranberry sauce I can stand but still way too sweet and even though the calendar says September, it was 93 degrees today and I was not in any Fall fest mood. I stirred it into a box of orange-cranberry muffin mix and baked it for about an hour and half against my better judgment in this heat and they're ok... but they're going in to the office with me tomorrow where those people will eat anything if you put it on a plate and cover it with plastic wrap...

and lastly...

#3: Some kind of chicken and dumpling soup that looked pretty good even to vegetarian me. Shadow the Wonder dog got it spooned over his dog food this weekend and he pronounced it, "Deee-lish-iss!"

So the take away here is this: Even when you have no idea what you're getting at one of these outlet grocery places, it's still more fun than shopping at The Giant... and for 11 cents a can, sometimes even the dog scores.

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

Fast, Cheap and Easy Tip #1

Or: How I manage to live on a state worker's salary in this half a horse town.

Some while ago I read someplace... I read, you know... I don't spend EVERY second trapping the random thoughts that flit through my brain... something written by some man who appeared, up until that moment, attractive to me in some way I can't recall now, when he said... and I can't say why he said this but it occurred to him, apparently, and now I am recalling it for you... something to the effect that there was nothing less attractive to him than a really beautiful woman reaching down to pick up dog poop. He couldn't help it, he said, it just really disgusted him.

Ok?

So there I was at 7AM this morning staring into the grass that lines the sidewalk near my house with a dog leash in one hand and a plastic bag of poop in the other and, as I was staring... I was looking for the one piece of poop I had missed having disappeared in that disappearing-in-the-grass way dog poop has... and I remembered this thing this guy had said all these months ago. And it occurred to ME, all these many months later that there is very little I myself find less attractive than a big pile of dog poop that someone... I won't say a MAN because, god knows, there are idiot women walking around who think it is beneath them to pick up their own dog's poop, too... felt too attractive to pick up.

How the hell does that guy think poop is removed from the streets, yards, parks and every other place a dog who is lucky enough to be owned by someone who attempts to care for it walks, hm?

I know very few people who don't have an MTv reality show named after them who hire other, presumably less attractive, people to pick up dog poop FOR them. You pick up your own dog's poop, for crying out loud. It's what you do if you were raised right or ever had an intelligent thought in your head.

Jeeze-US.

Which brings me to:

The Cheap Tip O' the Day If You Haven't Already Thought of It Yourself

When you are at the mainstream supermarket of your choice, stop on your way out and pick up a bag of plastic bags from the recycling can they have strategically located next to the entrance for well-meaning people who want to feel better about the detritus they generate by shoving a bag of plastic bags in there where they can rest for a moment before they are hauled off to the incinerator.

The bags, not the people.

Never mind the existential argument of paper versus plastic for a moment. We can get back to that any time.

What? In THIS town that incinerator is where every bit of everything that goes into the garbage goes... they aren't even pretending to landfill this stuff and we all know it... it gets burned up into cinders and the heat does not generate electricity to make the people's electric bills in this town more affordable or even to reduce the cost of doing business by businesses or is otherwise made use of... it gets burned up and there goes THAT revenue stream... it's all true. You could look it up... but never mind that, either, this is the tip...

Pick up a bag of bags so you have something to pick up your dog's poop with.

It's a lot cheaper than buying the plastic bags they sell for this purpose and it gives new life, for a second, to a poor, doomed, about to be burned up plastic bag. You are allowing it the dignity of having greater use and the plastic bag doesn't harbor any delusions about how it is too attractive to be so closely involved with dog poop.

Don't worry about asking permission to take the bags from any supermarket staff... you could, in the interest of good manners, I suppose, but I never have and I have taken the lid off those barrels and rummaged around for a decent sized bag of bags right in front of those poor men who retrieve carts from the parking lot for a living and not one of them has ever said a word to me not even when they were looking straight at me while I was doing it... you could, though... it would be a way to make conversation and, hey, you might meet someone...

If anyone ever did try to stop you, I'm sure they would lose interest about the time you started discussing the problems of that freaking incinerator and why people think they are too good to pick up their dog's poop...

I'm just saying.

Outlet Grocery Review: BB's Grocery Outlet, Schaefferstown, PA

BB's Grocery Outlet

Route 419 N.

Schaefferstown, PA

No phone, no pool, no pets

M - F: 8 AM to 5 PM

SAT: 8 AM - 3 PM

Cash and local checks only

They bag your groceries in FREE bags!

Now, like many of these charmers, you will not find much more than a State Route Number when you go looking for an address. These Amish are crafty marketing geniuses and they know that a large part of the attraction of these smash and dent places is that not everyone knows about them, damned plain elitists that they are. You need a connection to find one. It took me YEARS to find the first BB's and now if, like Lou Reed, you've been waiting on your Man to hook you up on the BB's East location... well, here I am:

Mostly How To Get There:
From Mooville Proper, get on Rt. 322E from Harrisburg towards Hershey. Stay on Rt. 322 no matter how tempting the signs or the Google maps might make that 419N, Schaefferstown address... on the other side of Hershey, past the conference center at the Lodge and the Milton Hershey School and all that you will see a thing looming on the right that will set your nose to twitching...

it's called the Country View Grocery and it is just that sort of mixed-use looking building that these salvage places set themselves up in... It might have been a little diner once... one that was too clean and couldn't find anyone to make any decent pie, you know the kind... and it is a grocery all right... I found some 2 for $1 L'Eggs control top pantyhose on a shelf and there is a little room in the back with all kindsa Amish noodles and whatnot back there... lots of bagged up and containerized bulk foodstuffs...

DO NOT BE FOOLED... this trompe l'oeil trifle is NOT the real deal. I did get a big bag of Spring mix lettuce for 75 cents that would’a set me back $3.69 at The Giant but I digress... Stay on 322E, you hear?

Eventually you will pass a road (Starner Rd.) and the very next turn off to the left will be for 419: TAKE THAT LEFT. You will very shortly hit Rt. 72/Quentin Rd. (big intersection, big ass gas station and a HUGE horse riding school place on the left... lots of very beautiful horses and girls spending Daddy's money on lessons and tack and snoot long before he strokes out from getting the bill) cross over 72/Quentin Rd. and keep on 419 which sometimes will be east and sometimes north but stay with 419 even as you have to dog-leg sort of left past a lovely old redstone church where they have a peach festival in August and then right and quickly left again at the Cornwall Furnace...

ALL OF THIS IS RT. 419... right about here is where you may catch a glimpse of a sign that says Schaeffer Rd, no matter...

Follow 419 past some utterly lovely homes and a stinky farm where this Saturday morning I saw an actual calf with an actual collar on it on a lead of some kind that was attached to a big igloo-looking thing right in the front yard by the road. I am against chained dogs in principal and in fact but I have not yet thought out my humane treatment of cows ethic and I was trying to get to BB's before all the good stuff was gone so I didn't stop to nose around (i.e. get shot)... finally you will see a large sign for 501N which will be disorienting because it will appear to be heading west.. PAY NO ATTENTION TO RT. 501!

A second later you will see another sign for 501S or some such and then you must begin to watch... (don't turn onto 501, you hear!?) VERY shortly after this you will come to a little bitty town square... right will take you past a cute and likely over-priced antique shop. It is called Market St. but there is nothing that way but a cool old rotted out Distillery and there is no liquor there any more... I looked, believe it. Straight ahead will take you onto Rt. 897 and god knows where. Instead, go LEFT onto Market St. In two shakes of a lamb's tail on the right you will see the familiar low to the ground yellow sign that you've been looking for: BB's Bents, Bumps & Bunch of Bargains.

It is on the right and it is MUCH smaller that the home office out between Newville and Newburg...

The Goods

More cramped for space but many of the same goods were here, from the looks of the assortment yesterday, as the stuff I looked over last week in Newburg... The COLDEST freaking freezer, check... Spices in a buncha boxes you have to go through every one to find what you're after for 25 cents or 50 cents, check... 8 oz. salad dressings @ 4 / $1, check. They've got a shipment of banged up super-premium dog food in and I picked up a 26# bag of Wellness CORE dog food that runs $40 at Superpetz on sale for, get this: $9.50.

And pint cartons of Woodstock Farms organic half and half: 3/$1!! OH, ALL RIGHT! They went out of date on Valentine's Day but I opened one in the parking lot and there was NOTHING wrong with it, I tell you... I went back in and bought the rest so there aren't any more of those, sorry. And VERY FRIENDLY shoppers! Very!

9 Stars. It's not the Newburg B.B.'s, but what is? Incredibly Highly Recommended. Bring your cooler if you're coming from very far away.

How To Leave

Go home the way you came. You could try to lollygag around on 501N up to 422 in Myerstown or take Main St./897 to the right on your way back through town and ride that out to Lebanon if you had a mind to go that way but I wanted to see what was in that Country View Grocery...

If I hadn't stopped, I could have been back in Harrisburg in 40 minutes. No lie.