Amish salvage store in Trumbull County thrives

MESOPOTAMIA (AP) — In a quiet gas-lit farmhouse on a frosty spring morning, two girls in bonnets and long blue dresses wind tape around expired bottles of Newman’s Own salad dressing, and wipe dust off dented cans of vegetables and crumpled boxes of Butterfinger candy bars.

They are picking through the leftovers from America’s supermarkets.

Amish-run salvage stores, a thriving discount industry tucked away in America’s farmlands, sells expired food and medicine dirt-cheap. This shadow economy, run by people who typically shun modern methods of commerce, is drawing a steady stream of non-Amish customers seeking relief from the country’s financial ills.

“We have anything from a Mercedes in our parking lots down to horse and buggies,” said Ray Marvin, general manager of B.B.’s Grocery Outlet, an Amish-owned salvage store chain in Quarryville, Pa.

The customers are after prices resembling those of old-fashioned nickel-and-dime stores — paper towels for 50 cents a roll, salad dressing for 10 cents a bottle.

Some close-out stores also stock their shelves with salvage but primarily sell bulk wholesale and overstocked goods at discounted prices.

“We’ve been amazed, how good we’ve done,” says Rebecca Miller, an Amish woman who opened N&R Salvage with her husband last year on the outskirts of Mesopotamia in Trumbull County. The couple has never taken out an advertisement, she says, but the customers keep coming.