Monday Q&A | Two grocery questions
Every Monday, I answer a few of the questions that my readers send me. If you have a question you'd like me to answer in a future Q&A post, just leave me a comment here or email me (thefrugalgirl [at] gmail [dot] com) and put Q&A in the subject line. I look forward to hearing from you!
I was wondering if you only buy the groceries you need for that week or if you sometimes stock up on stuff when it's on sale?
-Angie
I do indeed stock up when I find grocery items at a good price! I buy nearly all of my white flour at Christmas and Easter, when it goes on sale for $1 or $1.50/pound. I buy a 20-pound box of blueberries when they're available in June and I make jam and freeze some berries to use during the winter. This year, I bought several half-bushels of peaches to eat, freeze, and make jam with because peaches are cheap in August (I suppose the peach and blueberry purchases are more of a bulk-buying purchase, though.)
I also buy extra toiletries when I find them on sale or when I have a particularly good coupon and I do that with sale-priced meats sometimes as well.
I stock up less now than I did when I was more into couponing. Since I currently rely mostly on generic brands (they're generally the same price week in and week out), that eliminates a lot of the need for stockpiling.
I sometimes think that life would be easier if I only bought what I needed for each week, but I am positive that if I did that, I'd end up spending more money on groceries than I do now!
Whenever I get the grocery store ads in my mail box and look overthem I never know if something is a good deal or not. How do I know if 5 avocados for $5 dollars is a good deal or night ($1 each) or $1 a pound for chicken breast; is that a good deal? I wish there was a website where I could look at a product such as apples or potatoes and figure out what they normally go for and that way figure out if my money is been spent the right way.
Lately our stores (HEB and Albertson's in Texas) have been doing this combo loco deal where if you purchase one thing you'll get 4-5 items free. It seems like a good deal but then again I'll only use 1 or 2 of the free items and then the other stuff piles up in the pantry. 🙁
Andie
Ooh, this is an important topic. Good question! If you want to make sure you're getting good deals on your groceries, you do have to know your prices.
Some people do this by compiling a price book, Tightwad Gazette style. I did that initially, but after a while, I found that most of the important information was stuck in my head (maybe it stuck there because of writing it down?).
So, I mostly rely on my memory! I've been working with a minimal grocery budget for so many years, I've got a pretty good idea in my head of what items should cost and what prices I'm willing to pay.
A universal price website seems like a great idea, but prices vary region by region and even season by season within a region, so I'm not surprised that nothing like this exists.
If you're a beginning grocery shopper, I would do a really basic price book. Take a notebook with you to the store and write down the regular prices of the main items that you buy (alphabetize it or break it into sections so you can find the info later!). When the items go on sale, make a note of that price as well. If you do that for a couple of months, you should get a pretty basic idea of how the sales run and what the normal prices are. You'll probably also be able to figure out what grocery store in your area is the least expensive option for you.
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Readers, I'd love to get your input on stockpiling and also how you figure out (and remember!) what constitutes a good price on groceries. Have at it!
Today's 365 post: Twirly Chairs
Current $50 Kellogg's Giveaway post: Adjusting to the Routine (ends tonight!)
I also wish there was a centralized place for looking at prices! I buy a lot of organic products and have learned to just suck it up and deal with some of the prices, but I'm not always happy about it! However, a couple of years ago I started putting together a price book. It became this huge ordeal and I quickly became overwhelmed. Because there are a lot of items for which I am not brand loyal (like toilet paper), keeping track of whose items cost what per unit and how much they cost on sale became too much for me. Instead, I decided to focus just on those items that I'm either brand loyal to or items that I really buy a lot of. For instance, I buy a LOT of boneless, skinless chicken breasts. In my area (Hudson Valley Region in New York), they often go for $2.50/lb and go on sale for as low as $1.90/lb. However, a local market chain sells them normally for $1.70/lb and on sale as low as $1.30/lb. Of course, these are prices for non-organic chicken so they no longer apply to me, but I still remember them! It took me a long time to figure all of this out and I'm still trying to figure out organic produce. My advice is to focus on a couple of key items and focus on those. Once you have those committed to memory, pick another area to focus on. Sure, it will take years to remember everything you'd like, but in the meantime you won't end up overwhelmed and decide to quit trying.
Adie- HEB is our grocery option as well. What I try doing for the 'meal deal/combo loco' is to take the items that are part of the 'deal' that I would buy anyway, add up about what they would normally cost me, and compare that to what the 'deal' costs. It often seems that the item you have to purchase is more expensive that week, so if I wouldn't use most of the 'free' items, I'm better off waiting until that main item goes on sale by itself. However, if I have coupons for many of the 'free' items (or the one you have to purchase) it can sometimes be worth it.
The price book sounds good. But I'll tell you, our stores play with the prices all the time....changing their "usual" price with no notice. Like this weekend, my favorite oatmeal was up to $2.50, regular price, when it used to be $2.20. When that happens, I usually get annoyed and stop buying that item for a while, or look for it in another store.
This is why to keep a price book - to know what's a good price compared to whatever's being charged now, be it a different price or a sale or a different store.
I live near an Aldi store and buy the bulk of my groceries there. They have a small inventory compared to regular supermarkets and have the lowest overall prices. After shopping there so often, I have basically memorized what they carry and what their prices are. ( I have those in my head, but a newbie could go in and start a price book just for Aldi.)
When I scan the grocery ads or go into another grocery store, I just mentally compare the prices to the Aldi prices to see if I can get a better deal.
This would work for any store, really. Just decide on the store in your area that you think has the lowest prices overall on the items you buy most often, then learn their prices. Then you'd have a decent baseline to compare other prices.
If you're getting free items that you won't use, you can always donate them to a food pantry.
If I'm unsure about whether or not something is a good price, I check the grocery delivery system that Stop & Shop has. I'm sure not all stores have that option, but when I was living in the midwest, I did that with my main grocery store as well. Prices may be slightly different than in the store, but at least it gives you an idea.
That's exactly what I was going to say. In my area, Peapod is the service that delivers groceries from Stop & Shop. It's not always the cheapest (but sometimes it is), but I think it's a great way to get a feel for the "regular" price of a particular item at a particular time in my area.
I read somewhere that a good rule for meat is to pay no more than $1.99 for boneless meat, and no more than $.99 for bone-in meat. I know that's not a perfect rule, but it's worked for me (I live in MA)!
Rather than try to track/record/remember prices on everything, I started by memorizing the typical and "good" prices for the top five items I bought at the grocery. These are typically the items that will send you to the store if you run out. By memorizing these prices, you know when you have a really good sale on your hands, and since they are the things you use regularly, you know it is safe to stock up. Right now, I know my top three items are cheese, milk, and Trader Joe's Jo-Jos cookies. The other two vary by season; probably, TP and pasta would be a safe bet to be on the list. I know that I can regularly get pasta for less than $1 a box, so that is the top price I will pay (unless I'm making a recipe for which I absolutely must have a certain shape, like lasagne noodles; that is rare). If I see pasta between 79 and 99 cents, I buy my normal amount. Anthing less than 79 cents a box and I stock up.
I'm definitely a stockpiler! I don't have a formal "price book" either, it's in my head, too 🙂 Since I buy almost exclusively minimally processed, basic items (i.e., flour, cornmeal, oats) rather than specific brand name "products", I don't have that many different prices to keep track of. I know what the absolute "rock bottom" sale price is for each item in my area. I've also learned from experience roughly how often the item will go on sale for the rock bottom price, and when it does I stock up with enough to last until the next "rock bottom" sale. For example, peanut butter often goes on sale for 2.99 to 3.49/kg but about every 3-4 months it will go on for 1.99/kg; when it does I buy enough to last us 3-4 months until it will be on again at that price. I also stockpile fresh produce in season and freeze/can like you do - when local blueberries were on sale for 1.23/pint I bought a LOT, lol. Right now local red peppers have been on sale for under 80 cents/pound (they'll be 3.99/lb in the winter!) so I've been buying a lot, chopping/slicing them up and freezing them, too. Often things will be in the sale flyers but the price really isn't that much better than the usual price. I see avocados "on sale" for $1.00 each when at some stores that is the regular price. I know that the rock bottom price is 2.49 for a pack of 5 avocados and will buy them when they come on for that price. We also take advantage of local pick-your-own farms - in June we picked 18 quarts of strawberries, made 4 batches of jam and froze quite a few, and we'll be picking a bushel of apples at a local farm later this week.
We spend $350-$400 a month on food for four people (usually closer to $350) and I estimate we'd spent roughly twice that if I didn't stockpile at rock-bottom prices.
Without intending to, I carry a price book in my head. (Scary, isn't it?) It consists of items that are either quite pricy or that I buy a lot of - in other words, the things I spend the most money on and whose price varies. So I know what's a good price for soda, Life cereal, granola bars[1], tortilla chips, Triscuits. I do fruit by semi-guess based mostly on knowledge of seasonality (a clue that a fruit is in season is when all the stores put the same fruit on sale at the same time). It's odd to me that I don't remember meat prices in the same way.
Before this I hadn't noticed how much prices vary. Soda, for example, regularly varies by as much as 33%. Wish I knew why.
[1] I tried Kristen's recipe but prefer the store bought. Is this the straw that breaks the camel's back and gets me kicked out?
Oh for the days when the ads read something like this: Brand ADC soap sale price $2.99 regularly $4.99.
But now the marketing people want to intice you to buy even if it isn't really such a great bargin.
So it remains for us to do our homework.
I actually did a whole post on my strategy here: http://imafrugalgirl.com/fgb/?p=300
Unfortunately stores are constantly changing prices on a daily basis so it is tough to keep a price book or I would have to be updating it every day. Lucky for me I have come to know what a rock bottom price is and that is when I stock up on things.
I was just thinking about this last week. I considered keeping my receipts for about a month, or keeping my list for about a month (and writing prices as I pick up the item). Has anybody ever tried either of those techniques? Did it work?
I found this method to be easier than a price book (mostly because little notebooks don't hold my list very well!):
Write down your list. As you shop, write down the price next to each item. If you shop regularly (at least once per week), and do this for at least a month, the prices of each item you buy on a regular basis become stuck in your head. If you want, you can hang on to each list for a while, and refer back to them as you make your lists for the next week, or as you're looking through the ad fliers.
This is also a great method for ensuring you stick to a budget - before you check out, add up all the prices on a calculator (I use the calculator function on my cell phone). If your budget is really tight, you now know if you need to put anything back before you get to the checkout line.
For things like produce that are sold by the pound, make a generous estimate ($0.44/lb for bananas, 2 lb of bananas weighed on the produce scale, I estimate $1.00), and round everything up to the nearest $0.10 (something priced at $0.41 and 0.49 both get written down as 0.50). This rounding up usually takes care of any tax if you're living in an area that doesn't tax food but does tax things like napkins and toilet paper.
My grocery purchases fall into the following categories: 1) can I grow it? If I can grow it, I plant enough to can/freeze for the year. 2) Basic items such as flour, sugar. I've found warehouse clubs provide staples at good prices. Ex: Sam's - 25 lb rice/8.00. 3) Weekly circulars - check only the front and back. Purchase items I will use in bulk. 4) Locally grown produce. Purchase in bulk, can and freeze. Once a year we take a trip to an apple orchard in another state and purchase several bushes of apples. I freeze sliced apples for pies, make and can applesauce. (This is included in a "get-away" trip for a day or two.) 5) We eat simply, little processed food, bake my own bread, etc. Our monthly grocery allowance (for myself, my husband, my 85-lb. Lab), is $260.00.
You're actually getting 5lbs of flour for 1 or 1.50, not just 1 pound!!