Joyous,

Come over and teach me?

Dear Joyous, You are SO SMART to add all circular prices to your Price Book!  I'm going to do the same thing for the one store I go to regularly besides Whole Foods (Cala/Ralphs/Kroger).  (WF has a short list of loss-leaders that is only distributed at the store entrance.  They have MANY MANY items on sale prices that are not reflected in that short list.)  THANKS for a great idea!  Love in Hm, Deb

I can't figure out how to make a price book work for me.  I go to one store and get my groceries. It seems to me that using up gas going to several different stores negates the savings that you would get from buying lower priced items at the other store. This makes my head hurt. oh well.  We started buying our groceries every 2 weeks instead of every week and we cut our grocery bill in half, which really surprised me.

Dear JeweledSunshine, It's much, much easier to use a Price Book in a city or where you don't have to drive around to get from market to market.  I can walk to botht he stores I go to regularly (Cala/Ralphs/Kroger & Whole FOods).  It's a long walk to Safeway, & I don't find their prices to be very good on non-loss-leaders, so I don't go there often.  There's a store called Foods Co that has wonderful prices for produce -- but, Boy!, is it ever inferior produce even to its sister Kroger stores, & SO MUCH worse than what I can get at Whole Foods (which is worth the much higher prices).

I can understand why the Price Book idea doesn't work for you. 

Yours in Him, Deb

jeweledsunshine:

We started buying our groceries every 2 weeks instead of every week and we cut our grocery bill in half, which really surprised me.

This is what works for me too! Every two weeks & sticking to my list!

I would love to do price book. I already go to a couple of different grocery stores. One place has a better selection of Jewish food. Another has awesome meat, etc... I just can't seem to get one going!

slk2042:

Joyous,

Come over and teach me?

Second-best, I could email you what I have and you can see how I got it set up. Email me if you'd like to! :D

I really started out pretty simple and kept adding to it until it was how I like it. What got me going really and truly was back in April when I sat down with a grocery list with ANY possible groceries I thought I might buy. I modified a list from the grocery list on Donna Young's website (I think it's donnayoung.org? maybe donnayoung.net? Search for it - it's a homeschool forms website, but she has household forms too.) I took lined paper from her site, too, that you can print off, and played with it until I made "forms" that Iiked. Then I punched holes in them, stuck them in a binder with a calculator and some envelopes for coupon-sorting.

What typing up my price book in the spreadsheet has done for me:

• Shows me which vegetables we really do eat, not just which ones I wish we ate
• Helps me make realistic estimations of how long my pantry/freezer will last. For instance, my price book tells me we haven't bought coffee since May, but we drink coffee almost daily. I wouldn't have known when I did that major stocking-up in coffee wihtout a price book.
• Reminds me of where I got that great deal
• Shows seasonal trends for some foods (maybe - will know better after I've had my price book longer!).
• Helps me compare similar foods to see which might be cheapest (canned vs frozen veggies, for instances, or among different berries.)

This all might sound super-organized, but I am honestly and truly not an organized person (and I'm not just saying that). What happened is that I found a passion for this and ran with it. I get a high from seeing if I can keep whittling the grocery bill down. I experiemented with what worked for me, and I'm still tuning it, but it is a lot of fun (though a little labor-intensive to type up all at once).

Okay now I'm inspired to set up a price book. So where and how so I start. Are there sites that outline the process on the net?? Any suggestions would be appreciated.

DL

Joyous,

Grocery giddiness seems to be quite common here, lol.

jeweledsunshine:

It seems to me that using up gas going to several different stores negates the savings that you would get from buying lower priced items at the other store.

I guess it could if you weren't careful, but my trips are combined with my travelling in for work, and the stores are all only a few blocks apart. Also I figure that if I visit three stores in one shopping trip, but I only go shopping every three weeks, that's about the same gas-wise as going grocery shopping once a week.

dlw:

Okay now I'm inspired to set up a price book. So where and how so I start. Are there sites that outline the process on the net?? Any suggestions would be appreciated.

 

DL

There's a list of good articles about it here:

Price Books