Dreadful Penny

Since this article about a Georgia super-couponer made the rounds of the personal finance blogs a few days ago, I’ve felt competitive inspired. I had been impressed with myself for routinely saving 30-50% on weekly grocery/cleaning product/cosmetic, health, and paper product runs. This week I tightened up my routine to see what I could do.

I can’t say the coupon portion was a grand success. I’ve been lazy about my coupon-clipping in the past few weeks, only clipping what I needed each time (or was very likely to need soon), so I didn’t have a thick archive to draw from. In fact, I sorted my coupon folder while watching The Tudors last night and was dismayed to find most of them had expired. Phooey. So, I chalked this week up as a fresh start and clipped out anything I might vaguely want, need, or could donate. Coupon for a free container of cat food that our pets won’t eat? I’ll take it. It can be donated. $2 off a cleaning product or shampoo we’ve never tried? Sure, I’ll clip that. If a sale comes along that would have made the item free, I’d be annoyed that I passed it by.

As I shopped, I realized that I’ve developed some habits for saving that others may not consider. The world beyond coupons. Here are a few that work for me:

1. Always compare the per unit price

It’s not as obvious as you might think. For example, at the store today I found a bag of Gala apples with a Disney brand, pictures of Toy Story characters, and puzzles for kids on the bag. Nearby was a stand of loose Gala apples, which were for sale at the lowest per pound price for loose apples in the store. Which was a better deal? The Disney apples. The loose apples were $1.59/lb while the 3 lb bag from Disney cost $3.99, or $1.33/lb. They’re unblemished, US-grown, and tasty, too.

2. Look for last minute manager markdowns

If you’re buying produce you can use in the next couple days or meat that you can cook or stick in the freezer, make sure to check the racks for manager markdowns. I never pay full price for bags of salad greens — they’re still good a few days after I pick them up at bargain prices. At my preferred grocery store, meat near the sell-by date is given a “$X off” sticker; the amount varies based on the original price, but for the cuts I buy, it’s usually about 30%. Another nice thing about manager markdowns: they can be combined with sales and coupons. Turkey burgers were on sale for $2.50 instead of the usual $3.99, and buying the oldest package brought my actual cost down to 50% of the original price. Today I bought a bag of Dole 7 Lettuce salad greens. It was marked down to $.99 because the sell-by date was May 20, and I had a $.55 coupon. $.44 to supplement the garden harvest sounds good. (I see the ads proudly offering bags of salad at 2/$5 and giggle.)

3. Coupons and sales are good, combining them is better

This is one of the reasons I need to build up my coupon archive again. It’s excellent to find a very good sale, then realize that you have a coupon to bring the price down even lower. Today’s example: Almay eye liner. It was on sale at CVS: buy two at $6.99 each, get 10 ExtraCare dollars toward a future purchase (ExtraCare dollars are used like cash and typically expire in one month). That made the effective price of each $1.99 — damn good for the Almay liquid eyeliner I like, especially when I’ve been thinking that my eyes could use more emphasis. But! I also had two coupons in hand, each one for $1 off of an Almay product. End result: eye makeup that was originally marked at $14.98 (non-sale prices), in my shopping bag for an effective price of $1.98.

4. Unless you’re in a huge hurry, scan for clearance items everywhere

Some stores have specific locations for clearance; at the end of a specific aisle, for example. With the exception of Target, I can’t say that most of those clearance sections are worth more than a cursory glance. I’ve had a lot more luck with products that remain in their normal stocked location, but now have a sign or sticker indicating that they’re close-outs. The lowest price stickers in the Walgreens drugstore near me are orange, and if I’m already browsing an aisle, I read them all. Sometimes that pays off: a “luxury” brand of body wash that was originally marked at $7.49 a bottle was marked down to $2.19. That didn’t seem low at first, until I realized that the bottles were larger than those I was comparing them to, and the per ounce price was about $.13 — a full dime per ounce cheaper than other brands on sale. Another advantage of clearance items is that purchase quantity isn’t limited, like it can be with sales, so I emptied the shelf. (We now have enough rosemary-peppermint body wash to keep us clean for months.)

5. You must have storage space

You can’t really save big bucks unless you can buy large quantities of core items on sale and ignore them when they’re at full price. We have a chest freezer in the basement; that allows me to buy ten-pound boxes of frozen fish filets, whole racks of spareribs, post-Thanksgiving turkeys and post-Easter hams. There’s a small flock of frozen chickens in there now. Not to mention cheese, orange juice, bread, and anything else that can be frozen safely and then defrosted when we’re ready to use it. We also have a pantry closet and a place to pile paper products. In our upstairs linen closet, I labeled shoeboxes (”Soap”, “Hair Care”) and put them on shelves so that it would be easy for anyone to find what he needs in the stash. When I lived in a small apartment with a standard sized refrigerator/freezer, this just wasn’t possible.

6. The best stores for saving aren’t very pretty

I don’t shop at Whole Foods. While I do sometimes buy produce at a fancy nearby market (their prices are comparable to other stores), I know that I’d pay a premium for anything on their shelves or from the deli. Even Trader Joes, which has generally good prices for what they carry, is too pricey for me to pick up more than an occasional item every few weeks. Most of my grocery shopping is done at Kmart. Yep, Kmart. I pick up a few more items at Walgreens and CVS. Every now and then, I shop at a scuzzy little grocery store that doubles coupons up to $1; it’s not worth the trip unless I have some high value coupons that match up with sales.

I wish that I could achieve the same savings by patronizing my local grocery store — just a couple of blocks away — for all of my shopping. Instead, I only go there for last minute or specialty items. And it would be nice if shopping at the farmers market made direct financial sense. I’m a big believer in supporting local business and local farmers, but we only have so much discretionary budget to cover the higher prices. So, I do a little of that. Most of the time, though, my fellow shoppers aren’t well-groomed upper middle class seekers of organic produce and the best boxed chai; they’re senior citizens with fixed income and immigrants who haven’t mastered English. Frugality means not being a snob.

7. Plan ahead

I make my dinner plans for the week at the same time as I create a shopping list. I usually plan around meat from the freezer and produce that’s on sale. If I need an expensive ingredient and there’s none in the house and none on sale, I change the menu — I can make that dish after I find the ingredient at a reasonable price. My plans don’t always work out perfectly, but I can generally avoid paying full price for anything but last minute “Oh no! We’re out of X!” or “You know what I’m really craving tonight?” items. And those are rare.

Rotating meat from the freezer rather than making menus based on the week’s sales has another advantage. Sometimes I find one small package of meat with a manager’s markdown; a great price, but not enough for a full dinner. I can either find a way to stretch it (slicing sausage into another dish rather than serving it as links) or I can freeze it and hope that I can pick up another package soon. If I can’t, let the stretching begin!

I can’t say I’m the thriftiest. I don’t obsess about saving, but I try to do the best I can in about four hours of planning, shopping, and paperwork each week. After comparing my success with that of Crissy Thompson, though, I might try a little harder.