Obscure hole-in-the-wall stores can be a great place to buy prepping supplies and materials, but you’ve got to know how to find them, and be willing to shop at them for this idea to work.
What is a hole-in-the-wall store?
It’s a store well off the beaten path, a store where the shelves may be a little dusty. In some cases, the shops will be a LOT dusty… and in other cases they can be even grimy and literally have holes-in-the-walls / roofs / windows.
Some won’t even have shops, they will be nothing but supply yards.
Hours may be irregular. Heck, sometimes hours are downright bizarre. Depending upon the size of the place, operating hours may be “give me a call and I will meet you there to open up.”
Salty, are you serious? You really think places like this are a good place to get prepping supplies? Yes I do, and yes I am serious. I’m as serious as a heart attack.
Give us an example of a hole-in-the-wall store
Today, Spice and I stopped in and “shopped” at the Ten Mile store. To say the Ten Mile Store is a hole-in-the-wall is a bit of an understatement. It DEFINES what a hole-in-the-wall store is. The roof is mostly there, sorta. Most of the windows have glass in them. The store has “limited” hours (open Saturdays 10-5, and that’s it).
They also have a TON of stuff you can’t get anywhere else, or if you do it will cost a LOT more.
For example, today we bought four used water barrels. Food safe used barrels in once-used condition, with the bungs that are set up to tap with regular spigots. Our four new barrels once held margarita mix before it was bottled… we know this because it says right on them what they held. $15 in like-new condition.
Can you find water barrels elsewhere by spending a ton of time shopping for them? Yes. Cheaper than $15? Possibly, but I’ve not seen any around here cheaper in like-new condition. How about a place to go pick up pretty much any kind of barrel you want, food safe or not, from 20 gallons on up to 250? That’s harder to find.
Each of these stores has their specialties. Ten mile also sells feed by the bag or by the pallet, along with farm steel (fencing) and all kinds of other stuff. Inside the store it’s self, the building is stuffed full of antiques for sale at prices low enough that people come out from city antique shops to snatch them up.
You can find things like hand grain mills, hand meat processing equipment, hand pumps and parts, all kinds of old woodworking tools, leather working tools and who-knows-what-all else.
Here’s our Podcast take on this subject:
Hole-In-The-Wall? Take Cash
One key part of shopping at any hole-in-the-wall store is to bring plenty of cash. If the items are non-perishable or don’t have a “best by” date, buy in bulk when you find things cheap, and depending on the store ask for discounts if you are buying in volume. Pull the cash out of your wallet, put it in your hand, and ask for a discount.
The worst thing that can happen is they say no.
Buy where ingredients are sold in big bulk batches.
We are fortunate to have many Amish-Mennonite bulk food stores in our area. Frankly, they are all over the place. Below is a couple of pictures taken from one of my favorite ones located in south Iowa. It’s an Amish run store, and their prices are crazy-low for bulk items.
Here’s an example of crazy-low prices. Pictured below are 50-pound bags of oatmeal. See the price on that 50 pound sack of regular rolled oats? $20.45. Folks, that’s 41 cents a pound.
Let’s spell this out in prepper speak, the way that Spice and I look at our prepping food. For that 41 cents, we get 1765 calories of quality nutrition, a food that literally is “just add some hot water” easy to cook and serve. Oatmeal is tasty, filling, EXCEEDINGLY healthy (we talk about all of it’s virtues in this article here on 3BY), gluten free, lowers blood sugar, I could go on and on.
Think about that again… 1765 QUALITY calories for 41 cents, in a food we can package to last for 10 years or more? Yeah, sign us up for some of that action.
We find this stuff not at the big-box store (even though rolled oats at any grocery store ass long as it’s in a multi-pound container and not those individual serving packets), but most cities of any size have alternative “cash and carry” supply stores that sell in bulk.
Forget the big boxes, look outside the box.
Stores that sell salvaged items / overstocked goods / close outs
There’s a third kind of hole-in-the-wall store we shop at, and that’s the salvaged items (etc.) type store. These are also all over the place if you look for them.
In North Missouri, our favorite store is Compton’s in Macon.
You never know what Compton’s may have for sale today, because they get all kinds of close-out, product returned, salvage items. One week they may have a shipment of ethnic foods, the next it may be boots returned to a big-box retailer.
You may walk in and find a manufacturer’s overrun of heaven-only-knows-what.
This particular store’s niche is bulk cleaning fluids like dish washing soap, liquid detergent, etc. They sell their own labeled products by the small container, the gallon size jug, the five-gallon bucket and the pallet load.
The store also sells both new and scratch/dented furniture and a ton of other items as well.
Need 100 identical fishing reels? I know where you can find them!
The final secret of hole-in-the-wall store shopping
It’s fun! It’s always a surprise when you walk in to places like Compton’s and see them stocked to the rafters with interesting and bizarre merchandise like a new shipment of high-quality life-like artificial big game wall mount busts. Seriously, you can’t find this stuff just anywhere!
Stores like this exist all across the world, and it’s just plain smart prepping to start searching them out.