Growth-and-income stocks are seemingly abundant at the moment, but there are a couple of catches. Plenty of dividend-paying companies have increased profits of late, but most of them have done so by cutting costs, not by ringing up more sales. That should make investors wonder if the growth is sustainable. Also, among companies with dividends and rising sales, many have high price/earnings ratios. That reduces the chances that future growth will translate to rising stock prices.

The companies listed below satisfy three demands. Their sales are rising (if only slowly), their P/E ratios seem reasonable and their dividends are larger than average. Companies like these are likely to provide reliable returns even if our present economic rebound proves less robust than hoped.

Verizon

Granted, Verizon is not a fast-growth business. Ignoring acquisitions, core sales are growing by less than 1% a year. But consider the backdrop. Layoffs have reduced companies need for business lines. Landline customers are gradually cancelling service. And leading-edge cable television service isn t a priority for many families at the moment, so while the company is adding FiOS subscribers, it s not adding as many as it would in a booming economy. All this, and Verizon is eking out sales gains, even without taking short-cuts, like sacrificing margins to be able to service one of the most popular cellphones of the day, Apple s iPhone. That suggests the company could grow nicely in a strong or merely stable economy. Shares trade a third cheaper than the broad market based on earnings, but for giant telecoms, dividend and free cash flow yields matter more than price/earnings ratios. Verizon has a 6% dividend yield. Its free cash flow yield is nearly 10%, and as the company winds down its fiber-optic investments in coming years, analysts reckon the free cash yield could hit 15% of today s stock price.

Nash Finch

Nash Finch gets its name from the Nash brothers of North Dakota (Fred, Edgar and Willis), who turned a candy store into a fruit wholesale business 120 years ago and hired 14-year-old Harry Finch to help out. Today the company is the second-largest publicly traded food wholesaler in the country, with more than $5 billion in yearly sales. There s still plenty of room for market share gains. Privately held C&S Wholesale Grocers has an estimated $19 billion in yearly sales. Grocer Supervalu (SVU) has $41 billion in sales, of which about $10 billion comes from wholesaling. Sales for Nash are growing steadily, thanks in part to a prospering military food supply unit. Nash carries a single-digit P/E ratio and pays a 2.2% dividend yield. Management says it will spend $25 million on share repurchases by the end of 2010. That s nearly 6% of the company s present stock market value.

Republic Services

Garbage hauler Republic Services owes plenty and grows only slowly. Yet the company s cash flow is so predictable that lenders are happy to provide it with attractive interest rates. The result for stockholders is plenty of free cash flow; the company devotes about 40% of it to dividends (current yield: 2.7%), a bit more than 40% to share repurchases and the rest to debt reduction. That s a good enough deal for one pair of bespectacled billionaire pals. Bill Gates has long been the company s largest stockholder, mostly through Cascade Investment, his holding company. Warren Buffett bought a 1% stake early this month for Berkshire Hathaway.