Most of us go shopping, but how many of us really know how to shop? Posts on this blog deal with saving money and while many folks hit the supermarket, not everyone may know how to budget shop.
When the money is coming in and there are no economic issues to worry about, most folks just buy whatever they want when they go shopping as opposed just getting the necessities. Budget shopping is an easy way to save some money (and, in some cases, some serious money).
Getting creative with meal preparation also helps. (See the previous post link to Ramen Noodles, for example)
Like anything else, there are always some grocery store scams to watch out for. One of the most common is the buy one get one free scam. I see it a lot with chicken. One week the chicken is $2.29/lb and the next week, during the buy one get one free sale, the chicken is $4.19/lb, so you still end up paying around $2.10/lb. Not a super great discount over the regular $2.29/lb. Sometimes though, buy one get one free deals ARE deals. Bring your calculator and you may score a bargain.
Another scam is the endcap scam. This is where a retailer will have, say, three items on an isle end cap and the top item and the bottom item are on sale and signed as such, while the middle item is regular price, so that you think the middle item must be on sale, while it is actually regular price.
I noticed another scam the other day while at the supermarket. There was a bin of frozen seafood and the sign over the bin said $7.95. My first thought was that the seafood was $7.95/lb, which would have been a good deal. However, upon closer inspection of the sign, the fine print indicated the price was for a bag of a different item entirely and was not a good price, even for the other item.
Another important tip when bargain shopping is to check the net weight of the item. For example, those plastic resealable coffee containers usually contain between 33 and 35 ounces of coffee. The much larger metal coffee tins only contain between 33.5 and 35 ounces of coffee, so the larger container is not the best value.
Another problem with groceries is the huge price increases coupled with smaller packages. Although we make home made chicken tenders for our son, because you can get boneless and skinless chicken breast on sale in our area for $1.78-$1.89 a pound, we used to also buy the bags of premade chicken nuggets at the grocery store. They used to be $5.99 for a 32 ounce bag, which works out to three dollars a pound; not cheap, but not horrendously expensive either. The situation now is that bagged nuggets are coming in 24-28 ounce packages and cost between $8.99-$9.99/bag. No way is $5-$6 a pound for ground up chicken meat and floor sweepings coated in thick batter a good value, yet, the stores still sell many bags of them. ('cause folks do not do their homework)
Frozen vegetables are also coming in smaller packages now. The 16 ounce packages of some frozen veggies, such as corn and peas, are now being shipped in 12 ounce packages which are selling for the same amount as the 16 ounce packages were. Check your net weights.
One value that I came across Sunday were the 64 oz bags of Kroger PSST brand Crunchy Breaded Fish Sticks. They were selling for $6.99/bag. This translates to about $1.75/lb. Sure it was just minced whitefish, but $1.75/lb for any type of seafood is a good value.
The fish sticks are pretty versatile. You can take a home made cream soup base, add chopped potatoes and corn, cut up some of the fish sticks and voila, a budget fish chowder. You can also chop them up and make cheap fish tacos, or pile them on a hamburger bun with ketchup or tartar sauce.........cheap eats.
If you do not make your own chicken stock/soup, the Mrs. Grass chicken soup mix, pictured in the photo at the top of the post, can save you some money. We always like to keep some chicken soup around in case someone in our family gets sick. In our area, you can find Mrs. Grass, or a similar product, for anywhere from $1.75-$1.99/box. Each box has two packs of soup that each make four cups of soup, so you get a total yield of eight cups of soup. The non-condensed chicken soup usually comes in a 15-19 ounce can and can generally be found for between $1.50-$2.49, so you get an additional six cups of soup using the dried mix as you do buying the premade. The energy cost is about the same since you have to heat both soups.
One food that folks usually do not associate with budget food is sushi. If you make your own sushi and sushi rolls, you can eat classy and cheap. California roll, for instance, just takes some faux crab sticks, sliced in half lengthwise, some avocado, some cucumber or carrots, rice and sea vegetable wrapper. You can make home made California rolls for around 40-60 cents each. You can also do some cheap Nigiri sushi. Just take your hand pressed sushi rice and top with thin smoked salmon slices that you bought on sale, or top with thin slices of vegetable or cooked butterflied shrimp that was also purchased on sale or was on manager's special.
Another thing to do is to buy cheap tough cuts of meat and cook them in a pressure cooker for a half hour or so until they are tender. You can pressure cook the cuts in broth and it will enfuse some flavor.
You can sometimes find basic ethnic staple foods in specialty markets for less than you can in supermarkets that have specialty food sections. It also pays to cook from scratch, but as this is not for everyone and you may have some time constraints on cooking, bargain shopping premade foods is still a way to save money.
Anther scam is the margarine scam and you can read about it HERE.
One thing I also noticed with certain brands of shredded Mozzarella cheese is that some brands do not melt to the stringy gooeyness that I like. I checked the ingredient list and lo and behold:
Potato starch, when used in quantities that make it a filler, will cause your cheese to not melt very well. Keep this in mind when buying cheese for, say, pizza or lasagna.
If y'all find any other grocery scams out there just email me and I'll update this post.
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