Lots of good practical advice so far. I have a favorite new system of grocery shopping. I read about “the Grocery Game” in the Seattle Times last month. See
www.terisshoppinglist.com to find out if the service is offered in the zip code where you shop. It’s basically a service ($10 per 8 weeks, $1 for a month’s trial) that matches your newspaper coupons with local grocery store sales and calculates according to their database whether or not it’s a “rock bottom” sale. Then, the philosophy of this website is that you should stockpile while it’s at the rock-bottom price and try to put off purchases until that item shows up on your weekly coupon/sale list.
Anyway, there are more strategies for this and you can read about it on the website. For our family of five I would typically spend $200-250 per week on groceries and dining out. Now I am spending about $150 with a savings on my bill of anywhere from $100-300 per week! That’s taking advantage of store sales, coupons, asking for rainchecks, etc.
Yes, it is a bit more work, but not much and I don’t menu plan anymore, which is a lot easier for me. I simply take a look at my stocked-full pantry closet and make whatever it is we have on hand. I do still have to buy some items that are necessary each week that aren’t on sale, but that is usually a max of about $20-30 for non-sale items. While I am spending still quite a bit of money on groceries right now, I am getting two or three times as much product for my dollars.
Recently, I made this switch from a nearly-all organic, homemade foods diet to this cost-cutting strategy at the request of my husband. I would like to be able to afford to buy all organic everything but it was simply an extravagance that we can’t afford right now. I am still working on my cooking skills to get to the point where we rely less on packaged foods and more on “raw materials” so that I can buy some organic foods again. Raw organic vegetables are cheaper than canned non-organic, but you have to have the skill and forethought to use them before they spoil, which is one area I fail in frequently.
One service which I loved but didn’t use well was
www.pioneerorganics.com which is a home-delivery organic produce service. Great produce, good price and fair selection of processed organic foods too. But my skills are not yet up to making all those veggies palatable to my picky eating family. Highly recommended if you are vegetarian!
Improving your cooking skills will save you lots of money. As a young adult, I learned mainly how to cook fast food type foods at home. One thing that can save you money is to use limited food items but in multiple ways. For instance, it is more expensive to plan your menu saying, “we’ll have teriyaki Monday, fried chicken Tuesday, lasagna Wednesday…” because each of these different ethnic foods requires wildly different ingredients and condiments. I know many Korean and Vietnamese families that spend very little on their groceries because they only eat certain types of foods and they simply prepare them in different ways.
We Americans have gotten used to the mall food court mentality and eating something very different every night is now a matter of expected variety in the diet. (Worse, there are some nights when each member of the family wants something different for dinner and gets it. In a family with several small children, this quickly gets squashed on all but special occasions.)
But the more traditional way to cook is to make a special or large meal on Sunday, then assemble the leftovers in different ways throughout the week, cooking new foods only as necessary or as side dishes, keeping things in the same “cuisine family” to make all the flavors harmonize.
