I was recently reading an article on CNN Money that discussed how to Shave $150 a week off of your grocery bill. I was intrigued. Who would be able to cut that much money out of their weekly grocery bill? I probably don't spend $150 a month on groceries, let alone $150 per week. The gist of the article was to plan ahead and only buy what you need and cook meals with ingredients that overlap. Not a bad idea but nothing revolutionary. One of their suggestions though, did pique my interest. They suggested to make a game out of grocery shopping and reference a website called The Grocery Game. I had to check this out.
Basically, The Grocery Game is an online subscription service that provides weekly lists of items on sale in your local area. The list is broken down into color coded items; green are free items, blue are the "best deals for stockpiling", and black are items you should buy only if you need them.
It sounds like a good idea but I'm hesitant to try it. It would save a lot of time on cutting coupons (I don't really use coupons anyways) but it also seems pointless to spend money to save money. The subscription is $10 every 8 weeks...working out to be $1.25/week. That is not a huge amount of money but would it ultimately be worth it?
The problem I find with grocery coupons is that name-brand items with coupons work out to be just slightly less (if not more) than generic store brands. Why spend time and effort to buy name-brand items at a discounted price when you can buy the generics, which are basically the same thing, at a lower price without the coupons?
I'd love to hear what others think. Are you a coupon-clipper? A faithful consumer of generic products? Or maybe a little of both?
Wednesday, December 28, 2005
The Grocery Game
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3 comments:
There is so little i use coupons for lately.... though with that said, if you are unfamiliar with sales and coupons this site is a good way to start. I think I lasted the initial 4 weeks and then did it on my own, for free
I checked the site and there was very little coverage in my area. Some of the grocery stores around here are starting to get back into double coupons, which might be interesting.
I do a fair bit of shopping at "scratch-n-dent" (salvage) grocery stores around here. But they're not always the cheapest.
I'm late to this thread, but I just had to comment. I think the Grocery Game depends on how you shop, where you live, etc. If you always eat name brands, never clip coupons, ignore sales, and only buy things when you need them (Ie- run to the store at midnight because you're out of toothpaste) it would save you tons of money. Otherwise...I'm still undecided. I'm actually doing a four week review of it at my blog, and I'm still kind of half and half.
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