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does it mean when a product is "out of
date"?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!