5 Tips to Save on Your Weekly Shop
Written on the: April 3, 2014 by Robert Haylor
Every weekend most shoppers face that overwhelming, tiresome and somewhat scary prospect of doing the weekly shop. That weekly shop becomes a lot more scary when you bring the children with you – as you know when you go down that sweet aisle you will be leaving with a bag of unnecessary products.
The average UK household spends around £56.80 per week on Food and non alcoholic drinks every week. A lot of you will argue that the figure is wrong and to a degree even we are frowning at the figure slightly. When push comes to shove, we both know that when you begin unpacking your trolley and the persistent beep of the checkout your eyes are looking at that subtotal going up and up.
So what’s the solution? Well we’ve come up with 5 top tips to save on your weekly shop.
1. Do You Really Need it?
Having a treat here and there is certainly something we are all guilty of, the additional box of cakes as it was in the two for one offer, or that tempting buy one get one free on crisps that really will tie the family over till next week. Supermarkets encourage us to buy more and they spend thousands in market research to discover your buying habits.
2. Was X Now Y
We’ve all seen these, the price of tinned tuna was £6.49 now just £4.00. First of all that top price, could be anything that the supermarkets want it to be, the higher that top price is and the low the bottom price is they know that you will be tempted to buy the product as you feel your getting real bargain – the chances are your not and in fact your probably only save a couple of pence if that.
3. Brand Match
In a lot of supermarkets you will find the value range, own brand, premium range and finally the normal brands that we have all come to know and love. As always the normal brands, Heinz, John West & Walkers are at the top end of pricing, followed briefly by the premium brand of the super market.
We’ve all seen the adverts of the brand match, price check and guaranteed pricing, but have we ever asked how regular that information is checked and how? We take the super markets word that we are getting a real deal on brands which they check against their competitors when in actual fact you probably are not saving anything.
4. Convenience Shopping
We’ve all been there, we go down aisle one and just as we’re about to stroll down aisle 2, bang, we are hit by a bombardment of tempting offers on anything from cheese to pasty’s. These products are not put here by accident, far from it, when you next walk down aisle one take a look at the products and then look at the products in aisle 2 – we can almost guarantee the products in that end shop fitting they will interlink with each other – you may also find that these products are priced more higher than those in aisle one.
Supermarkets know that we are busy people and walking back down aisle one just to pick up a cheaper garlic bread – is not on our top priority. Ask yourself, how much would I save if I walked back to aisle one…
5. Don’t stagger
Finally, staggering the shopping is a big no no. Doing shopping for the Monday, then Tuesday often means two things, one you will at somepoint be picking up that phone to your local Cantonese and secondly it means convenience stores are going to love you this week. Staggering your food shop has proved to be more expensive than if you were to visit the supermarket once and do your shopping in one go.
