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The Bargain Store
by Michelle Weisblat-Dane
We have a bargain store that recently moved into our neighborhood. They sell grocery store overstocks and all of those things that end up in the discount bins. I started shopping there and found that I had cut my monthly grocery bill in half. So I told my friends and neighbors.
What I didn’t expect was the responses I got. “Well, what kinds of things do they have there?” Okay, this was a reasonable question.
“Oh, they have canned fruits and vegetables. The cans are a little dented so they’re marked down to a half price,” I’d say proud of my finds.
“Oh, no, I wouldn’t buy dented cans; they might have botulism in them,” they would say walking away from me as if I had just contracted some strange kind of disease. Just because a can is dented doesn’t mean it’s likely to have botulism. Okay, maybe 50 years ago this might have been a problem, but not in today’s modern canning facilities. On the off chance you get a can that has botulism in it, it’s going to look like it’s trying to explode, not be dented in. Still, say you open it not knowing any better. It’s going to smell horrible. Would you feed something that smells like that to your family? No, you’re going to throw it away. Worst case is I waste 69¢. Okay, so maybe this bothers people and they’re a little leery about canned food.
I’ve said enthusiastically, “They have a great deal on cereals. The corners of the boxes are a little smashed, but for what would be $2.50 at the grocery store, I pay $1.50.”
“How can you be sure it’s safe? You don’t know what’s happened to that box of cereal,” someone said with extreme concern.
The cereal in the box is in a sealed bag. My family goes through a box of cereal a day, so they have to put up with a little bit of it being crushed, no big deal.
“If the food part bothers you, they do have a lot of cleaning supplies in slightly damaged bottles,” I would continue. By this point people are looking at me strangely. Okay, so the bottles look funny. Some of them can’t even stand up on their own anymore without being propped up by the bottle next it. So what? It’s going to go home and be thrown into the cabinet under the sink. No one is even going to look at them.
Then the question comes down to what “overstock” means. These are the items that didn’t sell well in a regular grocery store. There’s nothing wrong with them. They just weren’t the big success that someone thought they would be. Going down the cake mix aisle there are all kinds of cake mixes from past holidays. They’re still good and will be for the next 2 years. There really is nothing in them to go bad. But, who wants to buy red and green Christmas cake mixes in July?
If you love the color orange, this aisle is for you. They have orange frosting, orange decorations, and orange cake mix. It’s after Halloween and I can’t think of another holiday that uses orange as a theme color. You know it’s cheap at these prices. I can afford to fix my kids cake for desert just because they got an A on a test. They really don’t care what color the cake is as long as it’s cake.
They have hundreds of boxes of fruit snacks. Every cartoon or children’s TV show had to have their own. When the show became unpopular no one wanted to buy their fruit snacks any more. Here is where they wind up. It’s not that they taste bad, because they all taste exactly alike, they’re just shaped differently. But for a quarter of the cost, who cares if I have never even heard of fish something or other?
They say that an average baby goes through 8 diapers a day. This is where I would go to buy diapers. Most of the packages are missing one or two diapers. But at half the price you’re still saving a bundle. It reminds me of the days in the depression when you would buy 5 crackers for a penny.
Finally, there is what I call the “Aisle of No Return.” This is the place that the foods no one wants to buy go to die. Someone in marketing got an idea for a food and thought it would be the next biggest seller. On the day they test marketed it “Oscar the Grouch” was their test subject. He liked it, so they presumed that the rest of the world would like it, too. Things like onion-garlic mayonnaise or Chili Tuna mix; oh, yes, these were big sellers. So there they sit for that one in a million who might crave these strange delicacies; if you’re one of those people, you can get them in large quantities at a great price.
In today’s economy it’s not often that you find a place that gives you such great deals and really friendly customer service. I know that I’m not too proud to save a few dollars where I can, even if the packaging isn’t perfect. It’s what’s inside that counts, and I count myself lucky to have found such a treasure.
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