If you keep a record of food purchases, at least for a while, you can establish your own target prices on the foods you use most. Then when you’re shopping, you’ll know if a price is great or not-so-great. You won’t be mislead by “sales” or coupons that aren’t really offering such a good price.
Make a “Price Book” to discover the best prices over time, and to reveal the pricing cycle of products at the stores where you shop.
What I call my “target price” is the price at which I know I’m getting a good deal on certain foods that I use a lot. Food prices vary from store to store, season to season, and even week to week in the same store. Knowing when the price is up or down, you will know when to stock up or skip a particular commodity.
For instance, my target price on whole wheat flour is about $2 for five pounds. Anything less than $2.50 for a five pound bag of whole wheat flour is good for me in my situation. At my closest supermarket, the price on this item varies more than 100 percent from time to time, changing from $2 to more $4 for the same item. So I don’t buy it when it’s $4. When it’s $2 or close to that, I buy more than one bag, enough to last through the pricing cycle until it’s on sale again. Knowing my target price helps me keep my food costs low.
Over the weekend, I saw that an Indian market had 20 pound bags of whole wheat flour for $6.99 – that’s $1.75 for five pounds. I asked if that’s the regular price and they said yes, so when I start running low on flour, I know where to pick it up next time.
I know my target price on peanuts is $2/pound. So when Giant Eagle has peanuts for $2 per one-pound jar, and each jar has a coupon on it for $1 off, thus making the price $1/pound, well, I stock up on peanuts then, buying enough to last a long time, so I have enough to last until the next great deal on peanuts is available.
I was running low on extra-virgin olive oil over the past couple of weeks, so I looked at the prices of that at all the stores I went to, and searched on the Internet, to try to establish what seemed like a good price on that. I decided that if I could get extra-virgin olive oil for 15 cents an ounce, that would be a good deal for me (about the same price as sunflower oil). Most of what I have found has been about 30 cents an ounce. So I made that my target price. Then when the ads came in the door hanger this weekend, I saw that Drug Mart is selling 3-liter cans of extra-virgin olive oil for $13.97, and I figured out that’s less than 14 cents an ounce, now I’m going to buy a supply of oil enough to last a few months. I have just cut in half one of the most expensive ingredients in a lot of the foods I prepare. Score!
By knowing my target price on flour, brown rice, tomatoes, bananas, blueberries, sunflower seeds, fresh pineapples, mint leaves, basil, lentils, pinto beans, chickpeas, honey, leafy greens, fish, chicken, and so on, I know when to stock up, and thus I have plenty of good food on hand, at the lowest prices, and I don’t have to go out and buy stuff at whatever price it happens to be on a given day. This saves me as much as half the money I might otherwise spend on food items I use frequently.
