Frugal Grocery Shopping For the Smart Shopper

"“The art is not in making money, but in keeping it”
~ Proverb quotes

Our frugal grocery shopping tips will help you save lots of money you never realised you spent.

Every week we all go trudging to the shops to get our weekly supply of essentials for the home, like our food, cleaning products and personal care items.

But do we really know how much we are spending? Grocery shopping can be one of the big overlooked areas of our weekly budget spending.

We might take our time and shop around for electrical items or think twice about our clothes shopping, but when it comes to grocery shopping we simply go on autopilot.

However it is probably our biggest single outlay every week, so it really does deserve to be thought about seriously and turn this area of our spending into frugal grocery shopping and save ourselves some big bucks.

Frugal grocery shopping lists

picture by Petursey

Making out a list before you go shopping will not only save you time, but it will also help to keep you focused and not get side tracked by tempting offers. However this will only work if you keep strictly to your list and not go shelf browsing.

I have prepared a FREE simple printable download shopping list that you can use to get you started.

FREE SHOPPING LIST

(You will need adobe acrobat to open it, if you do not have acrobat it can be downloaded for free HERE)

Tips for writing out your frugal grocery shopping List:

Decide in advance your next week’s meals and note down the ingredients required.

Check your cupboards to see what ingredients you do not have or need to re-stock.

Check your staple items such as bread, milk, cleaning products and personal care items.

Once you have made your list keep it available for next week, it will come in very handy as reminder of items that you regularly need. I sometimes forget to buy some the basic items if I don’t have a list, I suppose it’s because they are a bit boring I guess.

How to be a smart frugal grocery shopper

Many people don’t realise this, but supermarkets spend thousands of pounds every year on cunning little marketing ploys to make you spend more money than you intended.

They employ teams of people to analyse shop layout and consumer shopping habits to make sure that they place their items in their store just in the right place to tempt you.

However if you know and are aware of these ploys then you are more likely to recognise them and not fall headlong into them. Common tricks are:

Moving Isles -Moving items to different places in the store, so that you have to go hunting down isles that you would not normally venture into and so exposing you to more of their products. Keep your head down and only focus on the items you came into buy.

The long walk - Commonly purchased items such as milk, bread and eggs are normally placed along the edges of a store, often at the back of the store.

Again forcing you to walk past lots of tempting goodies. If all you want to buy is a loaf of bread then keep to the edge of the store and avoid walking through centre isles.

Especially wise on the way back from the bread shelf to the till, keep to the edges and save not only your wallet but also your waistline.

Check those lower shelves - Shops will often put their most expensive items or their own brand on the shelves at eye level. This is because a lot of shoppers just take the first item they see on the shelves. Lets use baked beans as an example, you will often find the leading brand name right in the middle of the shelf, it’s a brand you know and hey, you need some beans, so why not.
But check out the lower or upper shelves first. If you are on a frugal grocery mission, here is where you will find beans at a much cheaper price or that have special offers on them. The difference in price can be far greater than the slight taste difference in the product; brand name is not always the best.
Advertising – Beware of advertising hype. Shops and brands will bombard you with advertisements promising you all sorts of enticements, i.e. we are the best, this will make you stronger, and this will make your hair shinier. Be aware that this is advertising and their main aim is to get you to buy their product instead of someone else’s.
Don’t be fooled by this hype, many products are even made by the same manufacturer and sold as different brands. Remember buy what you need and not what the advertisers tell you that you need.