{"id":1821,"date":"2008-06-05T05:00:11","date_gmt":"2008-06-05T12:00:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/getrichslowly.org\/blog\/?p=1821"},"modified":"2019-10-08T19:47:09","modified_gmt":"2019-10-09T02:47:09","slug":"unit-pricing-get-more-food-for-less-money","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.getrichslowly.org\/unit-pricing-get-more-food-for-less-money\/","title":{"rendered":"Unit pricing: Get more food for less money"},"content":{"rendered":"
This article was written by Charlie Park at PearBudget<\/a>.<\/b><\/i><\/p>\n Recently, Get Rich Slowly readers got upset at the idea of spending $6 on a gallon of milk. Reading that, I had to chuckle a little bit: Shortly before we had to give it up, our milk went up to $11 a gallon.<\/strong><\/p>\n Yup. You read that right: $11. A gallon.<\/p>\n Technically, the milk was free, but the boarding and care of the animals that give us the milk went up to $11 a week for every gallon we got. The payoff was awesome: farm-fresh<\/i>, antibiotic- and growth-hormone-free milk. And the expense was necessary: My wife was nursing twins, and she\u2019s allergic to milk from the store. (Now that the babies are weaned, we\u2019ve stopped buying it from the farm.) But the result was the same: We drank a gallon of milk and it cost us $11. Yikes.<\/p>\n So why, if we were willing to spend $11 on milk, would I be qualified to write about saving money while shopping?<\/p>\n In order to have the money for such expensive milk, we had to keep an even sharper eye on our other grocery spending. To not compromise on the foods that matter to us (organic beef, good produce, hormone-free milk), we had to find other ways to cut food costs.<\/p>\n Almost any \u201chow to save money on groceries\u201d article will tell you one of five ways to trim costs. You\u2019ve probably seen them before:<\/p>\n Each of those methods is a good way to watch what you spend. And new tools like The Grocery Game<\/a> help to compare costs. Unfortunately, those options aren\u2019t always possible, or they don\u2019t do enough<\/b>. Maybe you don\u2019t have access to a bulk food club. Maybe you have trouble finding coupons for the kinds of food you buy. Maybe you already buy generic brands, but it\u2019s still not enough.<\/p>\n Luckily, there\u2019s something that you can do \u2014 today \u2014 that takes no planning, requires no math (usually), and that will save you money every time you shop<\/b>. It\u2019s called unit pricing<\/i>, and it\u2019s pretty neat. If you\u2019re a grocery guru, you almost certainly know about unit pricing (it\u2019d be great if you could add a comment to the post about unit pricing techniques you use); but if you\u2019re new to grocery shopping, it\u2019s possible nobody\u2019s ever told you about unit pricing, or explained how it works. Let\u2019s change that.<\/p>\n In most states in the US, and in more and more countries around the world, every time you see a price tag at a grocery store, you\u2019ll actually see two prices. The more prominent number is the real price \u2014 the amount that the cashier will ask you to pay when you get to the cash register. The smaller number, tucked away on the side of the price tag, is something called the unit price<\/i>. Often, the unit price will be in a smaller font size, printed with a lighter color of ink, or the real price will have yellow highlighting on it to call attention to itself. Ignore the big, bold, yellow-background number. Embrace the unit price.<\/b><\/p>\n The unit price is the amount you\u2019re paying for each \u201cunit\u201d (ounce, pound, etc.) of the product you\u2019re buying. By giving you a standard unit to use to compare products and packages, the store lets you make a more informed choice. You can let the store do the math for you, to make it easier for you to compare prices<\/strong>.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s an example: I have a small party coming up, and I\u2019d like to buy some soda. I\u2019d like to avoid 2-liter bottles, if possible, opting for single-serving containers.<\/p>\n I go to the store, and it turns out I have seven different options (plus the two-liter bottle):<\/p>\n Maybe you\u2019re better at doing math in your head than I am, but I look at all those numbers and my head starts swimming. My eyes begin to glaze over.<\/strong><\/p>\n But here are the same options, with their unit pricing:<\/p>\n Unit pricing lets you keep fewer numbers in your head.<\/strong> It\u2019s easy to look at the options in front of you, to compare them, and to see which one makes the most sense.<\/p>\n Knowing that we\u2019re now comparing apples-to-apples, we can look at the price per quart, and see that the six-pack of 24-oz. bottles is the cheapest of the \u201csingle serving options.\u201d And we can see that the twelve-pack of cans is just little bit more than that. And we can see that the 2-liter bottle is the cheapest of all of them, and it gives guests power over their portion control, so maybe I\u2019ll reconsider that whole \u201csingle serving options\u201d decision.<\/p>\n \u201cI know all that already,\u201d you\u2019re saying. \u201cBuy the biggest box on the shelf, and you\u2019ll automatically get the lowest price per unit.\u201d That\u2019s often (but not always) true. If you\u2019re buying a commodity item (something you tend to buy every single time you\u2019re at the store, and that you tend to go through at the same rate whether you have one pound or ten pounds of it on hand [think: rice]), you can usually get away with just buying the biggest package you can. But it\u2019s easy enough to check and see that you are, in fact, getting the best price \u2014 just look at the tag. (For example, pay close attention in the breakfast cereal aisle<\/strong>. We\u2019ve found that the biggest box of Cheerios sometimes has the highest unit price.)<\/p>\n I know you\u2019ve basically got it by now. But there\u2019s one more section of the store we\u2019ll take a look at, since it\u2019s a place where unit pricing is incredibly easy, and where it can make a big difference to your food bill: the meat department.<\/p>\n Meat is one area where unit pricing is actually really really easy.<\/strong> If you don\u2019t use unit pricing anywhere else in the store, at least try it with the meat department. Most grocery stores print their own labels for their meat \u2014 the numbers are large and readable, they\u2019re custom-printed for each package, and they include the sell-by date, the size of the package, and the unit price (all of which are useful data).<\/p>\n One especially nice thing about shopping for meat: it\u2019s all measured with the same unit! So you can, very easily, see what the per-pound price of that ground beef is, compared with the per-pound price of the filet mignon. You can look at the boneless chicken breasts, as compared with the drumsticks. You can look at the fish versus the chicken, or the pork versus the beef, and decide which will be the better purchase.<\/p>\n Unit pricing isn\u2019t always the best method to use for shopping. There are always other things to consider as well. Are the ingredients safe? Will my family eat this? Obviously, unit price shopping isn\u2019t a substitute for that. But it\u2019s one more tool you can use to help you make better financial choices when shopping<\/strong>.<\/p>\n So if you\u2019re trying to get out of debt, or you\u2019re trying to save for the future, take a look at the choices you\u2019re making with your food buying. Saving 20 cents here and 75 cents there can really add up. And maybe buying according to unit pricing will help you spend less on things that aren\u2019t as important, so you can buy more of the stuff that matters. Like $11-a-gallon milk.<\/p>\n Charlie and his wife live in Virginia with their three daughters. They\u2019re the folks behind an easy online budget program called PearBudget<\/a>. Photo of Italian butcher by o0Karen0o<\/a>.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<\/span>Standard Advice<\/span><\/h2>\n
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Unit Pricing<\/h2>\n
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<\/span>Bigger is Not Always Better<\/span><\/h2>\n
<\/span>Meat Market<\/span><\/h2>\n
<\/span>Smarter Shopping<\/span><\/h2>\n