5 Tips to Cut Your Grocery Bill and Save Money During COVID-19
- Author: Mary Singleton
- Posted: 2024-06-01
While you may have noticed that your bill at the gas pump has gotten lower as a result of COVID-19, you are also feeling some pain at the supermarket checkout counter. Food prices have soared due to a combination of increased demand and supply chain issues. In addition, manufacturers are using the pandemic as an excuse to raise prices and inflate their profits. Your personal finances may depend on how well you can handle a higher grocery bill. Here are five tips to help your personal finances by keeping your foot bill down at the store.
Reduce Your Meat Intake
One of the foremost places where shoppers have experienced sticker shock is when they visit the meat department of their favorite grocery stores. Slaughterhouses and meatpacking plants have been breeding grounds for COVID-19, and meat producers already have a reputation for trying to juice their prices in more calm times. Shoppers have seen price increases of at least 15% for their meat products, and many of them are paying even more than that. One should consider switching from beef to chicken. Not only is it healthier, but chicken is also less expensive than meat. Chicken prices, while also increasing, have not gone up as much as beef costs.
Buy Larger Sizes
Since many people are stuck at home, they will find it easier to go through the food that is in their cupboard. In general, they will see less food going to waste. With this in mind, one way to save money is to buy larger sizes of whatever they are purchasing. Unit costs for food get lower the more that you buy. The best way to save is by buying in bulk if you have the room to store the food. All this takes is a little bit of advance planning and preparation to know what you want for the long term. You can see your food bills go down by as much as 25% when you buy larger sizes or in bulk.
Buy Store Brands
You may find yourself paying a premium of nearly 30% for name-brand items. For some foodstuffs, you may find it worth it to pay the extra money since there is a definite difference in taste. However, for many other products, the store brand tastes almost exactly the same as the name brand. You will get more bang for your buck when you buy the store brands. While you may prefer the comfort of buying a brand that you know, you may not get much, if anything, for the extra money that you spend. If you do not switch entirely to store brands, at least find the items where store brands are very similar to the name brand so you can save some money.
Buy Online Groceries
One of the biggest challenges that people face in the grocery store is sticking to their list. Grocery stores are experts in knowing where to place items in a way to convince you to buy a few extra things that you may not need. Suddenly, you notice that you have spent way more than you anticipated at the store. Provided that you can get the groceries delivered, buying online will keep you from making these extraneous purchases that cost you money. You would simply look up the items from your list on the website and would be better able to avoid buying the extra. Sticking to only what you need will cut your bills by a fair amount as you will make fewer impulse buys at the store.
Stay Away from the Prepared Food
Many people have little desire to cook the food themselves and feel that it is easier to buy prepared foods. You will pay dearly for this convenience as supermarkets more than double the prices of standard items when they do something to prepare them for you. It is tempting to pay the extra money to let the supermarket do all the work, but it gets expensive after a while. For example, you can pay $4 or more for a pound of pasta salad. However, when you buy the pasta and spend a few minutes to prepare the salad yourself, you have cut your costs by more than half. Try to go through a list of what you would buy prepared and see if you can indeed make it yourself.
