Frugal Living - The Grocery Game
“Frugal Living” is a series of tips for saving money. Some may be of use to you, some may not. I don’t use all of the tips and neither will you - we all have our comfort levels and our “things” that we don’t think we would want to give up or change, but you’ll surely find something of use if you check our site daily!
It’s getting a little shocking to see prices in the grocery store lately, isn’t it? We’ve become accustomed to inexpensive food and compared to some parts of the world where people are starving and rioting, we are still doing quite well. Even so, the double whammy of rising food and energy prices (intertwined as they are) is cutting into pocketbooks.
One way to cut your grocery bill is to learn how to “pantry shop.” Pantry shopping is about stocking your home so that you don’t have to go to the store when you run out of an item, you just have to go to your pantry. The key, though, is making sure that you stock your pantry with lower priced items, and that’s where The Grocery Game comes in handy.
Here’s how it works:
Grocery stores regularly run loss leader specials, which are sales where particular products are sold at or near a loss in order to lure customers into the store. Once they’re in, the assumption is that they’ll pick up other products that are regularly priced. For example, you might see a special for peanut butter usually priced at $2.50 but this week it’s $1 a jar. Since your kids live on peanut butter and jelly, this is a great deal. The flip side, though, is that the jelly is not on sale and neither is the bread.
For a pantry shopper, this is no problem. Pantry shoppers have three or four jars of jelly in the cupboard from the week when jelly was a loss leader, and a few loaves of bread in the freezer.
The downside to pantry shopping is that it can take a lot of time to go through the weekly grocery fliers in your area. Additionally, learning the cycles that local stores use for their loss leader specials can take months. Add coupons to the mix and you can easily spend hours figuring out your grocery excursion, and who wants to do that?
The Grocery Game does all of the research work for you. All you have to do is get a Sunday newspaper and take the coupon inserts out, mark the date of each insert on the front with a big bold Sharpie, punch them with a three hole punch and put them in a binder. When it’s time to go shopping, you go to the website, sign on and go through your store’s list (click here for an example). There are handy check boxes you can click for the items you want to get, an ability to filter out so that you only see those items, and then print. Use the dated references to find relevant coupons to clip and then it’s off to the store.
That may sound like a lot but once you get the hang of it you’ll only spend perhaps 20 minutes from start to finish, besides actual shopping time.
The upsides:
- You don’t have to do the research on loss leader cycles.
- The Grocery Game knows, from years of experience, when is the best time to add a coupon savings to a store special.
- The list is usually in the same order as the store layout, so you don’t spend too much time going back and forth between aisles (this is in contrast to another site I tried once called Cut Out Hunger - their service was free but the list was not ordered as well, although they may have improved the process by now).
- Having a list cuts down on impulse shopping, especially once you get into the fun of trying to see just how much you can cut off of your grocery bill.
- You should see immediate savings of at least 30% off of your grocery bill, and often as high as 50%. You can go even higher but see the “downsides” below for cautions.
- You can get a 4 week trial for $1, which is helpful because it does take a few weeks to build your supply of coupons and stockpiles of food in order to really maximize savings.
- The cost of $10 every three months ($15 for two stores, $20 for three stores - depending on your area’s availability) plus the cost of the Sunday paper is easily covered the first week.
- Using the program can help increase what you are able to donate to food banks in your area, and they need it.
Downsides:
- It’s easy to go a little nuts. When I first started, we ended up having a lot of barbeque sauce and toothpaste because those products seemed to be always practically free. We used everything up and gave some to the local food bank, but it took a while!
- If you live in an apartment or a small home, storage can be a challenge. This may limit the extent that you can use The Grocery Game, but there’s also room for creativity. Look for spaces that aren’t getting used - under beds and in closets, for example. But remember, don’t go nuts! You don’t want to get so much on hand that you forget what you have and items expire.
- Be aware of your family’s health. Just because an item is free or almost free doesn’t mean that you should buy it. Household cleaners, air fresheners, and incredibly processed foods come to mind as items that you might not want to buy, especially if anyone in your home has allergies. There are definitely times for treats, however - use the Game to help you at least manage the cost of things like frozen appetizer and dessert goodies, but don’t make those items the core of your diet. Use the produce list section as a way to try out new veggies instead.
- Be aware of unit costs. Sometimes an item on “super sale” (my own phrase, not theirs) is still more expensive than the generic equivalent right next to it. The big chain grocery stores make it easy to compare unit prices. Even though buying “regular” priced generics won’t give as much of a thrill on the receipt because there’s no percentage savings factored in, remember that ultimately the most important number is not how much you save but how much you spend.
