I start my research on Sunday and begin with a trip over to one of my new favorite websites, GroceryGuide. You provide your zip code and it shows what stores are available in your area. You select which ones you are interested in seeing the sales for and go from there in any direction you wish. They will do everything up to and including printing a grocery list based on the items you want. Now, this site is by no means perfect and can be slow at times (especially if you’re adding and removing or resorting) but for me it gets the job done without requiring me to go to the grocery stores to get their weekly circulars.
After looking through GroceryGuide, I write down what I’m likely going to be interested in purchasing that week. As I said above, I have a general menu planned out for each day by doing something along the lines of, “I need 8 meat and 6 vegetarian dinners, this many quick lunches in case I forget to make something and this much food for snacks.” Sometimes, like our last 14 days, I miscalculate a bit and we’re stuck eating pasta for two days or scrounging on Thursday for *something* to eat for lunch at work.
Around Wednesday or Thursday, especially if Rainbow hasn’t cheerfully provided me with a weekly circular in the mail along with all the other fucking junk mail that ends up crammed into my tiny little mail slot, I head out to both Cub and Rainbow to pickup their circulars and coupon books (in Cub’s case). I already have a pretty damn good idea what everything will cost and what I will be buying but sometimes I’m surprised with a couple of deals that might not have be very clear from GroceryGuide’s listings. I carefully go through my list, sort by store and list everything in order of how we shop at the store. Rainbow is far less familiar to us than Cub as we only recently started shopping there so I usually spend at least an extra 20 minutes wandering around looking for something that I haven’t a clue where it’s located. You would think that when Rainbow uses descriptive aisle informational signs that read like “eating nuts” that I’d be able to figure out where everything was but alas, I’m not :)
I make sure to ask Kim what she’s really wanting that week to make sure that I make room in the tight list for her. She’s more likely than not to ruin the entire thing by requiring that I purchase such horrible processed foods like EasyMac and tuna lunch meal kits. She also likes to whine about my menu choices but won’t win out until she starts cooking herself. The chef gets to decide what we’re eating after all.
We start with the store that we’re buying the most meat at or the meat that I really need to poke through to find what I want. After cramming the cart full of 99% of what I was looking for on the list we go through the checkout and see what we’re left with. Sometimes I’m over, sometimes I’m under (like today). We then head off to the next store with a buffer (or overrun) and have to make changes on the fly as we go.
Today was my best shopping day ever I believe. I did so well that Kim encouraged me to write this post because of how much I saved. Now, I knew going into it that we would be saving quite a bit of money because Cub had a nice B1G2F sale on several items. In addition, at some point this week they sent out a coupon that said if you spend $70 you get $7 back. I was trying ever so hard to make sure I spent as close to $70 as possible w/o going over by much to maximize my ownage. Unfortunately, as I mentioned above, Kim’s bullshit needs were most of the $6.84 ;-) Rainbow had a great 10 for 10 sale (mix and match) that allowed me to get everything from frozen seafood to hot sauce for a pretty damn good price. I wish they would do that one more often :)
My total at Rainbow before savings was $59.39 and after, $41.11 which gave me a total savings of $18.28 or about 31%. While over 30% isn’t bad, it’s certainly not as great as the complete and utter ownage I pulled off at Cub. My total at Cub before savings was $146.82 and honestly, I was a bit nervous that I wouldn’t make it under the budget point because it seemed like a long ass way to go before those coupons started peeling off the digits… In the end I saved $69.98 or about 48%. The cashier actually mentioned to me, “I was wondering if we were going to owe YOU money.” After we walked outside, I mentioned to Kim that I’m sure they see that kind of shit pretty often and she said that from what she’s heard manufacturers consider coupons advertisements because so many people see them and forget to use them. Maybe the cashier at Cub was actually surprised, I’ll never know.
Anyway, my overall total for today was $206.21 before savings and after recouping $88.26 (43%) we ended up with $117.95 and a surplus of $17. While it’s nothing spectacular, I must admit that I feel pretty proud that I can own that hard ;)
Anyone have any other suggestions or comments about what your family does to tighten up the belt but still come out with enough food to happily feed your family?
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March 30th, 2008 at 3:26 am
You understand however that Cub/Rainbow/whatever is still probably turning a profit, even though you’ve “saved” all that money, right? :) Although the other way to look at that is imagine how much MORE of your money they would have gotten without your work…
Personally, I clip some store coupons here and there when I see them, more so in the past year than before, although we tend to stock up on the better priced items quite a bit - some things we’ll buy a year’s supply of if they’re priced right, so we’re not shopping for two weeks at a time or whatever.
Also, the GroceryGuide website looked interesting when I read about it, but it doesn’t cover one of the two major chains up here in Duluth (Super One). That really only leaves Cub here… I tend to shop Cub a lot more than Super One as Cub is 24/7 and Super One is closed when I head home from work, although Super One has much better meat deals and meat prices…
March 30th, 2008 at 3:38 am
1. Yes, I know they are turning a profit. I’m not trying to beat them at some game, I’m just trying to feed us w/o bankrupting me ;)
2. E-mail them and see if they’ll add SuperOne.
March 30th, 2008 at 8:38 am
Our food budget for five s about 3X yours, and I try to keep a lid on expenses as much as possible. However I’m not very genuine about it as don’t like shopping at Cub… I’m not a coupon clipper and I hate the crowds there. I do Target and Rainbow. Target, for their house brand stuff, Market Pantry and Archer Farms, you can’t beat the price anywhere. The problem at Target is their produce sucks. The meat is OK, prices are good and the quality is excellent for their beef.. the rest not so much. Rainbow is where I go for fill in stuff and produce.
When I’m comletely sick of eating processed food, which happens more and more these days I got to Valley. There prices are high, but I love the quality and, if you know how to cook and can use bulk raw indredients, you can actually save a ton of money there.
March 30th, 2008 at 10:10 am
In school I remember reading about how slim profit margins are at grocery stores…
“Food retailers experience intense competition. Profit margins are about 1 cent on each dollar of sales. After-tax net profit for the U.S. supermarket industry was 1.46 percent during fiscal 2005-06, based on FMI’s 2006 Annual Financial Review. FMI indicates stores generally rely on generating high volume sales by making a penny on each sale of 100 items versus making 10 cents by selling 10 items.”
http://www.agmrc.org/agmrc/markets/Food/groceryindustry.htm
Also the rate of redemption for coupons is very very slim…
“Fewer than 2 percent of all coupons are redeemed, said Charles Brown, vice president at NCH Marketing Services in Deerfield, Ill., a coupon clearinghouse for manufacturers and retailers. When consumers started printing copies of Internet coupons, it was like printing money. That’s when manufacturers began limiting the number that each user could print.”
http://www.startribune.com/lifestyle/yourmoney/15357476.html
Because the low redemption rate manufacturers and retailers look at them as flat out advertising. Now obviously different types of coupons have different redemption rates but if everyone were using the amount of coupons that we do Cub would be hurting and they would probably switch to an alternative marketing method.
Grocery stores do like to pull dick moves where they will take items that are commonly purchased together and have a sale or a coupon on say jelly, but they will increase the price on peanut butter incrementally. Hopefully by buying generic and by comparing prices between two grocery stores we are avoiding that problem and because the two stores are so close together we aren’t screwing ourselves on extra gas to travel to the second store.
March 31st, 2008 at 1:25 pm
It sounds backwards, but I keep control of our budget by buying all of our health & beauty aids as well as all of our cleaning supplies at CVS or Walgreens. I know you’re probably thinking “HUH?” But by working their sales combined with manufacturer’s coupons I almost always come out ahead. CVS is constantly putting out store coupons to save (like last month was $5 off when you spent $15 and they also had a save $3 when you spend $15 in beauty products, and you could use both coupons). They are pretty liberal with their bargains. I used to exclusively buy Purex laundry soap simply because it was the cheapest detergent…well now I buy Tide because I can actually get it cheaper than Purex by using coupons and working CVS deals. There are entire websites devoted to bargain shopping at CVS and Walgreens. Email me if you want some links. Some of the websites are run by over zealous religious fanatic types that are saving money to glorify God…but I say as long as I don’t have to shave my head or drink Kool-Aid its all good.
March 31st, 2008 at 1:40 pm
Mrs M,
I have read on your blog that you do that but I thought it was more of an inside joke of some sort. I really don’t care for shopping at CVS because they require those CVS club cards to get their deals and I refuse to take part in those.
If you want to pass the links along, please fire off an e-mail to me at billandkimroehl@gmail.com. Thanks :)
April 1st, 2008 at 3:03 pm
wow! that was some kick-ass shopping.
April 1st, 2008 at 3:04 pm
Karah,
It just shows the lengths I will go to please my wife ;-)