15
Aug
Grocery shop with a list to save money
One of my favorite stores is just around the corner from where I work. It’s a local farm store that sells all sorts of stuff from fresh fruits and veggies to dried and frozen foods. You can even order an entire cow from them if you want, and they’ll chop it up for you and package it. We figure we might need that if we ever have a bunch of kids.
About once a week I go there and just shop. They have two pricing schemes at the store: great and awful. The fruits and vegetables that are grown locally are priced wonderfully. They’ll do corn for 4 for a dollar, and cucumbers for 3 for a dollar. That’s a great price around here. But anything that they source from elsewhere is ridiculously expensive. They sell celery for $2.50 a bunch and milk for the equivalent of about $10 a gallon (they only sell smaller sizes.) So naturally I always shop the specials. I don’t think I’ve ever bought anything there that wasn’t on special or at a price that I thought was “good”.
However, they still lure me into buying things that I might not normally buy. I was there yesterday just looking for some fruit for the week. I generally get some of the tangerine varieties they have because they are tasty and cheap. However, I also noticed that they had these things called “crenshaw melons” on sale for just $2. They are related to cantaloupe, and I thought we could share it at a party we were going to that night. Then they had a couple different bottles of root beer on clearance, and I love to try new root beers. By the time I left, I had spent $1 on the things I came for and $5 on things I didn’t. That’s not a whole lot of money, but things like that add up.
If I had walked into the store with a shopping list, I would have bought my $1 worth of fruit, and maybe a bit more (so I would have enough fruit to last a few days), but I wouldn’t have bought the clearance root beer and I wouldn’t have bought the melon. I would have saved about $4 this trip alone. And while that’s not much (about $200 a year if I did that every week), every little bit counts when it is not necessary. When you have necessary spending, I think little bits count less, but that’s an entirely different article.
August 21st, 2007 at 5:51 am
[…] Grocery shop with a list to save money by FFB […]
August 22nd, 2007 at 6:55 am
Nice story. We have a local family farm that store prices are so outrageous just as you mentioned, but people pay for the experience though.
Have you read any of the research that suggests that grocery shopping with a list is actually more expensive. You buy everything on the list and then other stuff, while without a list you forget items and buy a few extra things.
The list is probably only as helpful if you can stick to it.
Cheers!
August 22nd, 2007 at 8:59 am
I hadn’t seen research that suggested a list was more expensive! But yes, you do have to stick to the list for things to be cheaper. =) I’m pretty good at that, in general. I think my wife is a little more likely to buy things on impulse, but I’m teaching her to do it less, and she’s teaching me to do it more.
October 30th, 2007 at 7:33 pm
Yay! I went grocery shopping today and got $200.01 worth of groceries for $102.20!