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Track Your Grocery Use To Never Pay Full Price Again

Having a properly stocked pantry is a matter of buying products you use, at the lowest price, in quantities that match your consumption.

groceries

Figuring out the lowest price is what you do with your price book where you write down when which products you use come on sale and what they cost then. This allows you to see the sales cycles and know when a special really is, you know, special.

How Much To Buy For Your Pantry

Now that you know what to buy when, we’re going to figure out how much.

Knowing how much to buy of something on special is important because you don’t want to end up with a pantry with 20 pots of peanut butter only.

How much to buy of a product on sale is a simple division of time between sales divided by time it takes you to consume a product.

Our price book took care of the first part of that calculation; figuring out your consumption, your actual grocery usage, is what we take care of today.

Tracking Your Grocery Consumption

Tracking your grocery usage can be as simple as tracking sales. A piece of paper or a spreadsheet, a text file, an email where you make notes: whatever works for you.

It’s quick too; usually you’ll have enough information to start making informed purchases within 4-8 weeks.

Next time you open a grocery item at home, take a permanent marker and note the date on the bottom, top or side. Sure, you can write the open date right away on it but experience shows that this usually doesn’t happen in the heat of the moment. So just mark it.

Once the item is done, count how many days it lasted. Write down on in your consumption book: product (brand name is not important), size or quantity, and how many days it lasted.

You can make this information as detailed as you want. Using a calculator you can divide the size or quantity by the number of days, giving you the average consumption per day.

Let’s take an 18oz (500 gram) pot of peanut butter, for example. We open it on the 3rd of September. It’s finished by the 16th of September. 16-2 is 14: that pot lasted 14 days.

Using Your Grocery Information

In your store flyer you see that 18oz (500 gram) pots of peanut butter are on loss leader special (advertised at the front page or back page of the flyer). They’re going to be $1.29 each.

You have your price book with you and you check; yes, this is indeed one of the lowest prices. Looking at the dates in your price book you also see that the next time they’ll be about this cheap is in 4 months.

So how many pots of peanut butter should you buy on special sale to make sure you a) earn yourself big bucks as you cut your grocery spending in half, b) don’t buy too many and don’t have pantry place for other items on sale, and c) don’t buy too less so that you would be forced to start buying at full price before the next sales?

It took you 14 days or 2 weeks to finish 1 pot of peanut butter. Months are roughly 4 weeks so you go through 2 pots of peanut butter per month.

In your price book you saw the next special is in 4 months. 4 months times 2 pots per month = 8 pots.

Check Your Pantry Before You Buy

That you’re going to eat 8 pots over the coming 4 months doesn’t mean right away you should buy 8 pots.

First, check in your pantry (or better: check your pantry list). Subtract the amount of pots you already have there from the total you would need.

So, if you need 8 pots for 4 months and you already have 3 in your pantry, you only need to buy 5 more.

I like to have a little bit of wiggle room. Sometimes the next sales is a bit later than what you thought. Or you go a bit faster through your groceries than you thought.

That means that in the case of the peanut butter grocery sale I would buy 6-8 pots so that together with what I have in the pantry I would have 9-11 pots. More than enough.

Summary

Following this system you’ll never pay full price again!

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