Beat the High Cost of Food: Shop the Sales

Wouldn't it be nice to have a pantry full of food at home that cost 25% or even 50% less than the price it is in the grocery store right now? It's entirely possible. Even with grocery prices on a level with luxury items as they seem to be, it can be done and probably easier than you think.

You won't have to drive to the nearest megalopolis, and you won't have to pay a membership fee or buy a hundred pounds at a time to do it. You just have to use this shopping method and you will be paying the lowest price possible for the food you really want.

Here's how it works:

To begin, you have to be familiar with food prices. Then you have to learn when specific foods go on sale. Thirdly, you have to know where those sales are.

Most of us have a pretty good idea of what our favorite foods cost, but to get down in the trenches with this method, we have to know exactly what we paid and when we paid it. A price book is essential for this. If you don't have one, set one up by saving your grocery receipts over a period of time, or digging out the ones you've already saved. Enter the name of the product, the store name, the date and the lowest price you paid for it.

When you've worked your way through several entries, you'll start to see that some stores seem to have the best prices on certain types of food. One store may nearly always have good prices on basics like flour and sugar and coffee, while another one may be better for fresh meat. Keep an eye on these stores for sales of the product they seem to specialize in. The sales price usually be better than at other stores.

As you keep or create your price book, you'll begin to notice that sales come in cycles. Butter is cheapest in the spring; eggs in the summer. Turkeys go on sale just before Thanksgiving, hams before Easter and canned fish just before Lent.

Plan your shopping according to the seasons. For instance, instead of getting one turkey when they're on sale, get two or even three. If you're reading this in early or mid year, don't buy turkey right now. Substitute with something else until they come on sale. You can freeze them fresh, or cook and freeze them in portions for many meals to come.

When grocery stores advertise sales prices, especially the very good ones, they use them as "loss leaders." "Loss leader" is just what it sounds like. The store takes a loss on the cost of the item and uses it as a "leader" - bait - to lure shoppers into the store in the hopes that they'll buy more.

Don't buy more than the loss leaders. Use the newspaper or the internet to find the sales in the first place, then decide which products you need (you won't need them all) and plan your trip to as many stores as necessary. Take your self discipline along with you! If you go quickly from store to store only buying the sales, it won't take long. Do this before you do your regular grocery shopping so you can plan your menu around the sales items. Don't feel guilty in taking advantage of loss leaders. Grocery stores know the rules well; it's time we learned them, too.

How much to buy? Part of that will depend on how much you can afford at the time, and part of it will depend on how often the item goes on sale and how good of a sale it is.

If you've done your homework with your price book, now it becomes pure gold. Let's say you bought canned tuna on sale for sixty cents recently and store #1 has them on sale at forty five cents. You know that's a good price, so you plan to buy a few more cans. But check your price book! There, you'll find that you bought canned tuna at three for a dollar from store #2 about six months ago. Depending on how much tuna you have on hand and how often you eat it, you might be better off to wait until store #2 has another sale - which could be about now, since the other stores seem to have sales on tuna. That could save you almost 50% over the last sale price you paid. Not bad.

As a general rule, if an item is 25% off, buy twice as much as you would for one shopping trip. If it's 50% off, buy up to 10 times as much as you would normally. If you find anything over 50% off, buy as much as you can reasonably afford and have room to store.

The key to all of this, and the reason you can eventually stock a pantry with items very much reduced in price, is to keep at it. If you have a choice of buying a "normal" week's groceries, or stocking up on sales, go for the stocking up and eat what you already have on hand for a week. It's just a week; it won't kill you.

Things to remember:

Be careful and don't believe the store ads. "Buy one get one free" is no good if they've doubled the price.

Buy extra only of those things that you like and will use.

If you can only afford to buy a couple more cans of a product when it's on sale, do it. You have to start somewhere. The savings will snowball if you keep it up.

Concentrate on buying things you use regularly first. Later you can stock up on specialty items.

Don't buy too much to use up before the expiration date. It's not saving money if you have to throw it out unused.

Rotate what you have. Pull older items to the front to be used first. Mark them, or boxes of them, with the date as soon as you get them home.

Plan storage first, before you bring home three cases of green beans and can't find a place to put them. Storage doesn't have to be in the pantry or even in the kitchen area. (See if it will fit under a couch, in a trunk, behind a curtain.)

Keep a running inventory. Write everything down when you bring it home and mark it off as you use it.

Put aside a few dollars (even if it's only five dollars) every pay day or shopping day to be spent on loss leaders and seasonal sales. It won't take very much before you have a good inventory.

Plan your menus around what you have stockpiled instead of buying other things to eat. For instance, if you need a vegetable and have corn and green beans on hand, don't buy peas for dinner.

Don't expect to be an expert or even to see a drastic change in dollars spent for food right away. It takes time, but after a few weeks, if you play the plan right, you'll begin to see your grocery bills go down measurably.

That's the frugal idea!