But, one point I disagree on is going shopping less often and buying a lot. That’s exactly when most people tend to overspend. When you’re buying for two weeks, you can’t always anticipate and you grab potentially more than you can use; if you’re not careful, items go bad or don’t get used the way you expected. I will stock up on items I always use like rice or canned tomatoes, but I find I’m more frugal and efficient, and waste less, by stopping at the market two or three times a week just for the fresh items I need.

I always keep my grocer list on line at http://www.GroceryWiz.com that way I can add to it when I need to and have it ready to go at the end of the week when I go shopping.

I have found that buying less is always better than buy more. When you buy more sometimes the extra stuff doesn’t get eaten and just goes to waste.

I would rather run back out to the grocery store and have to do more grocery shopping than waste the food.

Hope this helps.

While you should check the ingredients and the nutrition values for any packaged food, it’s especially important to check this information on store brands. They’re often much cheaper, but sometimes you pay a health price in areas like higher fat, unnecessary sugar levels, and/or extremely high sodium content.

Compare the first 5 ingredients of any store brand with your favorite name brand and the name brand on sale, just to make sure you are spending money on real ingredients, and not things you can’t pronounce or even just plain junk. Also be sure to compare the per-serving levels of saturated fat, trans fat, sodium, and insoluble fiber, and do the math on how much of that container you’ll actually eat in one sitting. That’ll give you an idea of how much of the product is made of better ingredients versus junky stuff, and how much you’re actually spending/saving.

Depending on what packaged things you’re buying, sometimes a good solution from a health perspective is to buy whole foods and cook stuff in advance. Not everyone has the time for this, but even if you pick one dish a week, making homemade batches of prepackaged equivalents like soups, mac and cheese, and pasta dishes and freezing them makes for inexpensive, easy, and healthy heat-and-serve meals.

I was a cashier in high school and sometimes a customer would get angry at me when an item came up with the wrong price – it was really rude, and clueless. I was more than happy to fix an incorrect price, but it’s not as if I set the price in the first place! Cashiers aren’t paid by commission. There’s no conspiracy to charge you an extra 30 cents. Seriously – don’t get angry at the cashier for a price you don’t like. If everyone is polite things work so much more smoothly.

Anyway. Checking things twice is a great idea. But if you notice that something is the wrong price, don’t wait until after you’ve paid to say something. It’s a lot easier to check a mistake before the transaction is complete, and a lot easier to fix it. Every so often someone would wait until after I had closed my till to point out that I accidentally charged them for the wrong brand of apples, etc. That was always frustrating because it would have been so easy for me to correct only minutes beforehand, and the customer could have gotten out of the store more quickly, but since they waited I had to take them to customer service and it took much more time than it needed to.

Of course – that’s assuming you notice right away. (If you do, say something! It’s not a big deal if the line gets held up for a minute!)

Grocery stores might do some things to encourage you to spend money (what store doesn’t?) but they’re not trying to steal from you. What kind of business practice would that be? Grocery stores live and die off of reputations for customer service.

I wrote about several in three posts on my website. The last one is at http://gettingaheadinlife.blogspot.com/2008/01/grocery-shopping-202-buying-in-bulk.html
The first two are linked from that one.

Jim

If you want to save money at the grocery store do *not* shop with a list of items. Shop with an idea of what you might like to eat, and then purchase whatever is on sale. Making a list is the easiest way to miss similar but cheaper products right down the aisle.

And fresh produce is only cheaper if you get it all used.

Checking your receipt and standing up for what is coming to you is very important. A few days ago I did a $119 shop and had two problems.

The first was that the cashier put through 2 apricots as weighing .530 kilos (over a pound!) and costing $2.87. It was late, there was only one cashier open with a lineup behind me but I politely insisted that I was not paying almost $3 for 2 tiny apricots.

He put them through again and they weighed in at .130kg. Great. Now I’ve been charged the right price but we can’t get the wrong price deleted because they don’t weigh what the scale thought they did the first time around. There was nobody around, the kid on cash was very young and very inexperienced and couldn’t make the intercom work.

He eventually walked away to look for someone to help and someone else showed up. The other employee was able to reverse the charge by putting it through as a coupon on produce. All told, it took about 10 minutes.

About 2 days later I entered my receipts into the computer and saw that I’d been charged for 3 jars of decaf instant coffee when I’d only purchased two. I went back today and got $5.25 back in cash. That took about a minute.

Some times I’m envious of people with access to Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods…other times, I think it’s budget salvation.

I get a half gallon of whole milk for 2.09 and bread is never more than 1.39, but usually more like 1.19. And I am talking about nice bread, Freihofer’s country white, or any amount of Arnold Whole Grain breads. Thomas’s Bagels are $.99!

They also have a calander that they give out and each month they have two coupons which are very useful. Buy one item (anything) and get a free loaf of any Arnold of Freihofer bread is one they have each month, the other coupon varies.

I recently bought a dozen eggs, two loafs of bread and a half gallon of whole milk there for $4.40. It saves my boyfriend and I a lot over the regular grocery store’s prices.

We also tend to shop two or three times a week after work (we work together, so this is convenient) because we can buy just what we want for that day and maybe the next day’s dinner and we are usually in a rush to get home and relax, so we don’t linger. I find that if we go to the store with the intention of doing a big shopping, we actually buy more stuff than we need or want.

We also use our own bags, our store gives us $.03 for each bag we bring ourselves.

As a result, it is always cheaper to buy the larger quantities, because rather than some complicated arithmetic with four-packs of eight-ounce cans, we actually get a note right on every item in the store that tells us the price per 100 grams.
I don’t know if that’s the law these days, but it’s certainly in every store I’ve been into in the last six or seven years.

For anyone out there who’s angrily anti-metric… Well, one kilo is around two pounds. It’s that simple.

Also, here in the UK, I have never seen a “coupon”. Stores will offer marked discounts and two-for-one offers, but they are available, and advertised, in-store, and are available to everyone. Mostly they’re there to promote a brand, or to use up overstocked items.

Stores over here didn’t start offering own-branded products until, I’d guess, around 1995, and for eight or so years you’d have had to be desperate, or just plan crazy to buy any of it. Now, though, store brands are pretty much as good or better than the branded products. Most of our biggest supermarket chains have three ranges of own-branded goods now, one cheap, one regular-quality, and one high-cost brand.

I don’t really know how much retail power supermarket chains have in the states, but to put things in perspective, the largest supermarket chain in the UK is called “Tesco”, and 25% of ALL retail spending is done there.

Our supermarkets carry a range of goods, from food items to cleaning-and-household products, to TVs and clothing.

I don’t know how much, if any, of that is different to how it is there in the USA, or how many of the differences are common knowledge; I thought it would be interesting to offer some kind of insight into how things are over here.

Our biggest problem is we make 5-6 small trips to the grocery store a week rather than one large trip. You don’t realize that those $20-30 trips add up so fast, but they do.

I can usually get frozen vegetable cheaper than fresh (not always, but usually).

Bread not from the bakery area is always cheaper.

And as for the meat from the butcher area…well, meat is never cheap, but the frozen meat is almost always cheaper than the fresh meat.

While I am certainly a fan of healthy, fresh food and farmers’ markets, it is starting to bug me to hear constantly repeated, here and elsewhere, the idea that fresh food is less expensive than processed food. I could eat far cheaper if I were willing to eat very unhealthy, processed foods. You can get frozen pizzas for a buck. There is no way I could make a dinner with fresh ingredients for a buck.

OK. My rant is done. And for all I know, fresh is cheaper for many of you. But it isn’t in Lexington, KY.