I’ve been perusing food blogs this morning — don’t know why particuarly, but I’ve gleaned a few things besides new recipes.
Planning out a weekly menu saves you time and money. Now that seems like a platitude or one of those things you say “well DUH!” to, but it’s surprising how many people don’t take time to do this and it’s equally surprising just how much overall time and money doing it would save you!
I can remember every Sunday afternoon was spent pouring over the food ads in the Sunday paper and Monday going grocery shopping with Mother. She would carefully cut out any coupons for cents off and for extra green or yellow stamps (that’s telling you just how old I am! I’ll bet many of you don’t have any idea what I’m referring to!), make a list for each store she planned to shop in and off we would go. The circuit never varied — there were 4 stores that she frequented although one was ONLY if they had a good sale on something as she considered it too expensive otherwise. We would come home laden with paperbags filled to the brim with groceries and a few toiletries. As complicated as this sounds, it only took a couple of hours total each week.
Today, Ken and I discuss each day what we think we want for the evening meal. He stops on his way home from work to purchase the items needed for that one meal. This takes him anywhere from 15-30 minutes to accomplish and he usually doesn’t have any coupons with him for savings nor does he know what’s on sale. We are limited in that we only have one grocery store in our neighborhood to shop at. With a little pre-planning on our part, we could cut that 15-30 minutes a day down to 30-60 minutes per WEEK and probably work in some savings as well. We could shop at a larger variety of stores since we could drive to a larger town where there are more choices and where competition helps keep pricing in line. We could use coupons to further help save money.
While there is a trade-off in that his daily stop doesn’t require him going out of his way at all and converting over to weekly shopping would, in terms of time and money, it is an overall savings of nearly 3 hours and an undetermined amount of green.
So, while you’re reorganizing your grocery shopping strategy and cutting out coupons, be sure to check out some of the neat food blogs like Ramen Days, My Wooden Spoon, Healthy Cooking Recipes, and for a taste of something exotic, Hawaii Food and Recipes
Ummmmm — now I’m HUNGRY!
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As the economy gets worse, more people look to save money any way they can and coupons are one of the easiest free methods to save $$ on groceries. Nice post about shopping strategies.
Bruce
When I was little, I remember my mother and grandmother sitting down together every Sunday and going through the ads too. Sundays were busy days, laundry then shopping.
We don’t do that anymore, just pick up groceries when we run out. It might have seemed really anoying as a kid, not to mention monotonous, but it did save time and money.
I’m always getting things in the local shop rather than getting a large, less expensive amount of things at the supermarket – it would save a lot of time and money if I had a plan. I know that. Yet I still don’t do it. :/