Okay, so you’ve cut canned vegetables from your grocery list and now your food budget has exploded like a can of green beans. How can you cut corners and save a little money without resorting to Breathairianism? Consumer Reports offers six suggestions, and while many of them may seem like common sense if you already practice them, the list is still helpful enough to be worth checking out. Tip number one:
Choose cheap stores. Not all stores are created equal. After doing a price comparison, Consumer Reports found that the following stores offered the best bargains: Aldi, Costco, Market Basket, Slater Bros., Shoppers Food Warehouse, Trader Joe’s and Wal-Mart.
We’ve covered this before with homespun advice from the thriftymommy side of the matter, and those soccer mom tips still pertain as well (although be sure you also read the highly useful reader comments on that post).
Six Ways To Cut Your Grocery Bill [CBSNews.com]
(Photo: idiotboy)
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I miss Shopper’s Food Warehouse. Been hanging out at Krogers but not the same. New Costco nearby but I don’t need huge amounts and I prefer fresh anyway. “Organic” means not mineral to me. Also means, let’s pay more for that banana. I don’t play that game.
“maybe those sale-priced $1 loss leader frozen pizzas are cheaper than homemade, but would you really want to eat one?”
Yes. Tetino’s FTW! j/k Seriously though, they’re good and I buy them all the time when they’re on sale, which is almost all the time.
@ThinkAboutItPlease:
Also, Aldi’s dry cereals are made by Malt-O-Meal. That came out when Malt-O-Meal screwed up & sprayed too much iron on the cereals. That’s how cereal is fortified with vitamins & minerals, it’s sprayed on.
Most store brand dry cereals are made by Malt-O-Meal or Ralcorp [Ralston Foods].
Most imitations of Pop Tarts are made by Schulze & Burch Baking. I know this as I’ve gone to the seconds store in Chicago & see all sorts of store brands sold there.
Schulze claims to have invented them.
@Chongo: “Do NOT sign up for the store cards.”
Better, sign up for a store card and swap with friends. Kroger believes I am a 40-year-old unmarried male minister living in the mountains of southwest Virginia who buy a surprising lot of feminine products.
Then swap again every so often with someone else.
There are websites where you can do this online, too.
I don’t mind the targeted marketing — I’m happy to buy a different brand of ice cream that they give me a coupon for b/c I bought brand A this time and brand B wants my business. Just the tracking. And the stupid Purina coupons. I’M NOT SWITCHING, PURINA!!!!!!
Coordinating your weekly menus (assuming you do menus) with the on-sale meat saves a lot. My husband says he wants tacos, I say tough noogies, turkey’s on sale this week.
@HrPingui:
Wow! What neighborhood are you shopping in? Watts?
I only know of 4 of those stores, only 2 of them are where I live, and only 1 of them is nearby. I’m not shopping at Wal-Mart. I may be “poor,” but there’s other cheap stores around here that don’t have Wal-Mart business practices.
I love store brands, but generic cola just tastes too weird, and I go with brand-name whipped cream cuz it usually dispenses right.
@Eyebrows McGee: Haha, I had forgotten about all the unwanted Purina coupons people would get when I was a cashier.
I’m in produce now. The produce from most stores is the same, and most of it’s sent in from California (I’m in New Jersey). So don;t pay attention to the signs all over the department that say it’s fresh- if it had to travel a few thousand miles to get there, it’s probably not so fresh. Be wary even when it is advertised as local- my manager makes us put out eggplant from cali in the Jersey Fresh bin. Makes for some awkard stares from customers since the boxes clearly say ‘California Grown’. Most of these things can be found easily locally.
Also, never buy organic from the regular chain supermarkets like ShopRite- since it doesn’t sell that quickly, it’s even less fresh and usually half the stuff is past ripeness and well on its way to rottenness by the time a new box comes in.
If you’re in Virginia, Maryland, or North Carolina, consider shopping at a Bottom Dollar foods. If you’re like me and you don’t bother with the deli or bakery when shopping, you’d like this store. It’s mostly Food Lion store brands, but they have plenty of name-brand products as well and often beat those prices at other stores if you must have that name brand. They also have some great deal on meats every week, I’ll stock up my freezer with what I can get.
@oneswellfoop: Don’t forget growing your own. If you have a backyard and live south of Anchorage, there’s really no excuse for not having a summer garden.
We’ve been gorging ourselves on heirloom tomatoes, cucumbers, melons, and squash for the last few weeks down here in SoCal, all from a little 10′ x 4′ plot and a few planters. Soon I’ll be planting greens and researching what else I can grow during the winter down here.
We’re renters, and it wasn’t too difficult to convince our landlord that a little garden plot would improve the value of the property.
i love these advice articles. it’s all common sense.