Yes, you can stock your pantry for less and save time by ignoring the
conventional wisdom of grocery shopping.  As inflation escalates and reduced incomes erode our
purchasing power, learning new grocery shopping skills will help keep the
shelves at home full.  Here are twelve tips for how to do it:

Ditch the
pre-shopping pantry inventory.  The shopping
pros recommend taking an inventory of the pantry before weekly grocery shopping
trips.  Advice often given to newbie
preppers recommends buying two items to replace the one that you used last
week.  Those practices will have you
paying regular retail price for your groceries, and that’s ridiculous.  On top of that, it necessitates picking up
dozens of individual items at the store, trying to remember the prices at
checkout so you aren’t overcharged, and then putting those individual items
away in their proper location so they can be easily found.  It’s a huge waste of time and money all
around.  The vast majority of pantry
items become loss leaders in the grocery stores once or twice a year.  One money-saving strategy for food storage
preparedness involves buying in bulk quantities—cases of canned goods.  With a well-organized deep larder, the hassle
of keeping track of exactly how many cans of soup or peaches you have on hand
each week disappears. Buying fewer different items each trip means fewer prices
to remember at checkout. 

Check out the grocery
store weekly ads, but don’t be suckered by them.  Most of what’s advertised each week is
processed and/or junk food.  Yes, we’ve
got to have some quick convenient meals for those personal emergencies—burned
meal, illness, or all-around bad day—but most of the time we’re better off
cooking from scratch.  Check the
circulars mainly for case lot sales on canned goods, as well as loss leaders on
meat, dairy, and produce. 

Scout out the
discounted items.  Learn when fresh
foods are discounted at your store and shop to take maximum advantage.  At my store, the meats are usually discounted
by 8:00 each morning.  Dairy products are
discounted around 10:00.  The produce
hits the clearance rack around 10:30.  I
haven’t quite figured out when the breads show up, but as I make most of ours,
I’m not so concerned about them.  Along
the same line, scout the store out to find where the clearance items are
placed.  The Smith’s stores that I’ve
patronized throughout Northern Nevada have several locations throughout the
store for discounted items—places for meat, dairy, frozen, produce, bread, and
then other items.  They can vary a
little; for example, the store I currently frequent doesn’t separate out the
dairy or deli items but just leaves them in their regular location. Everything
is always at least 50% off and sometimes 75% off.   

Relax the rigid meal
planning.  With a well-stocked
pantry, you always have the essentials for meals at hand.  Instead of a weekly meal plan composed before
shopping, create meals around the fantastic deals you get shopping that week.  Killer deal on bananas?  It’s time for banana bread and
smoothies.  Good price on cheddar?  Sounds like macaroni and cheese.  After dinner each night, check the
refrigerator to see what needs to be used up and incorporate that into the next
day’s meals.  If the eggs are getting
older, maybe it’s time for some quiche.

Skip the coupons.  The vast majority of coupons are designed to
get you hooked on a particular product. 
It’s usually a processed food low on nutrition and high on junk and
calories and hardly what we need to be filling our pantries with.  (Unless it’s an essential comfort food for
someone in your family.) Even when the savings are calculated in, store brands
are often cheaper.  If you are one of
those coupon-clipping pros that can get the product for super cheap or free, by
all means do so.  But for a lot of people
it takes more time and involves junk and processed foods we’d rather keep out
of our homes.

Enjoy fresh items in
season only.  That’s the way life
used to be, and it’s the way it will be again as just-in-time shipping from all
over the globe collapses.  When things go
sideways, we won’t be enjoying Chilean grapes and blueberries in February.  Unless we’re in Chile.

Price comparisons.  Do the math to be sure you’re getting the
best deal.  Fortunately, many stores
include the cost per ounce on the shelf labels; it’s the law here in
Nevada.  But when items are being
discounted, especially by low-level employees, well, sometimes it becomes
obvious that math isn’t their strong suit. 
In my local store two weeks ago, all sizes of one national brand of whipping
cream were being deep discounted even though they still had 1-2 weeks before
reaching their best-by date.  Quarts were
discounted from $6.99 to $4.79.  Pints
were discounted from $4.29 to $1.99. 
Half-pints were discounted from $2.59 to $0.69.  Naturally, I scooped up the half-pints.  (In my experience, whipping cream lasts a
long time past the best-by date.)  Larger
packages aren’t always the best deal.

Don’t be a slave to
the list.  Lists are important for
not forgetting the less-frequently purchased items.  Refusing to deviate from the list, however,
keeps you from taking advantage of sales and discounts.  Should I have avoided taking advantage of the
store’s unadvertised deal of pumpkin at 50 cents per can because it wasn’t on
the list?  Hardly.  I was able to get a three-year supply for our
family.

Don’t be a slave to
the budget.  Yes, we need to live
within our means.  But often, keeping to
a set weekly budget means we end up spending more and getting less.  With flexibility, we can take advantage of
great deals on items that don’t normally go on sale and stock up.  Overall, that saves us money for other
prepping.  Some months I’m significantly over the
planned budget, but others, I’m way under. 
Yesterday, my store had gallons of peanut oil on clearance at about 60%
off, for much less than I could get the larger containers at Sam’s.  I bought seven of them, clearly tweaking the
grocery budget for this month, but ultimately saving money in the annual
budget.

Read the nutrition
labels. This is important for identifying allergens and mystery ingredients,
but often pointless for determining whether one item is more nutritious than
the next.  In those situations you’re
often just dealing with junk and convenience foods anyway, items that can be much
more healthfully made at home from scratch. 
Nutrition content is important for those food storage items that are
enriched, like milk products.  Where
reading the labels also becomes important is in dealing with servings.  Manufacturers have not only made a practice
of down-sizing packages, but they’ve also been down-sizing the servings.  Food storage companies love to do this and
then proudly proclaim that their over-priced offerings have more servings than
those of comparable companies.  When
making comparisons, be sure that the serving sizes and calorie counts are similar.

Pay attention at
checkout.  Make sure you’re being
charged correctly at checkout.  I can’t
believe how few people do this; my store overcharges me at least once or twice
a month, and it’s not by just a few pennies, either.  Yes, it’s a hassle, but it’s also important
for stores to know that you’re paying attention and their careless practice of
overcharging is not going to go unnoticed. 
This most often affects items in the store’s flyer, where the employees
fail to lower to the advertised price. 
Sometimes the issue is the checker scanning the regular UPC code,
instead of the discounted sticker code. 

Pay with cash.  This isn’t a food storage money saving tip
(though making purchases in cash has been shown to help people spend less).  It’s to keep your purchases from being
tracked.  No one else needs to know how
much flour or sugar you bought this week.

As life continues to get more interesting and we are faced
with new problems, keeping our pantries full becomes even more
challenging.  Incorporating some or all
of these strategies will go a long way towards making sure our families are
well fed, come what may.

Links to related
posts:

Best-By Dates:  What Those Numbers Stamped on Cans Really Mean

In Depth Discussion of Powdered Milk (Nutritional Analysisand Cost Comparison of Brands)