How to Save Literally Hundreds at the Grocery Store

Saving hundreds at the grocery store is not just possible, you can start shopping smarter on your very next trip. The very first thing you need to know is that it is you against them (the companies who are after your money). They spend millions upon millions of dollars on advertising, marketing and packaging to target you, the consumer. You are the one holding the money that they want so they are in competition with each other for your dollar. When you discover all the marketing strategies and tricks that they use to try to separate you from your money, you will want to hang on to your money longer during trips to the grocery store. The adage, "A fool and his money are soon parted," is very true. Shop smarter and you will shop better and have money left over to show for it. Try these next few steps for only one month and see what a difference one month makes, with practice, you will be saving hundreds upon hundreds of dollars by shopping smarter!

Planning
First, plan well. Items that are worth their weight in canned goods are: a shopping list, a pen or pencil, and a calculator. As embarrassed as you may be walking around with one, a shopping list saves time and money. How many of us have gone to the store for one important thing then come home with five bags of groceries and realized, we didn't come home with the "must-have item" that you went for in the first place? What a waste of gas and time the trip back is!
Write down items that you need and if you can, put the shopping list on the fridge or in the kitchen so that you can jot them down as the necessary items come to mind. Try to group your items on your list according to where they are in the store. You live by that store so you know where the produce is, where the bread, peanut butter, jelly and mayonnaise are, where the canned vegetables are and so on. Some of us shoppers know our neighborhood store so well that we can and often do help shoppers who aren't as knowledgeable as us with locating hard-to-find items in the store. Once I asked a lady what she was having trouble finding and she replied, "Metallic cupcake liners." I thought for a second then remembered that they were on Aisle 5, baking goods, on the top shelf by the birthday candles and the cake mixes. Grouping your items on your list as you know you will come across them in the store will save you time by reducing wandering around and backtracking in the store.

If you plan your trip for the early morning, you may get some items in the produce section reduced. Look for bags of produce that are so ripe, they are marked for quick sale. It takes an experienced and trained eye to pick the produce that is not too ripe but just perfect but you can then go home and make yourself a smoothie with those tropical fruits you got on sale, or make mushroom gravy with fresh mushrooms, or simply mushrooms sauteed in butter. Look for the produce that is in the best condition and don't buy so much that you will end up throwing it away. Once I bought a huge paper sack full of bananas for one dollar thinking I could make banana bread. I found out banana bread only takes a cup or so of mashed bananas, so what fruit I could not eat or give away was thrown away and that is something you should avoid at all costs. Wasting food should be a sin with all the people who have none and are dying from it. There are people in Haiti that are so poor that they are eating cakes of dirt because they have nothing more. Mud cakes to quell the pangs of hunger are being eaten while I am idiotically throwing food away. http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,547198,00.html If you find yourself with too much of something, give it away to some family who has less than you. You probably would not have to look far to find a struggling family with kids to feed who would take it and be grateful for the help.

Timing
The first thing you need to know is that even your physical state has an effect on how you shop. Never go grocery shopping while you are hungry. It makes you vulnerable and you have millions of dollars of marketing working against you. If you go on an empty stomach, you are more likely to label Oreos and Cheetos as health foods and toss them in your cart for the trip home. You are trying not to waste money, remember?

Do not go with young kids or toddlers if you can help it. This is where the advertising dollars come into play. Colorful animated figures that seem to reach out from cereal boxes, cookies, and candies are doing just that, reaching out to your kids silently emanating, "Buy me! Buy me! You need me! I am sugary-heaven and happiness can be found through me!" Don't go with hungry children or you are just laying your head on the chopping block. Not only are you stabbing yourself in the foot financially with the wasted money spent on appeasing them and quieting those insatiable, little whiners but you will get such a headache from the stress, you may end up wasting money on a bottle of wine to deal with the stressful, noisy trip to the store! Your goal is to save money not waste it. Get someone to watch the kids while you go so you can have some peace and quiet because shopping is serious when you look at it as your payoff for working so hard. Why throw away money that you worked so hard for?

Just as going in the morning increases your chances of getting cantalouples, papaya and other fruits on sale, so does going on the right day. Check the circulars to see when the sale prices are going to change back up to regular price and schedule your trip accordingly.

Reconnoissance
Reconnoissance is a survey of the region. This may sound silly but when you find out how much you have going against you, you won't think it is silly. You will hang on to your dollars even tighter. Grocery stores are designed to work against you. Seriously. Think about this: meat, eggs, milk, cheese and other must-have items are placed way in the back of the store so you have to go through those long aisles of colorful, grab-your-attention packages that were psychologically designed to make you succumb to them. Do you think those companies spent millions of dollars on advertising without coming up with incredibly sly ways to get the consumer away from their money? They are using the researched right colors, attractive packaging and psychological warfare against you, the consumer. Did you know that the most expensive, most attractive, and seductively packaged products are all conveniently placed at eye-level, just for you? The bargain brands and cheap imitations are down low so you have to bend down and exert some effort. Expensive products can easily be had by just reaching out your arm. The real bargains are not going to be placed in a convenient place for you because money talks and the grocery store has to listen.

One bright spot is that store-brand items can now be found right next to name-brand items, and usually in very similar packaging. A marketing class in college showed me that on some items, the only difference is the packaging. The product is exactly the same. Sure, there are some exceptions to this. For example, I have yet to find a sandwich cookie that tastes just like an Oreo, but when I'm strapped for cash, I forego the Oreo's delicious crispness and deal with a substitute. I have found many, many items that are so close to the name brand in flavor and texture that I no longer spend the extra two dollars on the name brand item anymore. Some items that you would have a hard time telling whether they are store-brand or name-brand are: club crackers, saltine crackers, tea, powdered drinks, pop tarts, bread, oatmeal, some cereals, cake mixes, beans, boxed dinners such as "Hamburger Helper" type meals, and many, many more. Some store-brand items you must acquire a taste for are: sodas that aren't Coca Cola, bagged cereals, and mayonnaise that isn't Hellman's, to name a few. If I am making a potato or pasta salad then I will utilize cheap salad dressing and not an expensive mayonnaise because it really doesn't matter and no one can really tell. If you are cooking for a party, gathering, or dinner where people can tell the difference and you do not want to be embarrassed by being a bargain shopper, then by all means buy the name brands and waste up to two dollars or more on each item. But a list of ten items where taste is not that differentiated, that is twenty dollars wasted> Who cares if people see the label on your can of peanut butter or canned fruit. Why be so presumptuous? Sometimes a label is just that, a sticky piece of paper. Why pay an extra two dollars apiece just to bring some home? Couldn't that twenty dollars you wasted on being presumptuous been better spent buying gas for your car or lawnmower? That is how ridiculous the price of gasoline is getting. $20.00 to fill up a small gas tank for the lawn.

Be smart. When you cannot really tell which item is a better buy per ounce, pull out the calculator and figure it out. It may seem embarrassing but it is not embarrassing to have more money for gas than the fool who just went by you in the grocery store aisle throwing everything in her cart that was eye level and in the most attractive packaging. That Sugar Smacks frog sure reaches out to you, but it is a smart shopper that knows why and where he is reaching out to you from. The increasing price of gas is having a profound effect on everything, especially food. 6 apples cost me 6 dollars once because I was in a hurry, was on a diet to fit into my wedding dress and I did not plan ahead. I felt horrible at the cashier's when even she blurted out, "Man, those are some expensive apples." I frowned and agreed. In order to save money, you have to be open to substitutions. I knew that if I had gone back to the produce section and bought a prebagged bunch of apples I would have saved 50% of that but I was being picky and wanted that type of apple for my diet. It is entirely up to us how seriously you want to take this. Some people will always buy expensive foods because they can or they want to give off the impression that they can, but I for one, can rarely afford to splurge like that.

Buy in bulk when it makes sense. One year they had Pace Picante sauce down to $1.25 a jar from $1.79. I bought 4 cases because I knew we were going to cook out all summer. Those cases lasted me throughout the summer. I did that for the next few years because I could taste the difference between that brand and others and it was something I was going to use. Buying a load of something for the sole reason of it being on sale could be a waste if you never or rarely use that product. What is the point of buying 3 cases of skin lotion if it would take you three years to get through two cases? Wasteful bulk buying is bad because the item might expire and you would end up throwing the case(s) away and losing money in the end.

Use coupons. Our store does not double, triple, stamp, validate or all that other fancy stuff that women who come out on tv saying that they feed a family on 5 for two months on ten dollars say their store does. I can't even understand how they explain how their coupon magic works that saves them hundreds a month. Last week, though, I bought two higher priced bags of pretzels because they had a coupon for 75 cents taped to them. (This was for a brand-name product but this brand-name product was miles above the competition in deliciousness and I told myself I was worth it.) When I got to the check-out counter, I got distracted and she rang me out completely. I noticed I was still holding the coupons in my hand after she said, "Have a nice evening." "Man," I said, "I didn't give you the coupons." "That's OK," she said and took the coupons, did some cashier magic and handed me $1.50 cash. I told my husband who was wondering what was going on, "Not bad, huh. Dollar fifty equals a burger in my world," and he nodded knowingly. See how saving money is literally cash in your hand?

My final tip is to be strong when you are in the checkout line. That is where the impulse items are going to call out to you like the cereals and candy do to children. Lighters in the shape of a sandal, candy bars, delectable little bags of chips, cold cokes, sexy men and women on the covers of glossy tabloids will be whispering, "Take me home, you need me, well, you really don't but take me home anyway." Do not listen to them. They are overpriced little possessions that you do not need. You know most of them won't even make the trip home if they were unfortunate to end up in your car in the front seat with you. Have you noticed that the candy bars by the checkout are not in convenient one or two dollar value packs like they are in the aisle where they belong? One bar can be $1.59 and because you are there and waiting in line all of a sudden, you will think that is a good deal and you are hungry enough to get one anyway. That is another reason to never shop when you are hungry. It makes you able to hear chocolate bars. Don't listen to them! You are almost out! Don't blow all your good work at the end! The marketers plan for you to fail there, on the last yard of their territory. Do not fail us now! Save your money and go spend it on a rental movie for yourself, a book you have been wanting or some new makeup or half a drop of gas for your car. Times are tough, jobs are getting increasingly harder to find, the prices of oil and gas are skyrocketing and things are only going to continue getting tougher. If the economy keeps getting worse, the money that you save by shopping smart may end up being the only spare money you have.