 "Photo: Susan Terry")
 "Photo: Susan Terry")
 "Photo: Susan Terry")
 "Photo: Susan Terry")
Despite the ancient, uneven concrete floor and the occasional expiration date surprise, Amazing Savings draws a crowd ready to brave the risks of expired yogurt in order to find dirt-cheap Odwalla bars and almond milk from, according to its residents, one of Asheville's most unusual places to shop.
When asked about Amazing Savings, shopper Michael Hofman didn't just speak. He sang.
"Amazing Savings, how sweet the cans of dented corn and peas," the Asheville resident sang to the familiar tune of "Amazing Grace."
Manager Joseph Abousaid, a former banker and licensed stockbroker who married into the WNC family that owns Amazing Savings, explained how the store sells goods from puffed rice to lip balm at 50 to 80 percent off retail.
"If you go into a grocery store and pick up a can of beans and you drop it by mistake, it gets dented," he said. "The grocery store won't sell it. No one will buy it."
At the end of the night, he continued, the stocking crew takes damaged goods and dumps them in a banana box. When the stockers gather a whole pallet of dented goods, the store sells it, he said.
That's where Amazing Savings obtains its goods. They bid on and buy unwanted, damaged, overstocked, and past-date merchandise from all over the nation, bought by distributors and sold to salvage and bulk stores like Amazing Savings.
By buying other stores' castoffs (sometimes items that have been removed only because of a label change, according to Abousaid), Amazing Savings gathers bargain-basement goods from tomatillos to peanut butter dog biscuits to men's hair color to organic grapefruit soda to a family-sized mega-pack of brand-name anti-diarrheal tablets.
"Wealthy people shop here, poor people shop here. You can stand out there in the parking lot and see all kinds of people. Everybody shops here," he said.
Despite limited parking, little advertising, a downscale location in an old South Asheville warehouse and barely enough room between the aisles for two grocery carts the store's funky staff and freewheeling approach gathers ardent fans looking for bargains.
"I feel like now I know what the cost of food is," said Stephanie Weil, who shops at Amazing Savings for her household every Saturday. "Now, I won't pay more than $1.79 for a box of cereal, which is what cereal costs at Amazing Savings. I won't go to Ingle's anymore and pay $3."
"You never know what you're going to find there," she continued. "It's like a treasure hunt. You can't make a list. The stock is different every time you go there."
Longtime customer and weekly shopper Randee Goodstadt-Evans, agrees there can be little planning when buying groceries from Amazing Savings. People should approach the store as hunter-gatherers, since there's no way to know what the store will have on a given day, she said
"One of the best bargains was a year ago last spring when they had pricey gefilte fish for, like, $2 for a big jar. It would be maybe $8 at Ingle's, if you could even find it. Anyhow, my poor dear husband, he got good and tired of gefilte fish," she said with a laugh.
Katie Wohlford said she enjoys the relaxed atmosphere and the satellite radio music always playing in the background.
One of Abousaid's managers has blond dreadlocks down to her waist. A bearded cashier once wore a blue-and-white sailor suit to work. On Halloween, a horned, caped demon crouched in the back office to send a fax, and Hatchet-Face, a character from John Waters' 1990 movie "Cry-Baby," manned the front cash register in a blonde wig and leather jacket.
"They had soul music playing from the soundtrack to Dirty Dancing and I was dancing in the aisles, and knew it was okay. Those people are more liberal and off the grid than I am," she said of one of her trips.
Wohlford's friend Heather Gourley, another frequent shopper, loves the organic food options.
"I can buy all the same organic products I love for nearly half the price offered at local organic food stores," she said. "I recently bought a pound and a half of fair trade, organic coffee for $6.99."
The coffee would have started at around $11 a pound elsewhere, she said.
"I feel like I walk around there every week picking up items to inspect the prices and I say, 'It's amazing,'" she said. "It's a little goofy, I know."
Abousaid said he's baffled by how popular and seemingly appealing items like fair-trade coffee end up unwanted, unsold and dumped off at salvage distributors.
"Pallets of peanut butter," he said, shaking his head. "Organic peanut butter. Extra-virgin olive oil. It's weird."
According to Hofman, the old warehouse building that was never meant to be a retail establishment is pretty weird, too.
"I don't like to shop in a grocery store with a dirt floor," Hofman said, moments before raving about his latest Amazing Savings find; jars of Italian pickled white garlic.
"I should have bought three cases. The first time I tried it, I ate an entire jar by myself," he said. "I find gourmet items at Amazing Savings I can't find anywhere else."
Top-notch pickled garlic aside, Abousaid acknowledged Hofman has a point about the floors, and the arm-shaking ride of pushing a shopping cart over the worst spots.
"If I pave the floors, I'm gonna raise the prices," he said. "And I don't want to do that."
Abousaid said he is glad there are earth-conscious grocers that choose to give unwanted, past-date and damaged items a second chance as bargain items.
"We're blessed by getting this product," he said. "We just want to bless the people with it."
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