To Market, To Market To Find a Good Deal

So in my quest not to spend money haphazardly, I’ve managed not to go food shopping for almost two weeks. This morning, there were such slim pickings for breakfast and for packing the girls’ camp lunches that I was shaking crumbs out of the cereal boxes into their breakfast bowls and reaching all the way to the back of the refrigerator to find something palatable to pack. There is no doubt about it–I must go food shopping today.

Problem is, I work from home and I’ve got two work-related deadlines to deal with today. So I don’t want to just rush out to the market, hungry and desperate to fill my cart (because we all know that’s how you end up overspending) just to get home in time to get my work done. At the same time, I can’t spend hours lollygagging up and down the grocer’s aisles, looking for a good deal. What’s a frugal mom like me to do?

Well, I discovered something interesting this morning. My two local food stores offer their circulars online. As I type this blog entry, I’ve got two tabs open in my web browser so I can toggle back and forth between each store’s circular as I got down my shopping list. This will allow me to actually compare apples to apples–or in this case, grapes to grapes–as I decide which store has the better bargain.

For example, one of the stores, Giant, which is right in my town, has grapes on sale for $1.99 a pound. The other is ShopRite, which is a little farther away–and offers a shopping online option–has grapes on sale for $.99 a pound. Can you guess where I’ll be buying my grapes from today?

A nice benefit to the Giant website is that it does allow me to create an online shopping list that I can print out and take with me to the store. Just now I discovered that Giant has a better offer on bread this week–10 loaves for $10 or a buck a loaf versus ShopRite’s best price of $2 a loaf–so onto the list the bread went.

So why bother with this toggling back and forth? Well, I recently read that a shopper who comparison shops like this and visit two or more stores in a day to purchase groceries end up saving about $40 per trip. If I have to visit these two stores to get these bargains, so be it. Gosh knows I’d love to save $40 per grocery shopping trip.

QUICK ADDENDUM
Those supermarkets can be so sneaky with their so-called good deals, and I almost fell for it. The Giant circular was advertising what seemed to be an amazing deal. Buy three General Mills products, and get a coupon for $4.50 off a future gallon of milk. At the same time Giant was offer General Mills cereals on sale–3 for $6.00. Hey, $2 a box isn’t so bad. So I did the math, and with this deal I would have spent $1.50 total to get three boxes of cereal and a gallon of milk. But then I read the fine print–there were only three General Mills’ cereals that qualified for the deal, and none of them are the kind my kids like. So while it’s tempting to go for the money-savings offer, what good would it do us to have cereal no one will eat? Besides, I just discovered that at ShopRite milk is way cheaper–$2.89 for a gallon of skim versus $3.18 at Giant–and they have Kellogg cereals that kids do like on sale for $1.99 a box. There’s a four-box limit at this price, and I’m going to go stock up.