Attention, bargain hunters! With all this talk of high food costs and budget crunching, have you ever thought of grocery shopping at $.99 stores?
Like Evan Kleiman in her interview with Julie Makinen, we were skeptical. Thinking of 99-Cent stores, and we can't help but envision rows of dented canned meat, the occasional cake mix, and rolls upon rolls of scratchy toilet paper.
But Makinen tells us not to judge so quickly...
Makinen says she's started noticing produce, dairy, and even organic fruits and veggies at the 99-Cent store in her Los Angeles neighborhood. Items are occasionally expired, but these fresh items, as well as the canned and boxed items, are more often surplus from other markets or the victims of packaging-design changes.
She does caution that you need to approach your 99-Cent store experience with a certain amount of flexibility. Since stock is constantly changing and moving, you can never be entirely sure that the canned tomatoes you scored last week will be there again. A good challenge for those of us learning to cook without recipes!
While a gourmet meal might be a challenge, Makinen assures us that we can indeed formulate an entire meal of 99-cent items! She writes about her own 99-Cent meal in her LATimes article, "Making a Meal of 99-Cent Items," and you can also listen to Evan Kleiman's entire interview with Makinen over on the Good Food website.
Do you shop at 99-Cent Stores for your groceries?
(Photo Credit: 99-Cent Store)
Copyright © 2007 Apartment Therapy
I haven't tried yet. It would be too many trips if I were to go to the regular grocery, the farmers' market, then the 99-cent store for groceries, but I have a friend who often buys produce at a store near her.
view OneWallKitchen's profile
there are so many 99cent stores here in Brooklyn. i don't buy food from there now, but i used to - due to financial reasons. and yeah, things weren't GREAT, but nowadays there's more brand names popping up. i have a friend who grocery shops almost exclusively (no veggies and fruit) at this one 99cent store that has meat and dairy and pastas and canned goods... it's on Z and Coney Island Ave in Brooklyn, in case anyone wants to know :)
you just have to be a really smart and suspicious shopper. that's all!
view kdkaboom's profile
I would think Aldi could meet the needs of the smallest budget and they have plenty of choices.
view art's profile
You guys talk about this a lot :)
http://www.thekitchn.com/thekitchn/roundup-ny-times-dining-section/cooking-from-the-99cent-store-eric-ripert-goes-frugalfrom-the-ny-times-dining-section-032608-046427
view squiggle's profile
I've bought several losers at the dollar store--food that tasted like it had been stored next to detergent (yuck, this happened more than once), straws where over half of them had holes in them, chocolate that was hard and whitish, licorice sticks that rodents had clearly been nibbling on, graham crackers that were downright inedible, measuring cups that were inaccurate by more than a little. Definitely buyer beware at those places.
view sb2323's profile
Something else to consider.
There are people out there who buy "out of code" products for resale by the pallet full.
They may leave the date on them or they will take off labels, relabel, etc.
view art's profile
Nice to see Andreas Gursky’s “99 Cent II Diptych" (the photo used in the story above). That photo sold for more than 3 million dollars at Sotheby’s. At one point, it ranked as the highest amount ever spent for a photograph, though I'm not sure if that is true or not at this point.
I do shop at the Dollar store for some things. The one nearest my house has tons of spices, so if I need something that I figure to be a one-off, I try there first. I hate to waste 6 or 8 dollars on a spice that will only go stale before I use the rest of it. We don't eat pasta, but when we did, we would sometimes get it there.
And if you are willing to look often, you can find random organics and exotic foods, but of course you never know what you might find on any given day.
view marsneedsrabbits's profile
You must have better 99/dollar stores than I've found here. Most of them carry a very limited supply of food, and in my opinion, very little of it is a bargain compared to the regular grocery or Wal-Mart. Also, usually it's an unknown brand, and I'm not always keep to take the risk. I certainly can't get any kind of meat or seafood at mine, with the exception of corned beef/watery tuna type items.
I have paid 99 cents for some spices, though, but those jars of garlic powder and red pepper flakes are everywhere, even CVS (my CVS has a fairly extensive selection of Mexican ingredients (not fresh, though), and Walgreens carries chorizo).
But I can certainly understand that appeal of a 99 cent store in, say, Manhattan, where Wal-Mart is not an option.
view renata's profile