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| - Expiration date, Exmuration date...p-shaw!
The Market Outlet in the Strip is what I endearingly call 'Scratch and Dent', and quite often you will find canned goods that fit that description to a T...and frankly, who cares? The only people who care would still be operating under the old-school notion that a dented can means botulism. When that was true, cans hadn't been developed to their current state.
Next up would be 'best if sold by' dates. How many packages of food do you have sitting on your shelves at home that are WAY past the 'best if sold by' dates, that you still open, eat, and don't even think about?
Exactly!
What the Market Outlet specializes in (with the possible exception of their produce) is special buys of bulk products that some other store or company couldn't sell because they were dented, crushed, or past the sell-by dates. Maybe products that were discontinued. But the bottom line is that there is a MUCH tinier 'bottom line', so the products are actually priced to sell, and...at prices that they should have been sold for in the first place.
And I LOVE it!
There are plenty of staples to be stocked up on, like pastas, pasta sauces, and other various fruit and veggie canned good. And without the Giant Eagle price gouge. You can actually still get two boxes of mac-n-cheese, various brands, two for a dollar. A big bag of pasta that the twisted greed bird would sell for $3, is also 99 cents here.
Snacks, sauces, breakfast good, coffees, sodas, frozen goods (I've actually seen big freezer bags of Wendy's chicken and just today, 'Mac Fries'...yes...the fries specially bio-engineered for McD's)
Some of their special buys are awesome. Like being on a no-carb diet again, there was an entire shelf of canned squid and octopus, in various oils and sauces. No doubt either past date, or discontinued. 99 cents each. I stocked up. Now I have an awesome no-carb snack in the pantry.
They also get in some stocks of personal care items, like crushed tubes of toothpaste. So? I'll put my finger over the crack and use the tube of Rite-Aid priced $6 toothpaste for a buck!
About the only thing I've found there that was a little unusable after its past-due-date were toilet tablets. They'd kind of lost their 'solidity', which made them dissolve much more quickly in the tank.
Spices, herbs, extracts, flours, non-stick sprays...why pay full retail for these staples, when you can get them for what they're actually worth, in perfectly fine condition? The produce, I would recommend eating up a little more quickly than you might something from the petrified produce section at the Market District. Then there are cleaning supplies, things like aluminum foil, zip lock bags, paper towels, etc. NONE of which come close to being priced at standard grocery store prices.
It's an amazing place...like stepping back in time to where grocery shopping should have STAYED in regard to prices and profits.
And besides...how cool is it to buy cans of 'crushed tomatoes' and 'crushed pineapple', that look like exactly that? Two cans...slightly crushed.
Now, I'm sure the Fox Chapel and Sewickley crowds would poo-poo any notion of setting foot in the place. However, for the rest of us, who have to live within realistic and ration means...this is a mini dented gold mine - maybe slightly long in the tooth - but so well worth the weekly visit!
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