Thrift shops for Bread!?

I live in Hope Mills, a small offshoot of our main town (Fayetteville), and any time I need something from Lowes or Home Depot, which is usually a couple of times a week, I have to drive the 6 miles down Hope Mills Rd into the real city. I have been doing this for nearly a year now, and I finally decided to stop in some of the little shops I've been passing by for so long. Most of them were a bust. One little thrift store was actually closed down, though the open sigh still flashed invitingly in the window. Another was full of clothes and Diaper cakes??, which is not what I am interested in at all. The cutesy antique shops were full of new furniture at a "discounted price" which was not discounted at all.  But bread outlet- oh the bread outlet.

Do you raid the rack of half priced clearance bakery items at Walmart like a starving child? I do. My husband eats a bagel for breakfast every morning, takes three sub type sandwiches and two regular sandwiches to work every day, and has to have rolls/biscuits/breadsticks with his dinner- so we go through a LOT of bread. And bread is EXPENSIVE. This place, The Sunbeam Outet, recollects the bread expiring that day from the grocery stores and sells it for $1 or 2/$1. All kinds of bread- bagels, rolls, the fancy sliced kind, buns. Everything. They also sell all those little prepackaged snacks for super cheap, but since everything I eat sticks to me like glue since Lovebug was born and Hubs hates sugar, I have to skip that isle. In addition to everything being so cheap already, they give you a free loaf if you spend $5, a 10% discount if you have a military ID, and $5 worth of free bread every time you fill up your punch card-which fills up quickly!

I left that store with all this for only $7 and felt a little guilty as I skipped out the door.  That it two packs of Natures Own bagels, two packs of Cobblestone Mill loaves, two packs of dinner rolls, a huge pack of brown loaves, AND a loaf of Cobblestone Mill sourdough sliced bread. All of it technically expired that day, but who cares? It all seems as fresh as can be to me. And my deep freeze has no problem storing it all for me until we need it.  I cannot believe the money I have been wasting buying all of this at the grocery store for the past year when I could have been saving so much at the Outlet!

A bonus, if you have children who like to feed ducks, or farm animals that like to eat bread, they sell big bags of yesterdays bread for dirt cheap. I have an aunt that gets truck loads of what didn't sell for $1 to feed to the cows- I guess cows like bread.

The best part? These are all over the country. Now that I have been in one I remember seeing them everywhere I have ever lived. What a discovery! What wonderful things have you found hiding right under your nose?