I always go with a list and strictly adhere to said list. Comparison shopping is a must to make sure your getting the most for your money. I make my own foods. No canned spaghetti, frozen dinners or boxed just add water meals either. Fresh is best for your health and your wallet cause you won’t be at the doctors office for heart burn or massive salt intake heart problems. Low sodium soup still has way too much salt. Make your own. Great family time project when you make a pot of soup together.

Grow your own oregano, dill, basil, parsley or other spices. You can grow in a large pot on the back porch or a window box. You’ll love the fun of experimenting with them. Sprinkle on salads, sandwiches, in soups, on potatoes or other vegies. Google recipes and cook. =)

Any tips on the best sites to buy these from?

Leave the kids at home. They will always make you spend more.

Sales
A lot of the time a grocery store is having a sale, it’s not really a sale. Just because it’s on display does not mean you’re saving money.

For instance.. Macaroni and cheese is advertised as 2/$1. They don’t tell you it’s normally 50 cents a box. They also don’t tell you that you do not have to buy two of them to get them for 50 cents each. This instills in your brain that you need to buy this product now, and you need to buy two of them.

Secondly, generic brands are ‘just as good’ as name brands, because they are. Careful observation of generic packaging will usually reveal what company makes it. The name brand manufactures the store brand on behalf of the grocery chain.

For our family, list is a big deal. In general, if it’s not on the list we don’t buy it. All family members can contribute to the list before we go to the store, but once we are there, the list says what we buy. When the kids (or even us adults) ask for impulse items we just say “It’s not on the list.” If they complain, we tell them to put it on the list next time. By then it is, of course, forgotten.

Nice post.

2. Paper? Plastic? We don’t really care. But asking us to double-bag…that’s just wasteful.

If check-out folks/baggers would not overload the paper bags, instead packing them correctly so as to fill them but not to the point where they pretty much have to tear, then I wouldn’t have to ask for them to be double bagged. Now I just take my own and do it myself. But really, I shouldn’t have to — there used to be bagging contests and people used to know how to bag properly with paper. Plastic apparently made all that obsolete, and I think plastic is wasted like crazy as a result.

re: The Reader’s Digest 13 tips

- Baby formula is locked up? Where? Cough and cold meds are locked up around here (by state law) but not formula.

- I always considered “grazers” to be folks who ate a grape here, a strawberry there … I considered this stealing, but some people didn’t. Ordering food at the deli and dumping the wrappers? That’s not even close to being a gray area.

- I think Aldi’s has a cool shopping cart system. You have to insert a quarter into the cart to release the chain. You get the quarter back when you put the cart back. (For those of you who aren’t familair with this, this is a very simple mechanical process – no people involved). It’s only a quarter … but I rarely see stray carts at Aldi’s – everyone returns them to the correct spot to get their deposit back. A brilliant way to reduce dented cars AND save on labor.