WHAT'S THIS ALL ABOUT?

What is Country Discount Grocery?
    We are a salvage grocery store in Wautoma, WI., located on Highway 21 between Wautoma and Coloma.  We sell perfectly good food for a lot less money than regular grocery stores.  The cans might have a dent or two, and the corner of the boxes might be a little bit bent, but the food inside is still as good as it ever was.  Little accidents with the outside package can mean BIG savings on your grocery bill.
For your convenience, we have coolers filled with fresh milk, eggs, butter, cheese, cottage cheese, sour cream, and cold soft drinks with the best prices around.  We recently added fresh baked goods, and breads. If it's canned, boxed, or bagged, we'll probably have it.  Cereal, coffee, vegetables, tuna, chocolate, mints, cookies, rice, sugar, flour, and spices fill our shelves. We don’t sell any alcohol or tobacco related products.

Where do salvage groceries come from?
    Accidents happen, even in the grocery business. If a case of green beans gets dropped, and a couple of cans get bent, those cans (and sometimes the whole case) don't make it to the grocery store shelves.  Instead, they're sent to a reclamation center, where broken jars are discarded, cans with leaks are destroyed, etc.  The rest of the products (the good stuff) are then shipped to a distributor, who then ships the salvage grocery products to us.
    Sometimes undamaged grocery items become salvage because their "use by" date was getting close, or because the item just didn't sell well in that area. Jalapenos sell well in Texas, maybe not so well in Wisconsin.  Sometimes the reason the item becomes salvage is seasonal.  Lots of Halloween stuff shows up in November, and Christmas stuff shows up in January.  In any case, all the groceries are checked for quality by the reclamation center and by the staff at Country Discount. 

What does it mean when a product is "out of date"?
    It means just about nothing.  While medicines and perishable groceries (milk, for example) have expiration dates that matter, the "best use by" dates on non-perishable groceries are mostly measures for making sure grocers rotate their stock efficiently.  A bottle of Italian dressing is just as good a month after it's "best use by" date as it was a month before it's "best use by" date.  As long as the seal is intact or the vacuum is good, the product is still fine.

I found some cool items last week, but I don't see them this week.  Will there be more?
    We wish we knew the answer to that one!  Our groceries arrive packed in boxes, wrapped and stacked on pallets.  We don't know what's in the boxes until we unpack them.  There are some items we get on a regular basis, and we will almost always have in stock (i.e., green beans, Hamburger Helper, BBQ sauce, pasta, etc.).  Items that are unusual or somewhat exotic we may see only once or only occasionally (i.e., specialty salad dressings, high-end sauces, On The Border Salsa, etc.).
    The best bet if you find something you really like is to stock up on it while we have it in stock.  The prices are low, so it's affordable to get more than just enough for the week ahead.

Why are the prices so low?
    Because they need to be.   $4.50 for a box of cereal is just too much when minimum wage is just barely over that amount.  We think $1.50 to $2.00 sounds a lot better, and that philosophy is carried out throughout the store.  Spices that cost $5 at the big stores are probably around $1.50 at Country Discount.  $7 coffee is $4.00, and so on.
    Because we buy huge quantities of grocery items each month, we're able to get high quality, name brand foods and sell them for a whole lot less.  Everybody benefits from this.  You save over half on your grocery bill, we get to make a living, and everybody's happy.     We're able to maintain low prices by having low overhead. We usually operate with less than three full-time employees, and with a lot of help from our friends and our family.


We can now accept Food Stamps, MasterCard, Discover and Visa Credit Cards & Debit Cards!