Amish stores pulling in customers with rock bottom prices
There are a whole lot of interesting ways that people are coming up with to save some money these days, and not all are in their best interest actually. There has been a rise in visitors to Amish stores, which stock expired cans and bottles of food, dented boxes of cereal and crumbled bars of candy. For a lot of American’s looking to save money, these are a way out of higher prices for just about everything.
According to Ray Marvin, the manager of B.B’s Grocery Outlet, the range of customers varies from those coming in Mercedes to those coming in horse and buggies. Prices are often dirt cheap at these stores, such as 10cents for a bottle of salad dressing, and 50 cents for a roll of paper towels. The Food and Drug Administration prohibits the sale of expired baby food, but all other items, including food and medicine are good enough to be sold, even though they might be expired.
Amish expert Don Kraybill of Elizabethtown College in Elizabethtown, Pa., calls the popularity of salvage stores a “mini Amish industrial revolution.” He says it is a natural outgrowth of booming Amish micro-enterprises, a result of the decline in farming. “Their businesses frequently succeed because they have low overhead, they work very hard, they’re creative,” Kraybill says. “And they have an ample pool of labor within their extended families.”
The Amish are scattered across 28 states, with the highest populations in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Indiana. A deeply religious group, they traditionally live off the land and without electricity, among other modern amenities.