Kindred Spirits Journal - Grocery Shopping

Today's email from Kindred Spirits Journal. This is a good one!
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Two Methods of Grocery Shopping

1. Needs shopping - You buy what you need now at the best price possible and enough to last until you go shopping again.

2. Reserve shopping - You buy what’s on sale even if you don’t need it now so that you don;’‘t have to overpay for it when you do need it. Reserve shopping is the process of building a small in-house grocery store. When it’s time to make dinner you visit your own store.

Needs shopping is, in my opinion, a flawed system. Even the most diligent shopper - who shops with cash, builds the week’s menus around what’s on sale, and is careful to avoid all impulsive purchases - will eventually need something that is not on sale. That’s what the stores count on. When you pay full price for some of the items in your cat, the store’s plan works. They win. Mission accomplished.

Consider this needs shopping dilemma: You need mayonnaise. The best price today is $2.99 a quart for the store brand. You need it; you buy it. It’s not a horrible deal but it’s not great.

Four weeks ago at the high-priced supermarket across town where they do crazy things like double coupons to attract shoppers, the quart size of Hellman’s mayonnaise (aka Best Foods, the Cadillac of mayonnaise among those who rate their condiments), was on sale: 2/$5. That same week there was a $.75 manufacturers coupon for Hellman’s mayonnaise in the Sunday paper.

Here’s the way that deal would have played out had you been aware of the sale and clipped that all-important coupon: $2.50 for one quart, less $1.50 for the coupon ($.75 x 2 = $1.50). Final price for the Hellman’s: $1. That beats your store-brand deal by 66%.

As a needs shopper this is your dilemma: You need it now. The coupon has long expired and the sale is over. So you pay $2.99 for the off-brand mayonnaise because that’s the best deal at the time you need it. To make matters worse, you discover that your friend, a reserve shopper, bought three quarts of Hellman’s for $1 each and won’t have to restock until it goes on sale again.

Reserve shopping is the best way I know to consistently pay less than half price for nae-brand groceries. This method requires a minimal investment of time and energy. It’s a reliable system - you can count on it to work for you week after week. You will enjoy a wide variety of foods in all of the food groups, including meat, produce, dairy, and household cleaning products and personal care items. Rather than coming up with menus before you go shopping, you look to the store’s sale cycles to determine your food purchases. You create menus after the fact once you go shopping in your pantry’s stockpile.

Reserve shopping is an ideal grocery method for singles, families with kids, big families, little families, seniors with no kids - for all situations. You are not narrowed into narrow selections but have lots of freedom to choose the foods you want to buy. The amount of food is limited by the amount of money you wish to spend. You simply spend up to the limit and stop.

Eventually you will have a month’s worth of groceries on hand. This insulates you against wild price fluctuations at the grocery store. You won’t find yourself running to the store for one or two things, forced to pay highly inflated full price.

When challenges come your way - you lose your job or get sick; there’s a blizzard; you’re hit with unexpected car repairs - whatever the setback, with food in the pantry, hard times are less hard.

(Excerpt from "Live Your Life for Half the Price" by Mary Hunt)


Kindred Spirits A ministry of Kindred Spirits Journal & www.biblicalwomanhood.org
...teach the young women to be sober, to love their husbands, to love their children, to be discreet, chaste, keepers at home, good, obedient to their husbands, that the word of God be not blasphemed." Titus 2:4,5