Customers Love This Funky Store

Everyone loves a bargain. Just look around. Discount chains are thriving, while department stores sputter. Wal-Mart, which arrived in the Valley in 1997, now wants to build two additional stores in Spokane.

But even Wal-Mart can’t offer greeting cards for a quarter.

Or T-shirts for a buck.

How about a big stuffed animal for $2. Or a pair of dress shoe shoelaces for 33 cents?

For these types of bargains, you’ll need to head to a funky little store on East Trent. It’s a refuge of sorts - like the island of misfit toys. Here, Bruce McKinley is king. And his subjects are crushed boxes of Honey Puffs, dented cans of creamed corn and outdated Power Bars.

They may be misfits, but at Bonanza Bargains, they’re far from unwanted.

Customers seem to enjoy rifling through piles of hats and bins of baby food. In fact, when McKinley remodeled, adding more shelves and upscale display methods, some customers complained.

“A lot of people, over the years, say they want to dig,” the 47-year-old Valley man said.

And like archeologists searching for treasures, they never know what they’ll find.

The inventory here changes weekly. It all depends upon what McKinley digs up himself - at auctions, closeouts and a variety of other sources.

“Right now, we have a (baseball) pitching machine,” said long-time employee Ronna McKinley. “We had a huge hot tub forever and ever. It can be just about anything.”

The store may be a hole in the wall - Bruce McKinley’s words - but it’s far from a new hole. The Valley business has been around for 43 years.

And it all started with a carload - a railroad carload - of damaged Campbell’s soup.

McKinley’s father, Jim, began the business with a $5,000 loan from a friend. He spent it all on the soup. Some of the cans, he explained, had been slightly flattened during the train trip. Grocery stores had rejected the whole shipment, so McKinley bought them up and resold them to a discount store.

He made a $4,000 profit for less than a week’s work.

From then on, the Valley man spent his days traveling across the country, buying up damaged goods and selling them at steep discounts. Fires - and the smoke-damaged items that resulted - were a big source of inventory. Anything scratched, crushed or dented - but still usable or edible - was fair game.

“I grew up on dented cans,” said Bruce McKinley, who was just a toddler when it all started.

It didn’t take his dad, a former comptroller for Sigman Foods, to realize that damaged goods were a potential gold mine of business.

And bargains. For Bruce McKinley, who took over the business about 10 years ago, the goal is to offer almost everything in the store at cost or less. He does it by buying products below cost - sometimes far below.

For example, let’s say a jar of mayonnaise breaks during shipment. It makes a mess - something a regular grocery store doesn’t want to deal with. McKinley buys the whole case at a deep discount and resells the unbroken jars.

The same goes with crushed boxes and dented cans. Not everything on McKinley’s shelves is damaged, but it might have been part of a damaged shipment.

Or maybe it’s outdated.

Everything comes with an expiration date these days, and when that date draws near, stores resell it at a discount.

It may not taste as fresh, but if the price is right, many customers don’t mind.

“It’s an interesting business to be in,” said McKinley, who does more than sell to his customers.

He also buys from them.

“People are welcome to bring in whatever they want to sell,” he said.

Sometimes they bring in the remains of their garage sales. One man sold the shop his collection of 1,500 baseball caps.

McKinley shies away from appliances and electronics, but he’ll consider just about anything.

Walking up and down his aisles, you’ll find imported anchovy paste sitting next to advent calendars and frosted Cheerios. A box of greeting cards sits next to a stack of Kosher egg matzos, right above a pile of model car kits.

People don’t mind the unique display methods. But they do tease Ronna McKinley about her antiquated cash register.

“Our machines are old as old, but they keep plugging along,” she said.

Two or three identical models are kept in the back - to use for parts. The 20-year employee isn’t sure how her boss acquired them.

But they must’ve been a bargain.