Penzey’s online is also a great place to buy fresh, whole spices - at a fraction of the price of the grocery store. You can find virtually any spice or herb in the world on their online catalogue. They’ll usually toss a freebie in with every order, too.
You have to be careful of “marked off” McCormick Spices. They often mark off spices pre-packaged that are getting old but are still usable. They don’t want a bad rap against the brand name for weak spices, and they’d take a loss on any spices they had to discard. Therefore, they sell at a discount after a few months. [This loss of potency, and evetual wastage, is also part of their rationale for charging so much in stores. McCormick and similar suppliers stock a (modestly) wide range of spices in a wide range of venues, knowing full well that the demand will not match the supply in many spices.
Decades ago, I lived in Atlanta, and a few times a year A+P (a grocery chain which was once once Atlantic and Pacific Tea Co., well accustomed to the inevitable loss of fragrancy ) would offer a sale where they refilled your existing spice container for 25 cents (in 60s/70s dollars) or so (rather than throwing out their aging spices. Other stores did the same, but not as often. I was just a kid and didn’t cook nearly as much as I do today (certainly not at the same level), so I didn’t appreciate how cool this was.
It probably didn’t even cost them much: the more spices I stock and experiment with, the more I use on a regular basis. The more ‘dead’ spices I cook with, the more spices I’d feel “weren’t worth it” and eliminate from my recipes. They’d be enlarging their market, especially in slow moving spices, by discounting spices they might otherwise soon discard
Do they still do that down South?