The Stolen Luxuries of Grocery Outlet, Bargain Market

It doesn’t matter much if you don’t find what you’re looking for at Grocery Outlet

I know I’m not the only one with special feelings for Grocery Outlet, Bargain Market. I know this because when I find myself there on a Friday night, newly single as fuck, I am not alone in my wandering trance. Who are all these other sad sacks? I ask myself each time. Are they also trying to retrace their ancestors’ steps? Trying to spark someone’s appetite? Feeling empty and broke and rich and lucky at once and — ? Grocery Outlet’s jingle on the loudspeaker is Pavlovian, snapping me back to the present moment.

It might be easier to understand the importance of Grocery Outlet and the discount stores like it if you are either an immigrant or descendant of immigrants, if you’re broke, if you’re someone currently eating your feelings — or all of the above. But I’m pretty sure that’s most of us in the United States.

Grocery Outlet was founded by James Read in San Francisco, in June of 1946. My mom was born a month later in Spanish Harlem, the daughter of poor Jewish immigrants. She grew up to be an antique dealer and reseller of clothes, always hustling. She is still more or less living month to month at 72. When I was born, she says my father’s brother asked, “Is she going to be a bag lady like her mom?”

She taught me how to scan the aisles of thrift stores and Grocery Outlets, to forage the bushels of discounts for survival. Wednesdays off from school meant the 50% off sale at our favorite Hayward thrift store, followed by a marathon of varsity-level secondhand shopping, punctuated by a celebratory buffet at Bombay Garden. We were not rich, but we could afford to buy things we didn’t need, so long as most of it was resold to yuppy consignment stores. It was a very particular type of luxury.

Grocery Outlet remains in the Read family. Though it has expanded, its inventory still comes primarily from overstocked and closeout items purchased directly from manufacturers. The stores keep certain products on shelves beyond the “best if used by” dates, but all products have to be pulled by 30 days past their expiration. If this turns your nose upwards, you are not one of us.

My high school friend, Katherine, had parents who were new to the upper-middle class and still understood the value of Grocery Outlet. One day, she poured herself a bowl of cereal, chomping on it mindlessly as she drew comics. There are a lot of seeds in this cereal, she thought at first. Then her seeds started to crawl, and she started to gag. Nothing like this has ever happened to me in 30 years of shopping at Grocery Outlet, but the fact it could gives me a twisted sense of pride.

It doesn’t matter much if you don’t find what you’re looking for at Grocery Outlet. That just gives you, our lovable sad sack, something to look forward to next time. It isn’t relevant that for a few more dollars you would be guaranteed to find what you’re looking for across the street at Sprouts. What matters is that you never indulge in a luxury like pumpkinseed butter unless it feels stolen.

Yelp review of Grocery Outlet, Oakland:

I can’t really write this review bc I will get too emotional.

I make up songs about grocery outlet.

buy ur non-dairy milk here they always have it n it’s like $1.50

Thank u grocery outlet luv u.

My ex, as I’m trying to get used to calling him, never appreciated the place. I tried to take him thinking that surely, as a third-generation Jew, he’d appreciate it. But he’d never been trained to fear the money could run out, or that the key to leveling up could be just around the aisle.

“Wait! You’re in line already?” I balked. “But you didn’t even look at the bougie isle!” It’s the one all Grocery Outlets have labeled, appropriately enough, “NOSH” (Natural, Organic, Specialty, Health). This was vegan gold! The heavily-discounted almond butter, hemp seeds, Mary’s Gone Crackers, Elmhurst cashew milk… he shrugged, grabbed a large organic peanut butter, and got back in line.

Last fall, my uncle was diagnosed with cancer at the same time my mom’s finances imploded. Going up to Oakland to help them was supposed to be temporary, but the distance eventually led me to move out of our shared place in LA for good. Though I mourned my recent past life domestic re-upping at Costco, my new standing date with Grocery Outlet was certainly more exciting. Here I was, a woman finally (finally!) left to wander the aisles of unknown rewards at her own pace. I pushed my cart with a sharp and savvy nose.

I took my sick uncle to his favorite store throughout chemo, and it never failed to cheer him up. Except for one day, when he became out of breath in the Grocery Outlet parking lot and began to cry. “I’m just so tired,” he finally admitted. “Sometimes I wonder if this is even worth it.” I let the question hang. I took his hand and silently pointed to a little bird perched on the branch in front of us. It felt like the only appropriate answer.

Yelp review of Grocery Outlet, Oakland:

“Just heard Grocery Outlet playing Sam Cooke’s ‘Another Saturday Night’ before closing on Saturday night. Five stars forever.

… Another Saturday night and I ain’t got nobody.

I got some money ’cause I just got paid.

Now how I wish I had someone to talk to.

I’m in an awful way…”

On a road trip, I like to create a rest stop by navigating to a new Grocery Outlet. They’re all kind of the same but inventory varies. If I’m passing through a wealthy town I’m certain their discarded scraps will be too.

“Looking for a gift for a frugal family member? Consider a gift card to Grocery Outlet, Bargain Market,” the loudspeaker blares. It’s the Friday night before Christmas, and I’m on my way back to Oakland after a night in a glass cottage with a lover who likes to nurse me wet.

We started dating when I was still in an open relationship with my ex, only now I’m single and prefer to belong to no one. Somehow, nothing between me and this sensitive sculpture of a man feels different, except perhaps that I no longer entertain fantasies of being rescued. It’s hard to say what turns me on more: his morning worship in the sun-soaked room, or that I know I’ve bought myself the perfect birthday present. Surrounded in all directions by their gaze, it is the closest I’ve come to making love to trees, and he is happy to be the conduit.

The glass house was too expensive, of course. This is what I do: I indulge erratically, just like my mother, in spurts of imagined wealth. Then I overcorrect with a bargain.

What a sense of calm I feel upon entering fluorescent Grocery Outlet and not knowing what I’ll find. I smell each and every soy candle before I reject them all. This is an important part of the ritual. You can get carried away quickly, looking for what you’re not looking for. Self-restraint is part of the dance. You can buy off-brand razors, perhaps, but only if you resolve not to shave your legs before the third date.

And then, it happens: the moment Grocery Outlet shoppers live for, the bargain you saw once but which has since eluded you — sighted. In my case (before 89-cent Lavvas would soon eclipse my passion), So-Delicious Coconut Yogurt in a large tub, only $2.99 instead of $6.99. I grab three. My heart catches in my throat, and I am my mother’s daughter, feeling as if I’ve just pulled off a heist. How she used to run up to me at the thrift store in a whisper when she found an especially good “designer” piece, just my size. “Rachel, look,” she’d whisper, like if she spoke too loud she might jinx it.

“Will you be paying with credit, debit, cash, or EBT?” my cashier asks kindly. On the receipt, where the computer normally tallies how much you saved by shopping at Grocery Outlet there’s a blank space, an open-ended question.

How much you saved by shopping at Grocery Outlet:

For the moment, I rest without anticipation. What a privilege it is to be able to chase the high of the deal.

Yelp Reviews of Grocery Outlet, Oakland

“This place is hit or miss nothing is ever the same and or consistent. I can’t do all my shopping here I just go in for a few items to get me by here and there…”

Months later, my uncle is in remission but defeated, displaced from his home and unemployed, struggling to access social services even with my help. My mom is crashing at her friend’s house, bemoaning her bag lady status, implicating fault that I haven’t found a place to relocate her that she can afford. I’m subletting a room I’m asked to vacate every few weeks for someone’s in-laws. We are all wandering Jews, unsurprised by our shared pseudo-diaspora. I’m pleased to find I’ve never felt more grateful or clear.

The depression makes my uncle’s appetite erratic, and he keeps blacking out from low blood sugar. He’s weaker than I’ve ever seen him, uninterested in almost everything. No one realized remission might be even harder. He moves slowly and slurs his words.

“Do you want to go to Grocery Outlet before your doctor’s appointment?” I ask him gingerly one day. “Yes,” he replies with an eagerness I haven’t heard in weeks, a perceptible twinkle in his eye. “I was going to ask if we could.” So a part of him is still hungry and maybe even hopeful. A better deal is out there, and we still might find it.

As it turns out, we all do. I find my uncle a room all the way in Milpitas. They trade his social security check for room and board and someone who makes sure he takes his pills. He starts smiling more and blacking out less. I finally resettle my mom, too. We’re over-budget as usual, but I’m happy she can get her fix at a nearby hospice thrift shop.

Their present temporarily stabilized, I move far away, into the woods. There’s no Grocery Outlet here. On the days I forget that this is my one wild and precious life, there’s always Imperfect Produce, Vitacost, or eBay. Maybe one day, if I become still enough, I will rid myself of the desire to hunt altogether.

I make sure to sit silently, though the forest never is. It’s comforting to imagine myself gone, the symphony swelling on and on whether I’m there to witness it or not. I take my own hand and focus on the red bird perched on the branch in front of me, singing. I practice savoring all I’d never want to possess. Such luxury, this moment. Such wealth to know both of our bodies are free.