Buying Groceries At The Dollar Store C/D

I avoid the dollar-store spices too. That stuff's at the dollar store because it's old enough to have a driver's license. But for whole green chilies and brands of soda you don't normally find at the main store, hells yeah. (I found something at Big Lots the other day called "50/50" — grapefruit-lime soda.)

Four frozen mini-pizzas: $3
Can of honey-roasted peanuts: $2
Eight Reese's Peanut Butter Cups: $1
Big can of Dumplins & Chicken: $2.50

It's all at the corner FAMILY DOLLAR.

I love how there's a whole new ecosystem of salvage/dollar-store retailers that have moved into old Wal-Mart locations as the big company moves into their new Supercenters

You ever been to a Bud's, Rock? Bud Walton was Sam's little brother. He opened discount discount stores in old Wal*Marts. Even the carts had the old WAL*MART Western font types!

Bud's made Savers look like Macy's.

of course this was, like, twenty years ago.

I'm gonna take a wild guess and say you're not from the US. In this case:

http://www.nexternal.com/cocoamill/images/pnut_cup350.jpg

This isn't a Reese's, but a rough approximation. I looooove them.

Back to topic: Its both, really. Depends where you go and when. I don't trust things that spoil, but pretty much anything that you drink is A-OK (barring dairy). Snack foods are plenty good too.

Great salvage grocery finds include "what were they thinking?" food product tryouts that failed. Strange flavors of juice, chips, etc.

I'm assuming that you're not from the NEW WORLD.

How did the peanut butter get into the chocolate? Shhhhhhhh, gem. Just enjoy.

(xpost)

The Big Lots in Tupelo is as nice and clean as any supermarket around.

1. HUGE cans of beans
2. salsa
3. chips
4. spaghetti
5. pickles
6. olives
7. oatmeal
8. cereal
9. HUGE bag of rice
10. HUGE Arizona Iced Teas
11. Kraft salad dressings
12. jalepenos
13. peanut butter and jelly
14. the occasional bag of cookies

You can also get 34 DISC CD WALLETS for $1 (as opposed to $7 - $15 elsewhere)!!!!

And I saw a 49 cent store in town but didn't go inside, may not even be there now.

then i tried to buy a box of mike and ikes, as if no one would notice the test in the box underneath them...

the funny thing is that i had a friend who'd previousy gotten correct results so i figured i should give it a shot.

I regularly go there to pick up pens and breath mints, and when I have time I'll browse a bit. It's fun.

The most unnerving find: 99 cent box of CONDOMS. Some crazy budget brand.

Any guesses as to what the test contains? I'm thinking something like...

"You might be pregnant if you recently had sex, True or False?"

I once saw a mother-daughter duo throw two of them onto the conveyor belt. That was a real treat.

*dildos
*breathalyzers
*pacemakers

I once bought some Golden Harvest Mac & Cheese, thinking M7C is such non-food to begin with that it wouldn't matter if it were a name brand or not. So I bought a ten pack for $2 or something. I cooked one, ate one bite, and threw out all of it. Even the plain macaroni was unusable.

I live by Big Lots headquarters and it's my dream to get a job there someday.

I have a sister-in-law in Sydney who begs for the cups. If only there were some sort of Peanut Butter Cup/Tim Tam International Exchange.

Being a cashier at a 99¢ store must be pretty easy once you memorize all the numbers:

"That'll be $1.07..."
"That'll be $2.14..."
"$3.21, please..."
"All right, $4.28 please..."
"$12.84! Anything else?"

FUCK!! I just found out that the Save-A-Lot across the street from us is closing down in six days.

I have no idea how to respond to this news.

It was nice having a 3000 square foot pantry while it lasted.

Are they having big slashed prices clearance sale and you stock up on like 148 bars of a no-longer-made scent of Irish Spring soaps? That is the kind of thing my parents live for.

i thought this thread title was a euphemism and was trying to figure out what it could mean

Not sure about sales, but I'm going to go get some cases and half-cases of a bunch of their private-label canned stuff. The beans and canned tomatoes are pretty decent, and super cheap already.

i do this irregularly it is mad frugal

Tesco Value and other supermarket bargain equivalents are how I live - cheaper even than the pound shop or Lidl/Aldi.

Just got back from the stockening-up. How depressing...it's like a yard sale at the home of the recently-deceased. The employees are bummed out, the shoppers are bummed out even as they scramble to fill their carts, every aisle has somebody calling up a relative. "Yeah, I just found out...you better get over here, they're clearing out fast..."

Every time I go over there, there's some old person having to decide between a can of corn and a can of butterbeans, becauase they can't afford both. This couldn't have happened at a worse time.

god bless the u.s.a.

i swear i read an article in the NYT a few weeks about doing grocery shopping in the dollar store, but i can't find it with a basic search and can't be bothered to go much further. it was an interesting article, though.

there's a dollar store here with a good Indian grocery section in the back.

The NYT article was in the Dining Out section a couple weeks ago

Our Big Lots closed and is now a Saver's.

there were two articles in the nyt, one of which featured eric ripert (of michelin-starred le bernadin/top chef fame) cooking a meal from ingredients purchased at one of the biggest nyc dollar stores.

Wait, maybe I just haven't been to enough dollar stores, but I thought all dollar stores had were like Hello Kitty notebooks and bottles of bubbles and sheets of stickers. There's like groceries and stuff, too?

yes

There's a "Dollar General" near my apt. that has a pretty good sized food section, but it's not a true dollar store. There are items there up to like, 20 bucks! Lots of the 'food' (mostly canned stuff) is a dollar or less, though.

Well, shit.

john, for a while you could get mexican coca cola at the family dollar on milwaukee around.... talman-ish? north of the western blue line stop but south of california. it was just south of family thrift.

I am going to go check out Dollar Deals.

according to the nyt articles, you can get frozen salmon at the giant dollar store near herald square.

man when I was in my early twenties I would buy groceries at Treasure Island (cf. Pic N Save, all pre-Dollar General stuff) and feel no fuckin pain, if yr digestive tract can hang you can save money this way

all my grew-up-poor defenses go up when I think people are getting ready to hate on shit like the dollar store

http://www.abcf.org/msadmin/user_images/DG.jpg

http://www.csi-kc.com/images/jobphotos/0100_DollTree_OP_KS/thumbnail.jpg

http://www.arklatexsigns.com/family_dollar_in_hemphill_012.jpg

(remember when $1.86/gallon was pretty fucking expensive?)

I don't understand why anyone would hate. Dollar stores are fantastic, besides feeding and clothing some of us during tight times, you also never know what bizarro stuff is going to be there. I used to do a walk-through the bargain stores on Newark Ave every few weeks just to see. I didn't pay full price for socks or undershirts or anything for years.

man when I was in my early twenties I would buy groceries at Treasure Island (cf. Pic N Save, all pre-Dollar General stuff) and feel no fuckin pain, if yr digestive tract can hang you can save money this way

I was really confused here for a second, because Treasure Island in Chicago is a relatively upscale "European" grocery store.

yeah made me do a double take too.

as wikipedia calls it: a small supermarket chain located in Chicago catering to customers with expensive tastes and those seeking hard-to-find European foods

perhaps j0hn meant the "defunct discount store owned by jc penny".

yeah that weirded me out when I lived in Chicago 'cause the Treasure Island in Norwalk was all remaindered/discontinued/failure products like Tabasco-infused Slim Jims

Q: can you live on basically nothing more than Tabasco-infused Slim Jims and coffee for a week?
A: yes my friend you can!

this was late-eighties

for the past year or 3, every local Dollar Tree has had cartons full of this little sci-fi masterpiece:
http://ec1.images-amazon.com/images/I/51T002P3N1L._AA240_.jpg
so i've made it a habit to flip through and read a sentence or two at random every time i'm in there. it's usually pretty funny.

never buy dollar store garbage bags, however tempted. they tear just pulling them out of the box and apart from one another. i'm pretty sure just the heat from my hand weakened the plastic's structural integrity.

rip to the nearest big lots. i miss the wide selection of shoddy shit.

just thinking about tobasco slim jims makes my colon angry and scared

this book i mean
http://ec1.images-amazon.com/images/I/51T002P3N1L._AA240_.jpg

if we still had changeable handles mine would now be REBEL MOON for sure

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v296/WilliamCrump63/IMG_1802.jpg

I'm playing "Taps" in my head...

We got about two shopping carts full of stuff today. The biggest single expenditure was a case of frozen OJ concentrate. Hard to believe that that tiny store started out as a Kroger.

our Save-A-Lot used to be Sav-A-Lot. wonder why they changed. maybe in these more enlightened times they don't want to look like dumbasses? dunno. but we still call it Sav-A-Lot, as in salve a lot.

Seriously, someone's lurking on this thread.