Tips for Cutting Your Food Bill

It has been estimated that many housewives could cut their food bill as much as 25 percent by shrewder shopping. Food is a big part of your family's expense. How do the experts say to save on it?

First, you should plan. You can save by buying once a week, rather than every day. You can watch for sales, and you can buy food products when they are in season and cost far less than they do the rest of the year.

A shopping list can help greatly. Stores that advertise low-priced, loss-leader items to attract customers hope you will buy enough other things to make up for the low-cost items. Great thought is given to getting you to buy higher mark-up items while you are in the store.

Displays stacked high, or put at the ends of aisles, or on special tables in the middle of aisles, or near the check-out counter may tempt you to buy items that were not on your list. Supermarket owners know that a store's profitability depends on its success in stimulating such impulse buying. Leland J. Gordon and Stewart M. Lee say in Economics for Consumers: "The tendency of consumers to buy impulsively is exploited by sellers, to their advantage. Impulse buying increases when men do the shopping and soars when children are along. Aware of impulse purchase traps, the careful shopper buys what is on her shopping list, and nothing more."

Other Ways to Save

Many grocery games are played with packaging, and with prepared foods. Once upon a time when you bought a pound of sugar, or a kilo of rice, these were weighed in front of you and you took them home. Now they come in packages, which can be deceptive. Some big boxes are far from full. A bottle of hand lotion was designed to look larger than a competitor's bottle that held twice as much. A package may look as if you are getting more, when actually you are getting less.

A simple solution is to compare. Read the weight before you buy the package.

Prepared vegetables are sold in convenient packages, and cheeses in bite-sized pieces. But you pay-sometimes more than you think-for such convenience. Not only do prepared foods cost more; they may have less nutritional value than you expect. Fillers, extenders and even water have replaced some of the nutrients in prepared foods.

The rule is simple: The more special preparation that has gone into your food, the less you will probably get for your money.

How to Protect Yourself

The careful shopper takes this job seriously, and gets as much as possible for the money. On the preceding page is a checklist of basic points to remember in order to get more for what you spend.

Doing these things will not make prices go down, but your money will go farther when you are conscious of where it goes. And you will know that you did what you could to keep from paying more than was necessary.