A shopping cart filled with gels, nail polish and travel-size shampoo waits near the front door. A multicolored, hand-lettered sign tells you to SAVE BIG! ALL ITEMS 5 for $1.00!
“What is this? Five for a buck,” says store owner Gary Gluckman, picking up a tube, examining a bottle. “Come on. What a deal.”
Beyond the cart, the deals keep on coming at the Grocery Clearance Center in Oak Cliff. So do the surprises – shelved, stacked and stuffed inside the store.
“It’s like exploring. You never know what you’re going to find,” says Katie Anderson, who has stopped in for bread (”It’s a dollar cheaper”) and whatever else might catch her eye. “Here, it’s not the regular things all the time,” she says. “And you better grab it when you see it because it may be gone.”
But more always follows.
“The wheels stop turning if new stuff isn’t coming in,” Gluckman says. For 16 years, the Plano resident has been a state-licensed retailer of salvaged and surplus food and drugs, one of 14 in Dallas County and 158 statewide.
His inventory is the stuff that the top-tier stores don’t want. Stuff that may be past its prime, some months out of date or may have been overstocked, discontinued, mislabeled, misshipped or damaged. Stuff the salvage outlets buy from retailers, distributors and liquidators and return to the food chain.
“We guarantee everything we sell,” says Gluckman, pulling an 11-pound hunk of Hormel turkey breast from a freezer. Price: $27.50 ($2.50 a pound). At the Grocery Clearance Center, he says, all meat is sold or frozen before its “sell by” date. “One of the reasons I’ve been able to stay in business so long is people trust me,” he says.
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THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
