How To: Give Yourself a DIY Sale on Hamburger
Stretching our grocery dollar budget always seems to be a challenge. I’m all about penny pinching, coupons, sales, buying in bulk and repackaging, and meal planning. When I get the receipt and it shows I’ve saved $20+ at the grocery store, it feels worth it. (Until I wonder how much they artificially inflated prices in order to “save” that much.) But regardless, by only buying certain items, regardless of what else is on sale, that’s still $20 we weren’t otherwise charged to have our pantry stocked!
Woohoo!
Would you look at that! Can you see the crazy $861.66 saved?! I don’t believe it, but I’ll take it!
It can feel like a lot of time and effort just to save a few cents here, and a dollar on three items over there, and to buy one item and to get a second free. Especially if you’re shopping at multiple stores. You can literally spend hours coupon clipping, store ad searching, meal planning, and otherwise scheming just to fill your fridge for the week. Never mind all the hours that it would then take to prep, cook, and preserve those food items you’re procured! And if you’re only shopping for one week at a time, then you have to turn around and do it all over again for the next week!
One of the great benefits about meal planning is that it gives you structure for your shopping. You can see that buying one special ingredient, that’s not on sale, for only one meal, but knowing you’ll have leftovers, might actually make more sense to swap out that meal for the week, with something else. Then you can save that special meal once that novelty item is on sale, or until you find another recipe to use up the rest of the ingredient.
Having a plan for most of your frequent meals saves you time & money!
Once you have a bit of structure, it can also save you time and money to plan for fewer trips to the store. We have worked our way to having once-a-month grocery trips. That means, we make a plan for the month, both with what we want to eat, and to restock our pantry, so that we have fewer hour-round-trip grocery store runs. We don’t always make it the whole month (milk certainly doesn’t last that long), and so for a couple of fresh items we might sneak in another tiny trip for things only on our list.
This has helped us cut down on our grocery costs a lot. Since we’ve been working on building out our deep pantry, I don’t have very good (as in specific) numbers I can share until our rotation is on a rock-solid (ie tracked) pattern. But, I can see that we’re buying more groceries, for less each month just as a going in point, so it’s motivating to try and figure out what the monthly grocery cart looks like when viewed annually. I love annual budgets because it’s easier for me to assess if our money is aligning with our values this way.
One of the positive adaptations of COVID-19 are all of the curb-side grocery pickup options. I say positive because of the ability to stick to the budget from the quiet of the couch, rather than the brightly-light aisles filled with sale signs. I can throw whatever food items we run out of into the cart, and it can sit there and wait for us. If I’m feeling in the mood for a certain ice cream, I can throw that in the cart too, to enjoy later. But the beauty of building a monthly pickup with an online cart, is that it’s a lot easier to “put back” those food purchases that you know don’t actually suit you. Yes, peppermint ice cream sounds amazing. But we don’t need it. We have vanilla, because we can add a scoop to any sort of pie or crisp. Peppermint ice cream with apple crisp?! NO WAY.
Since we shop at a Kroger store, we also have the benefit of the online cart showing us exactly what we paid, for each item, on which date. For your spreadsheet nerds, it’s a lot of fun! This has been a really great resource for me to track how much we eat every year. I’m trying to switch to buying more in bulk, or more items during a great sale, so this gives me a benchmark for how much “is enough” for a month, three months, or whatever timeframe I’m looking to stock up for.
Now, let’s say you need to pick up some hamburger to restock your freezer. You go and add a pound of burger to your cart, and then bump up the quantity to two or three. Then you start to think, I wonder if they have larger sizes of packaged up hamburger available. When you check, you find a three-pound package!
Woah! Not only are both items on sale, according to the website (I think $3/lb is “normal”), but buying the three-pound package instantly saves you money. Nice!
Once you pick up the hamburger, you realize that while throwing the three-pound meat log into the freezer is convenient now, it sure won’t be when you go to defrost and cook with it if all you need is one pound. To divvy up the meat, try using your hand-washed bags! Yay reducing single-use plastic items, and getting multiple uses from them!
Now, you’ve already given yourself a sale. Instead of paying for $2.99/lb for hamburger, you snagged the same meat for $1.99 by buying more. But let’s say you’re like us, and you mostly use the hamburger as flavoring. Your pasta sauce is loaded with other tasty things. Your tacos have layers and layers of goodness. Let’s say you’re up for an experiment, and instead of making three packages of a pound each, to use in three meals, you make four packages, of 3/4 pound each, for four meals…
WOOHOO! From $3 for a meal-size package, to having two meals for that same price! $1.49/meal sounds like a heck of deal to us! To me, this is not making an apples to oranges comparison. I know it’s like comparing large apples to small apples because of .25 lb difference, but since we’re talking about convenience here, I’m willing to overlook this difference. Normally you pay for convenience, but this time, we’re using it to our advantage by splitting the three-pound meat log into four meal portions!
If we had bought four one-pound packages, that would have cost us $11.96 instead of $5.97. Unless there is a super sale, I don’t see us ever buying single-pound beef packages again. This food math is amazing!
This was originally designed for an Instagram post, but we wanted to make sure and share this grocery store hack with as many folks as we could reach! Happy hacking!
