Several months ago, I thought I knew it all on how to save money when grocery shopping. I have found, however, that there is always more to learn as months later I am beginning to address this topic again. I know I am not the only one who thinks that we are playing a game when we go to the grocery store. Educated consumers walk away with loads of goodies for minimal money and others of us fork over the big bucks for the same exact thing. What sets one shopper apart from another? How do you beat the grocery game? Is it really all about coupons and rebates?
Let’s begin by discussing the fliers that you receive in your mailbox each week which outline the stores deals and steals for that week’s particular campaign. These items are called the store’s loss leaders. Loss leader simply means that the store is losing money by offering these items to you at a lower price in hopes that you are going to do the rest of your grocery shopping with them. Will you, an educated consumer, necessarily put all of your money down into one store? Absolutely not! An educated consumer walks away with the loss leaders and adds nothing more to her basket unless the prices are unbeatable elsewhere. How does this educated consumer know that these prices cannot be beaten? They know this because they keep a price book.
A price book will make you the smartest consumer in the store because you will actually know whether or not an item really is on sale or not. Begin by setting your price book up in a way that makes it easy for you to use. There are two common ways that price books are set up- alphabetically or categorically. I find my price book is easier to use when it is set up by category because it is easier for me to locate milk under the category of dairy rather then the letter M.
Each page in your price book should contain the date, name of your grocery store (use a code that is easy for you to remember), the brand of the item, the size of the item, the price of the item, and then the unit price of the item. The unit price can be discovered by dividing- size/price. The unit price can also usually be found on the actual grocery sticker below the item which can save you some time in the math department.
Here is a sample of what a price book entry would look like for Peanut Butter:
Date Store Name Brand Size/Price Unit Price
10/01 WM Store Brand 18 oz/.99 .88 lb
The first couple of months of filling your price book is very tedious, but after you have logged this information in for awhile the best deals will emerge and you will also see a pattern in the store’s timing of these sales. For example, you will know that John Doe’s Supermarket runs their special on pasta at 25 cents a box every July and January.
Begin filling your price book by writing in all of the items that appear in your local fliers and the - continued below ...
