While visiting my inlaws over Christmas I had the opportunity to go grocery shopping with my father in law several times which was fairly entertaining. He's been doing more of the grocery shopping in the last year or so while my mother in law has been dealing with medical issues and so he's becoming aware of how much food costs and just how much prices can vary between grocery stores. He's discovered that Winco is cheaper for just about everything which I heartily agree with. I used to be a died in the wool Winco shopper and loved shopping the beautiful new one in south Salem when we lived there. That store is really something to behold. Especially compared with the small one I shopped at for two years in Moscow. 80% of the college population (pretty much the entire town) shopped there and the day before Christmas Break ended you couldn't find bread, milk, bagels, eggs, or any other staple to save your life. The entire town was grocery shopping that day!
Now that we live in Dallas and the closest Winco (well...Waremart but it's the same thing) is 20 minutes away I do almost all of my shopping at Safeway. In the last three years I've learned their sales rythyms and know what prices are the good ones to buy at and stock up and which ones to pass on if possible. I've also become much better at scouring the weekly ad for the coupons/sales and making a dinner menu for the week and then shopping for the food we need for dinners, breakfast, lunches, and snacks that week and listing the good sales on stuff I should stock up on. It's all been part of my effort to reduce our grocery bill and it's paying off. I usually grocery shop on Mondays during the day when it's not very busy but I went today because they were having a 48 hour sale. I had my stack of Safeway coupons I clipped from their weekly ad, a $10 off a $50 purchase coupon clipped from the free Statesman Journal Polk County paper we got this week, and a coupon for Mountain High Yogurt (cheapest brand of full fat yogurt they sell). I saved 48% or $65.23 by shopping the sales and using my coupons which I thought was pretty good!
Here's a few of my good deals of the day:
$.99 for 5lbs of carrots
$.99 for 5lbs of potatoes
$2.27 for 1lb of deli ham sliced thick for soup
$9.44 for 6 boxes of cereal (1.57 a box!)
$4.99 for 2lbs of Tillamook cheddar cheese
$6.76 for 5lbs of frozen chicken breasts
$1.29 for Oreos
I'm getting better at shopping more frugally but I know I have room for improvement. What I really need to do is shop for boxed/canned/frozen/bulk foods at Winco every month or two and fill in the rest from Safeway. I really love the bulk bins at Winco, there's some awesome deals to be had there. Especially with spices!
Sunday, March 8, 2009
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4 comments:
Nice!! I got the chicken, cheese, oreos, and cereal, too! Love the savings, the $10 off coupon is really nice. My receipt said I save 51%....what an incredible feeling :)
Good job guys. I shop pretty much only at Waremart. I am really not smart enough (especially with kids in toe) to shop at Safeway. It seems like I always get the wrong brand or size and then I get to the register and it is wrong. I need more practice. Waremart has zapped my brain.
Way to go! I"m trying to do better at this myself. I'm buying the paper each Saturday so I have the fliers all in front of me and the coupons too. I haven't yet tried using any internet printed Q's as a few of our stores here don't accept them, but at least the stores I do shop at double Manu Q's up to 99cents :)
Do you guys have aldi's there? I do ~75% of my shopping there.
Safeway is the only grocery store in Dallas. There's a few "markets" but they are actually more expensive. They double coupons but only 4 a week up to $.50 apiece. I was printing online coupons without a problem until David upgraded the laptop to Windows 7 and now I can't get them to print! It's driving me NUTS!
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