One opened near me recently and we usually pop in there on the way back from our main shopping run to check out the specials and pick up a few pantry items. This week our local one was selling in-date 15 x 90g boxes of Smith’s Poppables for $6, which might be the best bargain I have seen there yet. I don’t have to buy snacks for at least another month now, though I might eventually develop a hatred for Poppables lol
From what I’ve seen, most stuff is either unusual flavours that didn’t sell well (like those Herbert Adams “Asian” meat pies) or closer to the best before/use by date than what you’d find in a conventional supermarket. For example chips might have a best before of 3 - 6 months or something in a bigger supermarket, whereas they’ll have 1 month left at NQR. Actual out of date stuff is very rare, at least in my experience.
I agree that it can be a bit of a trap because prices are so low, which is why we only go there at the end of a full shop so we know what we need and what our remaining budget is (we withdraw cash every fortnight and use that as a hard limit on spending, so the NQR budget is usually the leftovers from that). Sometimes the prices aren’t actually competitive, or they just don’t have the stock, so it’s useful to go in with some idea of what you’d otherwise be paying.
I used to go to the one in Werribee which was great because it had a huge fridge/freezer section so it was easy to buy cheap frozen stuff but last time I went there a couple of years back they’d changed the layout and they didn’t have that anymore…
But yeah I used to go to try out some of the more odd things you couldn’t find in conventional supermarkets.
The Woolies and Coles apps are useful for this: You can scan a barcode and see immediately what the product costs in those respective stores.