Post written by Sherin. Follow me on Twitter
Yesterday, I went for my first grocery shopping in the year 2010. It was a big shopping compare with previous about a month back, and of course, it was frugal as well. Thought to share some of that experience and money saving tips for readers to practice throughout the year 2010 grocery shopping. Most of these are well known but, we frequently forget to practice when heading out to the grocery shop.
Here are some interesting tips on grocery shopping that I had used:
1. Prepare a list of items in advance. This would be highly helpful when you reach at the store. Not only in the sense of saving much time but also, clear value to your money by buying only necessary items. A good list of items that need to be purchased, eliminate the requirements of re-visiting the shop again thus saving gas, fuel and time.2. Visit multiple stores to identify the best price among them for various items. This can be done for the items that are costly or purchasing rarely. More than visiting and purchasing from one store, selecting and visiting the second store highly helpful to understand the price differences on items that is little bit costly and get the item with a low price than the next.3. Take a round everywhere in the store to identify what are the offers and discounts there. Some shops offering discounts in the weekdays and others in the weekend. This is depending on your place and location. Ask to the shopkeeper to know the discount sale days if available.4. Once you find any offer having extra in any pack, confirm the price of the pack is similar to a pack where no ‘extra’ available. Shop keepers can offer extra but the same time a price hike too. If such, ‘extra’ never gives you any value because you are paying for that!5. I prefer loose items than the one comes as packed. For example, loose sugar always have less price than the one gets as packed in the store. Select loose items, weigh it and grab your price tag from the counter.6. Buy more any item that you are using frequently. Food grains are generally comes to this category. Buy only required quantities of any items that get spoiled if keep for long time. Vegetables, onions are in this category.7. Never pay additional money for the packing cost of an item. Avoid buying any time that comes with high quality, well designed packets. We generally throw the packet out once after reaching home. Don’t pay to the packet. No company put prices on their packaged items excluding packing charges. Standard packets ensures less packaging cost added with item price.8. Carefully look into each and every areas of the rack to identify right items. Shoppers generally keep profitable items in the front row and rest behind those.9. Single packet is better than multiple packs. Check for getting more quantity pack than selecting several small packets of same item.10. Check the bills properly to know no mistakes happening from the billing counter personnel and proper discounts, offers have been received.These are the areas I generally taking care when goes to grocery shopping. If you take care of most of the points, you can save lots of money, time and receive proper value to your money spending.
Image courtesy: Jeff Keen