Thrifty Girl on a Grocery Shopping Spree

Today the newly-minted thrifty version of me went shopping armed with a set of fliers. In the past I would’ve just grabbed whatever was on my shopping list and went on with it. But this time around for all the things I wanted to grab I consulted the competitor’s flier to see if they fair any better.

What a grand idea.

Turns out that another store had half the items on my list on special. And I’ve always thought of them as the expensive store in the neighborhood. Like I said in my previous thrifty shopping post – a store may be expensive overall, but it may be cheaper for you.

All in all I probably cut between 20 to 30 dollars from what my regular bill would have been.

I feel so thrifty I could burst. I spent an hour bragging to my husband about the joy of finding organic broccoli cheaper than all the regular priced broccoli we normally get. Or that toilet paper mega pack that is over 60 percent cheaper than usual.

Why didn’t we do this before? Why have we been wasting our money all this time?

And now I strongly feel that a more organized approach is required. I am thinking up a method to organize the fliers. I can’t just cut out what I like, because the one or two stores around there that price match need to see the whole flier. I need a flier-organizer.

My flier organizing method so far:

I got the fliers on Thursday. I quickly went through them circling items that I usually buy that appear to be on a meaningful sale. And I copied them into a notebook.

In the notebook on top of the page I marked the week (Feb 5 onwards…)

Then as I went through each flier, I wrote out items I usually get.

Store 1:
Grapes $1.29
Cucumbers $1.79
Etc

Store 2:
Strawberries 2 for $5.00
Etc…

I did this for all the fliers when I saw something I normally buy.

The beauty of writing items down into a notebook is that you can see at a glace who has the best deals and who has the most of them.

Then I picked two stores that had the most sales and that’s where I will be getting groceries this week. The odd ends in all the other fliers I’ll get from WalMart (they price match) if I really need them. Result? Seven fliers of deals – only three the stores to visit. I could even limit it to just WalMart – but frankly, their produce section is bad.

Now, if anybody knows a good binder/pocket idea that would fit nicely a whole set of fliers, please give me a shout.

On that note… Cheers and thrifty shopping!