Top 10 Grocery Shopping Tips

A lot of these tips are things that many may realize but possibly at the time just neglect to apply them when they are at the grocery store. It is sort of a grocery shopping for dummies guide. I won't claim to be unlocking the secrets of the universe with this article but certainly even the most meticulous among us is bound to see something in this list that they are missing or are simply not aware of. Also you may laugh at some of my explanations for the points I make. So with out any more typing just to get my word count up lets forge ahead.

1) This one is a no brainer of course but choose your cart carefully. After years of wear and tear (as well as angry employees throwing them around the parking lot in a rage releasing some pent up frustration over working there) many of the carts are quite warped. This can be an issue once it is overloaded with more food than you planned to buy.

2) Be selective about who cuts your meat. If you like your chicken or turkey shaved thin as I do you may have to impress upon the worker at the deli of that fact, sometimes several times. If they had a little too much alcohol before coming into work and hand you back a sack with incredibly thick bologna slices you may have to choose a new server. I would just wait until they are busy in the future and ask someone else to cut it. Just kidding about the alcohol part by the way :)

3) Buy plenty of veggies if you are going to fill your cart it will drive down the price, plus they are good for you.

4) Recently in my community I have heard of an underground meat market. Apparently people steal meat from the grocery stores and sell it for half the price. I laughed at first but then I got thinking about the price of meat. I am not incredibly poor but I admit half the time we end up buying little real meat. A lot of the times we end up with fish sticks and such. But all I can say as a tip in this area is to buy marked down meat as much as possible. Just use it as quickly as possibly to avoid any issues with the meat.

5) Other than buying marked down meats, but whole turkeys. Even at full price these birds can keep my family going on meat for a good week and a half. If you wait until after thanks giving and Christmas you can usually get them on sale as well. If you but a few birds your good for awhile.

6) One time my family and I saw TV dinners on sale at 75% off we were so amazed by the price that we filled our freezer with TV dinners. I can honestly say there is a reason why things are cheap and even more so if they have a massive sale, it's because they don't taste very good. Just because there are cheaper foods that can be purchased out there doesn't mean you should buy them. You are only trading the taste to save a little money.

7) Depending on where you live you may have the option of getting milk in jugs, cartons or bags. Choose the jugs they are resealable and keep the freshness in. Trust me, we have bags mostly here and I can honestly say there is nothing like the experience of drinking from the jug (yes I know I'm bad) and having a river of cheese waterfall come spraying into your mouth.

8) In terms of cat food buy what your cat likes. Sometimes they don't live so long and they deserve a little comfort food.

9) This ones self explanatory but price and bulk shop. It is sometimes a daunting task to pay $10 for a bag of rice than $3 for a box. But sometimes it is the difference between getting healthy ong grain rice and getting 6 - 7 times as much rice and not. Or buying V8 jugs instead of cans, you save and get just as much V8.

10) Watch your cashier. If they are ringing things through with an electronic scanner usually things are good but you can run into problems if they have to type the code or price in manually. Nothing like getting charged for a $18 three pack of watermelons when you were supposed to get charged for a $1 bag of carrots. It works best if one person puts the food on the conveyor belt as the other person watches the prices being put in.

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