Ignore the Conventional Advice for Grocery Shopping and Stock Your Shelves for Less!

Yes, you can stock your pantry for less and save time by ignoring the conventional wisdom of grocery shopping.  As inflation escalates and reduced incomes erode our purchasing power, learning new grocery shopping skills will help keep the shelves at home full.  Here are twelve tips for how to do it:

Ditch the pre-shopping pantry inventory.  The shopping pros recommend taking an inventory of the pantry before weekly grocery shopping trips.  Advice often given to newbie preppers recommends buying two items to replace the one that you used last week.  Those practices will have you paying regular retail price for your groceries, and that’s ridiculous.  On top of that, it necessitates picking up dozens of individual items at the store, trying to remember the prices at checkout so you aren’t overcharged, and then putting those individual items away in their proper location so they can be easily found.  It’s a huge waste of time and money all around.  The vast majority of pantry items become loss leaders in the grocery stores once or twice a year.  One money-saving strategy for food storage preparedness involves buying in bulk quantities—cases of canned goods.  With a well-organized deep larder, the hassle of keeping track of exactly how many cans of soup or peaches you have on hand each week disappears. Buying fewer different items each trip means fewer prices to remember at checkout. 

Check out the grocery store weekly ads, but don’t be suckered by them.  Most of what’s advertised each week is processed and/or junk food.  Yes, we’ve got to have some quick convenient meals for those personal emergencies—burned meal, illness, or all-around bad day—but most of the time we’re better off cooking from scratch.  Check the circulars mainly for case lot sales on canned goods, as well as loss leaders on meat, dairy, and produce. 

Scout out the discounted items.  Learn when fresh foods are discounted at your store and shop to take maximum advantage.  At my store, the meats are usually discounted by 8:00 each morning.  Dairy products are discounted around 10:00.  The produce hits the clearance rack around 10:30.  I haven’t quite figured out when the breads show up, but as I make most of ours, I’m not so concerned about them.  Along the same line, scout the store out to find where the clearance items are placed.  The Smith’s stores that I’ve patronized throughout Northern Nevada have several locations throughout the store for discounted items—places for meat, dairy, frozen, produce, bread, and then other items.  They can vary a little; for example, the store I currently frequent doesn’t separate out the dairy or deli items but just leaves them in their regular location. Everything is always at least 50% off and sometimes 75% off.   

Relax the rigid meal planning.  With a well-stocked pantry, you always have the essentials for meals at hand.  Instead of a weekly meal plan composed before shopping, create meals around the fantastic deals you get shopping that week.  Killer deal on bananas?  It’s time for banana bread and smoothies.  Good price on cheddar?  Sounds like macaroni and cheese.  After dinner each night, check the refrigerator to see what needs to be used up and incorporate that into the next day’s meals.  If the eggs are getting older, maybe it’s time for some quiche.

Skip the coupons.  The vast majority of coupons are designed to get you hooked on a particular product.  It’s usually a processed food low on nutrition and high on junk and calories and hardly what we need to be filling our pantries with.  (Unless it’s an essential comfort food for someone in your family.) Even when the savings are calculated in, store brands are often cheaper.  If you are one of those coupon-clipping pros that can get the product for super cheap or free, by all means do so.  But for a lot of people it takes more time and involves junk and processed foods we’d rather keep out of our homes.

Enjoy fresh items in season only.  That’s the way life used to be, and it’s the way it will be again as just-in-time shipping from all over the globe collapses.  When things go sideways, we won’t be enjoying Chilean grapes and blueberries in February.  Unless we’re in Chile.

Price comparisons.  Do the math to be sure you’re getting the best deal.  Fortunately, many stores include the cost per ounce on the shelf labels; it’s the law here in Nevada.  But when items are being discounted, especially by low-level employees, well, sometimes it becomes obvious that math isn’t their strong suit.  In my local store two weeks ago, all sizes of one national brand of whipping cream were being deep discounted even though they still had 1-2 weeks before reaching their best-by date.  Quarts were discounted from $6.99 to $4.79.  Pints were discounted from $4.29 to $1.99.  Half-pints were discounted from $2.59 to $0.69.  Naturally, I scooped up the half-pints.  (In my experience, whipping cream lasts a long time past the best-by date.)  Larger packages aren’t always the best deal.

Don’t be a slave to the list.  Lists are important for not forgetting the less-frequently purchased items.  Refusing to deviate from the list, however, keeps you from taking advantage of sales and discounts.  Should I have avoided taking advantage of the store’s unadvertised deal of pumpkin at 50 cents per can because it wasn’t on the list?  Hardly.  I was able to get a three-year supply for our family.

Don’t be a slave to the budget.  Yes, we need to live within our means.  But often, keeping to a set weekly budget means we end up spending more and getting less.  With flexibility, we can take advantage of great deals on items that don’t normally go on sale and stock up.  Overall, that saves us money for other prepping.  Some months I’m significantly over the planned budget, but others, I’m way under.  Yesterday, my store had gallons of peanut oil on clearance at about 60% off, for much less than I could get the larger containers at Sam’s.  I bought seven of them, clearly tweaking the grocery budget for this month, but ultimately saving money in the annual budget.

Read the nutrition labels. This is important for identifying allergens and mystery ingredients, but often pointless for determining whether one item is more nutritious than the next.  In those situations you’re often just dealing with junk and convenience foods anyway, items that can be much more healthfully made at home from scratch.  Nutrition content is important for those food storage items that are enriched, like milk products.  Where reading the labels also becomes important is in dealing with servings.  Manufacturers have not only made a practice of down-sizing packages, but they’ve also been down-sizing the servings.  Food storage companies love to do this and then proudly proclaim that their over-priced offerings have more servings than those of comparable companies.  When making comparisons, be sure that the serving sizes and calorie counts are similar.

Pay attention at checkout.  Make sure you’re being charged correctly at checkout.  I can’t believe how few people do this; my store overcharges me at least once or twice a month, and it’s not by just a few pennies, either.  Yes, it’s a hassle, but it’s also important for stores to know that you’re paying attention and their careless practice of overcharging is not going to go unnoticed.  This most often affects items in the store’s flyer, where the employees fail to lower to the advertised price.  Sometimes the issue is the checker scanning the regular UPC code, instead of the discounted sticker code. 

Pay with cash.  This isn’t a food storage money saving tip (though making purchases in cash has been shown to help people spend less).  It’s to keep your purchases from being tracked.  No one else needs to know how much flour or sugar you bought this week.

As life continues to get more interesting and we are faced with new problems, keeping our pantries full becomes even more challenging.  Incorporating some or all of these strategies will go a long way towards making sure our families are well fed, come what may.

Links to related posts:

Best-By Dates:  What Those Numbers Stamped on Cans Really Mean

In Depth Discussion of Powdered Milk (Nutritional Analysisand Cost Comparison of Brands)

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