My 25% Grocery Savings Rule In Action-Part 4-Case Study #1

Published January 31st, 2009

This week in our series in how to implement my 25% grocery savings rule, we get down to the nitty gritty, a case study of a typical week of grocery shopping in my house. If you’re just joining us, you may want to start with the original post above. So far in this series we’ve also covered the planning stage, and the challenges you might face. Now on the exciting part–what I actually buy and how much I save. I’ve decided to do 2 weekly case studies. You’ll see that I don’t buy the same stuff every week. Since it’s just my husband and I, we buy staples eg. milk, bread, eggs, only every couple of weeks. As you’ve read in previous weeks, I keep a well stocked pantry, and stock up in items I use regularly when they’re on sale, so I don’t need to buy every ingredient for every meal, every week. I combine what I already have in the fridge, freezer and cupboards with what’s on sale every week, and that’s how I plan my menu. With the exception of yogurt cups, you won’t see a whole lot of snack or prepackaged food as we usually make extra portions at dinner time for lunch the next day or the freezer.

I thought of how I could make this case study as easy to follow as possible. Below you’ll see a picture of what I bought this week, my lunch and dinner plans for the week, and then listed by item, the price for the same item at the full priced grocery store, discount version of the same grocery store, and finally what I paid for it at the discount store, hope fully on sale or with a coupon. Just keep in mind because of the way I shop, I often buy a couple weeks (or more) worth of an item, so you may not see some of the things you usually see–but not because we don’t buy them. As described in previous posts, I shop between 3 discount grocery stores, within 10 minutes of each other, and get it all done in about an hour-and-a-half while my husband goes into work for a couple of hours every Saturday morning.

So, after going through the planning, this is what we bought that particular week…

As discussed in the original post, each grocery chain has a high end and lower priced store in their family ie. food comes from the same warehouse and chain of distribution. To make it a fair comparison, the full price grocery price corresponds to it’s discount grocery counterpart (eg. Zehrs price is compared to No Frills price). The last column is the price I actually paid by buying what’s on sale that week +/- using a coupon, or paying the regular price at discount grocery store.

Item	Full priced grocer	Discount grocer	Price I paid
Classico pasta sauce (x2)	$3.99×2	$2.99×2	$2.00×2
Old El Paso taco sauce	$2.99	$2.67	$2.67
Stewing beef	$5.99	$5.10	$5.10
2 chicken brsts(bone in,skin (x2)	$6.99×2	$5.49×2	$3.39×2
Firm Tofu	$1.99	$1.49	$1.19
Equality frozen lemonade	$0.79	$0.49	$0.49
White mushrooms 1lb	$3.99	$2.99	$2.99
Cluster tomatoes 0.8 lb	$1.81	$1.59	$1.36
Sunshine 100% WW bread	$2.69	$1.49	$1.49
Dimplheimer WW bread	$3.29	$2.19	$2.19
Pesto tortillas (6 large)	$3.29	$2.79	$2.39
Hot & sour soup spice paste	$2.29	$1.79	$1.79
Can No name mini cobs of corn	$0.99	$0.79	$0.79
Can sliced bamboo shoots	$1.05	$0.99	$0.79
No name sour cream	$1.39	$0.99	$0.79
Avocado	$1.29	$0.79	$0.79
Grapefruit 5 lb bag	$6.00	$5.00	$2.00
Deli Black forest ham 300g	$5.37	$4.17	$3.37
Ciabatta roll (x2)	$0.69×2	$0.40×2	$0.40×2
Garlic cheese bun	$1.19	$0.89	$0.89
Nabob coffee 326 g (x2)	$4.99×2	$4.29×2	$1.00×2
Silk choc soy milk 2L	$3.79	$3.79	FREE!
Patak’s spice paste jar	$5.49	$4.79	$3.79
Black Diamond cheese bar	$8.99	$6.99	$3.97
Green cabbage	$3.99	$1.99	$0.99
Clementines 2 lb bag	$3.99	$2.99	$1.88
Apples 6 lbs	$8.94	$5.99	$2.87
Carrots 3 lb bag	$2.99	$1.99	$0.79
Red onions 3 lb bag	$3.49	$2.49	$0.79
Red peppers 0.7 lb	$2.79	$2.09	$1.43
Rougemont apple juice can	$1.29	$0.99	$0.99
Heinz cond. mushrm. soup	$0.99	$0.69	$0.39
TOTALS	$126.46	$97.34	$62.55

Since it am not very tech savvy, I won’t lie, it was painful for me to make this table, embed it, and do the calculations, but hopefully it helps to illustrate an example of how this system can work. By planning ahead, eating what’s on sale that week, and by using a couple of coupons I managed to save 35% over the regular price at the discount grocers, and a whopping 50% over the price at the full priced grocers for the same items! That’s right, no gimmicks, you can do it too

Stay tuned next week for another week of groceries and another case study…different foods…still big savings!

Read the rest of this series:

Original post: My 25% Grocery Savings Rule
My 25% Grocery Savings Rule in Action-Part 1: Introduction
My 25% Grocery Savings Rule in Action-Part 2: Planning and Resources
My 25% Grocery Savings Rule in Action-Part 3: Challenges
My 25% Grocery Savings Rule in Action-Part 5: Case Study #2