Second Chance Grocery is a salvage grocery store in Starkville, Mississippi, located on Highway 25 South, right across from the Pines Mobile Home Park. We sell perfectly good food for a lot less money than regular grocery stores. The cans might have a dent or two, and the corner of the boxes might be a little bit bent, but the food inside is still as good as it ever was. Little accidents with the outside package can mean BIG savings on your grocery bill.
Second Chance sells only non-perishable groceries. If an item needs refrigeration, freezing, or has a short shelf life, we leave that to the big grocery stores. If it's canned, boxed, or bagged, we'll probably have it. Cereal, coffee, vegetables, tuna, chocolate, mints, foil, rice, sugar, flour, etc. fills our shelves.
Our store is a little different from some salvage groceries you might have visited. We have a computer inventory of all our stock, and prices are marked on the shelf edges, not written on the grocery packages. Bar code scanners are used at the checkout, so pricing mistakes are few and far between.
Second Chance doesn't sell any alcohol or tobacco related products.
Accidents happen, even in the grocery business. If a case of green beans gets dropped, and a couple of cans get bent, those cans (and sometimes the whole case) don't make it to the grocery store shelves. Instead, they're sent to a reclamation center, where broken jars are discarded, cans with leaks are destroyed, etc. The rest of the products (the good stuff) are then shipped to a distributor, who then ships the salvage grocery products to us.
Sometimes undamaged grocery items become salvage because their "use by" date was getting close, or because the item just didn't sell well in that area. Jalapenos sell well in Texas, maybe not so well in New Hampshire. Sometimes the reason the item becomes salvage is seasonal. Lots of Halloween stuff shows up in November, and Christmas stuff shows up in January. In any case, all the groceries are checked for quality by the reclamation center and by the staff at Second Chance.
It means just about nothing. While medicines and perishable groceries (milk, for example) have expiration dates that matter, the "best use by" dates on non-perishable groceries are mostly measures for making sure grocers rotate their stock efficiently. A bottle of Italian dressing is just as good a month after it's "best use by" date as it was a month before it's "best use by" date. As long as the seal is intact or the vacuum is good, the product is still fine.
We wish we knew the answer to that one! Our groceries arrive packed in banana boxes, wrapped and stacked on pallets. We don't know what's in the boxes until we unpack them. There are some items we get on a regular basis, and we will almost always have in stock (i.e., green beans, Hamburger Helper, BBQ sauce, pasta, etc.). Items that are unusual or somewhat exotic we may see only once or only occasionally (i.e., specialty salad dressings, high-end sauces, On The Border Salsa, etc.).
The best bet if you find something you really like is to stock up on it while we have it in stock. The prices are low, so it's affordable to get more than just enough for the week ahead.
Our products arrive packed in banana boxes, so we've always got plenty of boxes around. We don't even sell bananas, but we have more banana boxes than a fruit market.
Because they need to be. $4.50 for a box of cereal is just too much when minimum wage is just barely over that amount. We think $1.50 sounds a lot better, and that philosophy is carried out throughout the store. Spices that cost $5 at the big stores are probably around $1.50 at Second Chance. $7 coffee is $3.00, and so on.
Because we buy huge quantities of grocery items each week, we're able to get high quality, name brand foods and sell them for a whole lot less. Everybody benefits from this. You save over half on your grocery bill, we get to make a living, and everybody's happy.
We're able to maintain low prices by having low overhead. We usually operate with less than three full-time employees, and with a lot of help from our friends and our family.
You bet we do. Second Chance is an approved Mississippi food stamp merchant, and we accept the Mississippi EBT cards as well. You may know these as "Qwest" cards. In any case, we're glad to be able to accept EBT cards.
Second Chance accepts Visa, Mastercard, and Discover cards, both credit and debit cards.
Absolutely.
Okay, maybe that's not a "frequently asked question" in our store, but it's a good question. We believe Jesus Christ is the living Son Of God, and we accept Him as our Savior and our Comforter. We believe the words of the Apostle's Creed: "I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord."
Belief in Christ as our Savior doesn't have a whole lot to do with groceries, but it has a whole lot to do with how we live and how we conduct business, and..... wait, maybe it does have a whole lot to do with groceries! We're always glad to share Jesus with those we meet, and we hope our approach to this business represents Him well.
The employees are a mix of different denominations, but we all have a few things thing in common: a devotion to serving Christ by serving others, a devotion to sharing His love with others, and a thankfulness that He has given us the chance to work in a place that's so much fun.
Will Second Chance ship to me if I live too far away to visit?
Sure, why not? We need to sell groceries, and you
need to buy them, so we'll do what we can to accommodate you. If you want to
order in bulk, or take advantage of some of the weekly specials, we can ship to
you via UPS. For large orders, say, $25 or more, you can save a lot of
money, even after shipping. Small orders can be done via USPS.
If the order's too small to make shipping it a good value for
you, we'll tell you on the front end.
Duncan Hines, Betty Crocker, Zatarain, and Jiffy mixes mix and mingle amid the 25¢ candy bars.
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