One tactic I mention regularly for saving money on your food purchases is to watch the grocery store flyer for sales, then plan your meals (and shopping lists) around those sales. This tactic really works - I’ve saved quite a bit doing this over the years.

However, things aren’t quite that simple - you can’t just trust the store flyer.

Over the last several months, I’ve been keeping track of prices on several key items that we buy all the time. Garbage bags, fresh spinach, toilet paper, grapes, Pepperidge Farm goldfish crackers, and so on.

I know what the typical price is on these items - I even have a small price list that has the usual prices for them.

So, a few weeks ago, when I took a long look at the flyers from my grocery stores of choice, I happened to notice that some of the “big sales” listed in the flyer weren’t on sale at all. The price was exactly the same as what I usually paid.

What gives? I did some research - calling and emailing a few people I know in the grocery business - and I came up with a few interesting facts about grocery store flyers.

For starters, a large portion of the spots in a grocery store ad are actually paid placements by the product manufacturers. That “sale” on Coca-Cola? It’s likely that Coca-Cola - or a local distributor - paid your grocery store to have their product inserted into the ad. The price of that “sale” item is often unchanged from the normal price - the only reason it’s in the flyer is to put a few more bucks in the pocket of the grocery store itself.

Why would a company pay for such placements? According to Tod Marks of Consumers Union, a mere mention of a product in a grocery store flyer can send sales of that product up as much as 500%. Thus, in many cases, the small cost of the product mention in the flyer can easily be recouped by a big bump in sales.

Another technique often used in flyers is quantity-based tricks. Let’s say, for example, that you typically buy a quart of cottage cheese for $1.49. In the flyer, you might notice that cottage cheese is on “sale” for $0.99 - but it turns out that this is the pint container, not the quart. Without careful reading, one might head out to the grocery store and grab that $0.99 “bargain” without thinking about it, actually paying more per pint of cottage cheese.

These two factors lead to the real question: how can you trust grocery store flyers at all? Here are some tactics I’ve found that work well for finding the real deals in the flyers.

First, ignore “brand name” products. Quite often, these are placed by the large food companies and don’t actually reflect much of a bargain at all. Just skip right past them. Occasionally, one of these might be a “loss leader,” but you can usually only find them if you’re really good at filtering out all of the noise.

Second, focus on the fresh items. The items that are fresh - fresh produce and fresh meats - are rarely branded at all. These items tend to be the real sales in the flyer (but not always - you should always have a good grasp on what the real prices are).

Third, “quantity” sales are often tricky. Let’s say you see some particular item on sale - 2/$5. That could mean a lot of things - it might mean that the items are actually $2.50 each and you don’t actually need to buy two items to get the discount, or it might mean that just buying one item will cost you $3.29 or so - which isn’t really a deal at all. Read the fine print and don’t just immediately buy more than you need or assume it’s a great deal.

Finally, know your quantities. Sometimes, “sales” loudly proclaimed in a flyer are for very small sizes. Once you’re actually in the store, however, you’ll find that the the larger size is actually the better deal, even though it’s not on “sale.” Sales on small quantity items almost always indicate something that’s not really a bargain (unless you can couple a coupon with it and get it for free).

Flyers have a lot of good deals, but there’s a lot of noise as well. Figure out how to filter through the noise and you’ll save yourself a lot of money on groceries.

My three year old son loves to go to the grocery store with Mom and Dad. He wanders around with us, listening to our discussions about which products to buy, and quite often expresses his own opinions. He’ll remind us that he loves V8 Fusion (our preferred fruit juice, since it’s 100% and also is half vegetable juice) and often dallies for a long time near the Pepperidge Farm goldfish crackers, as I noted two years ago (and depicted as well):

As we shop, we make tons and tons of little decisions along the way. Those decisions, on their own, seem inconsequential.

Should we buy the bulk can of diced tomatoes or the smaller can?
These tortillas feel softer, but they’re way more expensive - is it worth it?
The free range whole chickens are on sale! Should we stock up?

A choice one way or another here might save us a dollar or cause us to spend a dollar more. In the eyes of many people, it’s an inconsequential decision - just make it and keep going. One dollar doesn’t make a huge difference, right?

The problem is that each little buying decision you make is deeply tied to other buying decisions, whether consciously or not.

How so, you might ask?

All of our buying decisions are based on a set of principles in our head, ones that are often so well-grounded that they don’t even pop up in conscious thought.

Here’s a thought experiment to help you see what I mean. Imagine a product you would never buy in a grocery store - pork rinds, maybe, or perhaps insanely potent hot sauce. Now, what about that product would cause you to not buy it? You’re likely to pop up an immediate simple answer - I don’t like the taste or it’s unhealthy - but on other purchases, you’re quite willing to overlook that principle for other reasons.

In truth, when we make a decision to buy in the grocery store, we’re trying to reduce a big set of principles and inputs down to one split-second decision. And often we feel we’re completely justified in that decision - and we move on with life.

It is very easy to tease apart each little buying decision, tell yourself that it doesn’t really matter that much and that it’s okay to splurge, and then essentially ignore your final tally when you get to the checkout because each decision was justified in your mind. Doing that, though, is a game that will, time and time again, put your wallet in the hurt locker.

So, what can you do to overcome this problem?

The easy methods are the shopping list and the meal plan. Making a shopping list in advance of your visit to the grocery store simply serves to reduce the number of decisions you have to make. This, of course, leads you to making fewer bad decisions.

But that’s just the start. Once you’re in the store with your shopping list in hand, commit to three more things.

First, simply do not put anything in your cart that’s not on your list. Your list, if it’s thought out at all, should have everything you need for your meals for the next week. If you see something you feel like you need or deserve, jot it on the back of the list for next time.

Second, mark any items that you’re not simply searching for the cheapest version of. On our list, I like to put a little X by any item that I don’t intend to just buy the cheapest version of. For example, with diced tomatoes, the various brands and cans are identical in terms of ingredients, so we usually just get the cheapest version. This, again, reduces the number of opportunities for poor impulse decisions in the store.

Third, if you have specific brands in mind (because of coupons or because of previous buying experiences), put those on your list, too, along with the size. For example, we usually have a big stack of coupons for V8 Fusion (100% juice, half fruit and half vegetable). So, instead of just writing “fruit juice x 3,” I’ll write “46 oz. V8 Fusion x 3″ on the list. In other words, if you make the list more specific, you further reduce the number of potential impulse decisions in the store.

Using all of these techniques, you’ll end up making just a handful of in-the-moment choices in the grocery store - and with fewer potential decisions, you have fewer chances to make poor ones. The end result? A cart full of items that you actually want and a much smaller grocery bill.

Long time reader Bob writes in:

I like reading all of your suggestions about making a grocery list and searching for bargains. My technique is actually pretty simple. I trust Consumer Reports completely - they’ve never led me wrong. So each month when I get an issue, I write down their “best buys” in each product category. That’s what I buy - I just look for the best deal among these. I often use coupons for things on that list, too.

I actually really like this idea - it provides a wonderful balance of getting quality items for a good price. In fact, I decided to give it a try myself with a few product categories just to see the results with my own eyes, so I pulled out the May 2009 issue of Consumer Reports and went shopping with five product categories in mind.

Kids’ Breakfast Cereal
Consumer Reports identified four best buys for cereals for children, balancing health, tastiness, and price: Cheerios, Life, Kix, and Honey Nut Cheerios.

I pulled out the grocery flyers this past weekend and found a sale at Target on the General Mills cereals (Cheerios and Life). I then flipped through the coupons and quickly found a coupon for those cereals.

End result: the price for a “double box” of Cheerios or of Life, after the coupon, was cheaper than almost any other cereal in the aisle, with only some generics beating them. After doing an ingredient and Nutrition Facts comparison, Life was our product of choice. The kids utterly love it and it’s pretty good for them, too.

Glass Cleaners
Consumer Reports identified five best buys for window cleaners: Windex No Drip Foaming Action, Sprayway Ammonia Free, Windex Crystal Rain Ammonia Free, Glass Plus, and Streak Free with Ammonia (the Wal-Mart store brand).

The solution here is a simple one: shop at Wal-Mart and get the store brand at roughly a third of the price of the other brands.

Coffee
I’m far from an expert on this category (as I don’t make coffee at home - keeping it as an out-of-home treat keeps me from getting addicted to the morning joe), but Consumer Reports identified Eight O’Clock 100% Colombian, Caribou Coffee Colombia Timana, and Kickapoo Coffee Organic Colombia as the three best choices.

In the stores I visited, Eight O’Clock 100% Colombian was the cheapest of the three by far, usually costing less than $5 for a 12 ounce bag of whole bean coffee. Here’s the trick, though - there were many coffees that were less expensive.

Since I’m not familiar with this area, I asked my wife for some input and she said that unquestionably, the price premium of the Eight O’Clock coffee over Folgers is worth it. She claims the volume difference in the containers is deceiving, since it takes substantially more Folgers to make good coffee than whole bean Eight O’Clock. So, three votes for the Consumer Reports model.

Tub & Tile Cleaners
Consumer Reports says Comet Scratch Free Disinfectant with Bleach, Ajax with Bleach Scratch Free, Kaboom Shower Tub & Tile, and Green Works Natural Bathroom Cleaner are the best choices, with Green Works being not quite up to the standards of the other but the best of the “natural” cleaners.

Coupons for Comet are extremely easy to come by and they reduce the cost of Comet below the store generic brand for that item. It works well for cleaning our tubs.

Creamy Peanut Butter
This was the one area where there was some debate. Consumer Reports identifies Smucker’s Natural and Smucker’s Organic as the two best buys for peanut butter.

Smucker’s Natural is substantially cheaper than Smucker’s Organic, ringing in at $2.49 for a 12 ounce jar at my store of choice. However, there were several peanut butters available for substantially less on the shelves. Having tasted Smucker’s Natural, I can say that it is quite noticeably tastier (much stronger peanut flavor) than many of the lower-end brands, and the texture is better, too. An ingredient comparison shows that it’s healthier as well.

For me, Smucker’s Natural would be the purchase if I had a coupon for it. Otherwise, I’d put off buying the peanut butter.

My Conclusion
From my experience, Bob’s strategy simply works if you’re trying to get the maximum value for your dollar (and not just seek the bottom dollar). This strategy pairs up well with looking at coupons and flyers, reducing the price benefit that the store brand has over the “best buy.”

Will I switch to this strategy? Perhaps not completely, but I am starting a list of the Consumer Reports best buys. It works surprisingly well.

My wife and I have been members at Sam’s Club for years. We use it to buy tons of items in bulk - but over time, we’ve realized that some items simply aren’t cheaper there. While visiting, I’ve noticed the same trend with Costco as well - it’s got spectacular prices on some staples, but poor prices on other things.

Is it worth it for you? I can’t answer that question - it’s clearly worth it for us, as we save literally hundreds a year shopping at Sam’s Club versus shopping at other grocery stores and department chains.

However, I can suggest a pretty easy way for you to figure out for yourself if you would save money at a warehouse store.

Make a “Bulk Buying” List
Your first step is to make a big list of all of the things you might be willing to buy in bulk for your home. The items to really focus on are nonperishable items that you use consistently and perishables that you use only on a very consistent basis. Some of these might include dishwashing detergent, laundry detergent, laundry softener, garbage bags, flour, rice, bread, milk, eggs, fruit juice, cleaning supplies, water filters, breakfast cereal, oatmeal, and so on.

One great way to do this is to save grocery and department store receipts for a few weeks (or a few months) and use those as a starting point. Go through those receipts, pick out the items that are regularly repeated (or are nonperishable and you have room to store), and make a new list of just those items.

On that same list, write down the prices and the units. So, for example, if you buy a bundle of 36 rolls of toilet paper, write down the number of rolls and the price of the package. Number of rolls, number of bags, number of packets, number of servings, and so on are all key numbers to write down here.

After that, you’ll want to calculate the price per unit of each of these items. It’s easy - just divide the price of the package by the number of units. If you bought a 36 pack of toilet paper for $7.99, you’d just divide $7.99 by 36 to get $0.22 per roll. This is an important number to have when you’re evaluating bulk prices.

Get a Day Pass
Once you have your list of things you’d regularly buy in bulk, get a day pass to your local warehouse store. Call the local branches and ask whether or not you can get a day pass at the front desk. Most such stores will offer one once - often, any purchases you make with that pass would cost you 10% extra (but don’t worry about that).

Go to the store, pick up your pass, and go around the store with your list and your calculator. Ideally, you’ll want to find as many of the items as you can - and you’ll put only the ones that are actually a bargain into your cart.

Know How to Calculate Per-Unit Prices
Figuring out which ones are a bargain is pretty easy. Just find the item you’re looking for, find the price and the number of items in the package, then use your calculator to divide the price by the number of items to get the price per item. If it’s better than the one on your list, add the item to your cart and jot down the better price per item on your list, along with the number of units. Don’t worry about the 10% difference on your one day pass at all yet.

Easy enough - most of you probably yawned your way through that tip. But here’s the kicker. At the end of the trip, you’re going to need to decide if the full membership is worth your money. Here’s how you do that.

Figure Up Your Total Deal
Go through your list and figure out the difference between the two prices per unit. For example, if you’ve got $0.16 per roll toilet paper in your cart and your previous best deal was $0.22, the difference is $0.06. Multiply that difference by the size of the package in the cart. So, if you’ve got a 36-pack of toilet paper rolls, multiply the $0.06 savings by 36 rolls, giving you $2.16.

Do this for every item in your cart, then add up the results. This total should be significant enough that it’s very clear you’ll save money over the course of a year. You might find that the stuff in your cart pays for the membership right now, or that it’s close. If that’s the case, go straight to the customer service desk, sign up for an annual membership, and check out. If that’s not the case, pull out any items that are cheaper at your other shopping locations and check out whatever is left in your cart (since, even with the 10% charge, they should be cheaper than you’d pay elsewhere).

On our staples - dishwashing detergent, water filters, bread, wine (Sam’s actually has a very good wine selection), olive oil, and so on - we regularly save enough to pay for the annual membership in a single trip.

The Real Trick
The real trick with warehouse clubs is to know how to focus on the stuff you’ll actually use in good time and avoid the stuff you don’t actually use in large quantity. When we shop there, we basically only buy things we know we will consume in their entirety in the near future (i.e., a bottle of wine) or we use so consistently that we’ll get through it pretty quickly (i.e., dishwashing detergent).

If you don’t stick to a similar policy, you’ll end up with a cupboard full of unusable stuff - and that’s a huge waste of money. Focus on the staples, though, and warehouse clubs can likely save you quite a few dollars.

Good luck!

My wife and I shop for groceries on a weekly basis (with the exception of a rare mid-week stop for more milk or other pure staples). We shop from a grocery list, usually nail the sales, and focus almost entirely on buying produce. The end result is that we usually save quite a bit at the grocery store compared to what we could be spending. This has enabled us to buy higher quality foods, like hormone-free milk and free-range chicken and eggs, but it could also go to help us pay the bills.

When I tell this to people, they usually sigh and say, “Doesn’t all that planning take a lot of time?” Frankly, it doesn’t take that much time at all, and since it saves us from making multiple grocery store visits in a week, it might actually save time in the long run in addition to the money saved.

Here’s exactly how we do it.

Step 1: Get a Flyer
The most important step is to get a flyer from your grocery store - or perhaps flyers from two or three local grocery stores. There are a lot of ways to get these - in a local newspaper, in the mail, or online, for starters. I usually download the flyer from the website of the grocery stores we visit - Hy-Vee and Fareway.

Step 2: Find Sales on Fresh Ingredients
Once I have the flyers, I go through them and mark any sales on fresh ingredients that they have. For example, as I write this, I’m reviewing Hy-Vee’s ad for October 14 through October 20, and I’m noticing several things on sale: fresh zucchini for $0.89 a pound, fresh yellow squash for $0.89 a pound, sweet yellow onions for $0.99 a pound, yellow bell peppers for $0.99 a pound, tons of apple sales, ground turkey for $2.18 a pound, hormone- and antibiotic-free cageless chicken for $1.99 a pound, and so on.

I ignore the sales on most prepackaged items. We focus on buying fresh foods and staples like flour for our meals. Over the long haul, the fresh items are cheaper and healthier.

Step 3: Do Some Recipe Research
This week, I know I’ll be working with ground turkey, whole chicken, zucchini and squash, yellow bell peppers, sweet yellow onions, apples, and the other meat we have in our freezer from bulk purchases. What recipes can I find that utilize these ingredients?

I go to a recipe search engine like FoodieView and just enter combinations of the on-sale fresh ingredients that sound interesting. My first attempt was searching for “turkey, zucchini, onion” and I immediately found a turkey and zucchini meat loaf recipe from Epicurious. Searching for “yellow bell, chicken” gets me an interesting chicken bell pepper recipe (which I’ll use, but modify a bit). Chicken-apple-bacon burgers? Yum. Plus, you can easily grill sliced squash (dipped in olive oil and ground pepper) for a wonderful vegetable side dish.

These ideas provide the backbone for several meals throughout the week, so I start planning ahead.

Step 4: Create a Week-Long Meal Plan
I usually start off with my blank meal-planning worksheet and fill in the dinners first based on the above recipes. For us, breakfasts are usually quite simple and lunches usually consist of leftovers, so those columns are quite easy as well.

I usually try to make most weeknight meals pretty easy. I usually attempt one difficult recipe during the week and one on a weekend, with the others being simple. Whole chicken roasting? That’s a difficult one. Chicken-apple burgers? Easy.

We usually have homemade pizza one night a week, often Fridays. We also often have pasta one night a week, often Tuesdays (for some reason). So I’ll pencil those things in, too. We have plenty of ingredients on hand for both, so I don’t really need to shop for them - buying flour in bulk makes crust easy, and we keep tons of tomato sauce and ground beef on hand at all times.

Given all that, it’s pretty easy to fill in the rest of the squares on that meal plan. I usually only need to come up with five suppers per week and two to three lunches per week (for meals where leftovers from the night before don’t carry over). Often, these are just simple sandwiches.

Step 5: Make a Shopping List from the Meal Plan
Once the meal plan is in place, I go through and list all of the ingredients for all of the recipes I’ll make and then cross off the things we have as I find them in the cupboards or refrigerator. Most of this is very easy, but it saves us money - we don’t accidentally buy things we already have on hand.

I also check the staples - flour, milk, yeast, juice boxes, and so on - and add replenishments to the list.

Step 6: Go Grocery Shopping - And Stick to Your List
Once you have the list in place, it’s simple. Take it to the grocery store and stick to it. Don’t toss stuff that’s not on your list into the cart. Since you’ve already planned your meals, you know that you don’t need it.

Using this path will also make grocery shopping itself substantially quicker. Most of your purchases will be around the edges of the store, in the produce and meat sections. You won’t have to go up and down every aisle to find the items you need. This will shave significant time off of your shopping trip.

In the end, though, when you go home, unpack your groceries, and put that meal plan up on the fridge, you’ll find that overall it hasn’t taken you any more time than a grocery trip without planning would have taken, plus you now have a clear plan for meals for the week and you’ve saved significant money at the grocery store.

Good luck!

As a rule of thumb, I think it’s a good idea to try generic versions of products you already use, or, at the very least, try out lower end versions.

But there’s a problem with that philosophy, one that’s explained very well by Allie, who recently emailed me on this topic:

The reason I don’t buy generics is because I’ve usually already found a brand I like, so why should I risk buying something I don’t like?

It’s a good argument, so let’s walk through the logic a bit and see where it leads us.

The Generic Argument
Let’s say you’re in a grocery store and you’re looking at your various options for tomato sauce. You can either buy a name brand you’re familiar with - like Hunt’s - or you can buy the store’s generic brand. Which do you choose?

If you flip the cans over and compare the ingredients, you’ll usually find that they’re identical. The contents of the can you’re buying are the one and the same for many items.

The only significant differences, in many cases, are the labeling and the price. The name brand usually has a prettier label from a brand you recognize, but the other one is usually substantially cheaper.

If the item inside the package is the same, take the cheaper one. Is it really a value to spend extra for that nice label and that name that you may have heard of before? Likely, it’s not.

But Not All Items Are The Same
Obviously, though, there are differences in quality between brands with many items. You might not be able to distinguish between tomato sauces, for example, but you certainly can distinguish between brands of toilet paper.

Because of this varying quality, most people tend to find a brand that they know they like and stick with it (lo and behold, the status quo bias strikes again!). It actually makes sense - it makes shopping easier and you know you’ll wind up with a product that works for you.

This is the thought process that leads people to fill up their cart with name brand items. They are familiar with those items and know that they meet their basic needs, and because this is the “norm,” they fill up their cart with those items, quietly paying the premium cost for a perceived insurance of basic quality.

The “Generic” Experiment
Instead of following that route, try this one on for size. The next time you go to the grocery store, actively replace all of your regular purchases with the low-end generics. Buy the cheap dish soap, the cheap deodorant, and the cheap wheat bread. Then just use them like normal and see if you actually notice any difference.

Likely, you will notice that some items are lower in quality. Some might even find that some aren’t acceptable for your use. However, many of the items will just automatically replace the more expensive versions without you even noticing.

Keep track of the ones that work for you and the ones that don’t. You may find that generic spaghetti is a good buy for your family, but your family hates the generic toilet paper. Lesson learned - go back to the name brand toilet paper, but stick with the generic spaghetti.

Make Up For The Losses
All of this sounds great in theory, but it doesn’t really help if you’re standing in your kitchen one night holding a jar of really foul generic peanut butter that you don’t want to consume. If you’re just throwing that jar of peanut butter away, isn’t that a waste of money?

Of course it’s a waste of money, but if you discover a handful of generic items that work for you and your family, it more than balances out over the long haul. Let’s say you try twenty five generic items on your next shopping trip and, on average, they cost $2 and save you $0.50 off the name brand. At the end of that week, you find that ten of the generics are up to snuff and become regular parts of your grocery list, while ten more aren’t up to snuff and five more were bad enough that you had to chuck them.

On that first grocery bill, you saved $12.50 overall. At home, though, you had to chuck five items, which at $2 each ate up $10 of that savings, leaving you only $2.50 ahead and with ten generics you really don’t like. Not the best deal, right?

But look at the long haul. If you buy the ten generics you do like twice a month, your newfound use of generics saves you $10 a month in perpetuity. Every month, you’re spending $10 less than you would have spent and your family is just as happy as they were before.

Give “The Generic Experiment” a Try!
This week, buy generic versions of everything on your shopping list. Keep a list of all of the generics you bought and put it on the fridge. If you discover one of the generic items isn’t up to snuff, just cross it off that list on the fridge.

The items that remain on that list are the “safe generics” - ones that are okay for you to buy. If you find yourself with even a few items on your “safe generic” list, this experiment will pay for itself and far more over the long haul. Likely, you’ll be surprised how many of the generics are as good as the name brands for your own use, and that fact will save you a lot of money on your food and household expenses.

Recently, I made an offhand mention that I’m a user of Amazon Grocery and this intrigued several commenters, so I thought I’d walk through the shopping process that leads me to using Amazon Grocery for some items.

What’s Amazon Grocery?
For those unaware, Amazon Grocery is a section of Amazon.com where one can buy most dry grocery goods and have them shipped directly to your home. This ranges from things like baking mixes to things like diapers and baby formula. Rather than transporting them yourself, Amazon ships the items right to your front door.

As a rule of thumb, the prices at Amazon Grocery are usually a bit higher than the prices in the grocery store, but using it effectively offers several advantages that cause it to be much cheaper for us on many items.

First Thing: Know the Prices
Before you even consider shopping at Amazon Grocery, know how much you’re spending on items at the grocery store. Take out your last few grocery receipts - including both food items and household stuff like laundry detergent, dishwashing detergent, etc. - and go through and mark everything that’s dry on that list. This gives you a baseline: you know exactly how much you’re paying for the item at your local store.

Once you have that in hand, fire up Amazon Grocery and start comparing prices. Almost always, the Amazon price will be somewhat higher than the price on your receipt - don’t sweat it quite yet.

How I Save Money Using Amazon Grocery
Of course, that baseline price for those items is just a starting point. Amazon offers a ton of ways for me to trim down that price and often get it to a level that’s lower than what the grocery store is offering. Here are the tactics I use.

First, I signed up for an Amazon.com Visa for my purchases there. You already need a credit card for your purchases there anyway and the bonus program is stellar if you use it exclusively for Amazon purchases (I use a Citi Driver’s Edge card for most of my purchases). When you sign up for that card when you’re processing an order there, you immediately get $30 off of your order. So, even on a one-time use situation, you can get $30 worth of free groceries shipped to your house.

Second, I use that card for all purchases from Amazon. The card gives you 3% back in Amazon credit for all purchases done with the card on Amazon.com. In other words, when you rack up $833 in purchases on the card, you’ll get a certificate in the mail with a $25 off coupon code on it.

Third, I take advantage of “Subscribe and Save”. Let’s say you run through dishwashing detergent and laundry soap and diapers like clockwork. I know we do - I can practically set the clock by how often we need to refill stuff. If you sign up at Amazon for their “subscribe and save” program on these products, they let you schedule automatic purchases and shipments of these items to your home - and shave another 15%-20% off of the purchase price.

Fourth, I keep an eye out for Amazon Grocery coupons. Once every few months or so, they’ll offer a coupon giving $10 off any Amazon Grocery purchase of $49 or more, which when compounded with the other stuff can really trim your costs.

An Example
Let’s say, hypothetically, that I only wanted to use Amazon Grocery to buy diapers. I log into Amazon and set up a plan to ship me a box of 126 Stage 4 Huggies every month for a year. The default price is high for that box ($34.99 for a box of 126), but not outrageous.

First, I sign up for the “subscribe and save” option. That takes the price down from $34.99 for the box to $27.99 a box. Then, when I check out, I sign up for that Amazon card - giving me the first box for free and $2.01 off the second box. This means that my cost for a year’s worth of these diapers shipped to my door is now $305.88 - a cost of $25.49 on average for each box, which is at or below what you’d pay at the store for the same box. Furthermore, I use the Amazon card for all of the purchases, getting myself about 40% of the way to a $25 gift certificate there. Even better, these diapers just magically arrive on my doorstep without having to worry about it.

Amazon Grocery Doesn’t Always Work, Though
There are a lot of items where “subscribe and save” isn’t available or doesn’t make sense for you, and there are some items where the local store simply offers significantly better prices. It really pays to do the footwork and look beyond the initial price that you see - look at all of the savings available to you and see what is really your best deal.

I don’t use Amazon Grocery for all of the stuff that I could potentially get, but I do use it quite often - and if the price on Amazon ends up being virtually the same as the store cost, I use Amazon because it’s more cost-effective for me to have an item delivered to my front stoop than to grab it at the store, put it in the car, haul it home, and bring it inside. The scheduling is particularly convenient, too, if you can get the price point to the right level - the convenience of just having dishwashing detergent or laundry soap delivered to your door right on time, like clockwork, is quite helpful.

Recently, I discussed the value of investing in yourself - putting time and money into improving you, not building assets. Today, we’ll look at one area of investing in yourself as part of an ongoing series on the topic, spread out once per weekday over two weeks. If you’d like to review all the entries, look at the investing in yourself subcategory.

Just a week ago, I touted the benefits of investing in yourself via exercise, and it met with a lot of interesting discussion, including the astute point that exercise and diet are two halves of the same coin when it comes to managing your short-term and long-term health.

It’s true: the food you eat every day has a profound effect on your long term health. High-calorie and high-fat foods might be convenient now, but that time you save right now is taken away from you at the end of your life as a result of unhealthy eating. Even more so, bad eating reduces the quality of your daily life even now in your healthy years. It’s easy to witness this effect - try eating very healthy for a few days and you’ll notice a significant change in how you feel. I often notice it after just one meal - a very healthy breakfast (oatmeal and/or fresh fruits) makes a huge difference for me.

I’m not talking about dieting for weight loss here - I’m talking about eating well for a lifetime of good health. Such eating usually results in weight loss, especially as you transition to it from less healthy eating, but the best way to invest in yourself with your diet is to eat naturally nutritious foods in a balanced fashion.

But what is a nutritious diet? This concept has been heavily marketed over the last decade or so, often to the point that it’s hard for the average consumer to separate fact from perception. I’ve read a lot of books related to food over the last several years (and I’ve discussed a few on here, including In Defense of Food and Volumetrics) and I’ve found that time and time again, a few basic principles are all you really need to cover your bases for a healthy diet.

Prepare more food at home.
At a restaurant of any kind, you’re relying on the food preparers to make selections for you and their primary interest is providing a tasty meal at a fair cost (with different levels of taste and cost depending on the establishment). Most restaurants aren’t really concerned in the least about the long-term health implications of the food you eat - they’re mostly just concerned that it’s tasty and that it pleases you in the short term.

When you prepare food at home, you have more control over the stuff you put into your body. You can make choices that lead towards a healthier lifestyle. When you make pasta, you can substitute in whole wheat - or even make some of your own. You can choose from a wide variety of spaghetti sauces, or else boil up some tomatoes yourself. You can buy a cheap loaf of bread, an artisan loaf, or make one yourself from just a handful of ingredients (flour, sugar, salt, and yeast).

Here are some tips if you’re afraid to make that leap.

Get a cookbook that focuses on teaching technique with a gentle hand. My favorite cookbook along these lines is Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything. If there’s something basic that I’m unfamiliar with, this is the book I turn to for tips on getting started. Better yet, Bittman’s recipes tend to lean toward the healthy side (for the most part) and are quite simple to follow.

At first, focus on simple stuff that you’ll find tasty. Don’t try to make something intriguing but nearly impossible right off the bat. Also, don’t decide that the day you’re going to start cooking at home is the day you’re going vegan. Start off making comfort foods, even if they’re not the most healthy dishes you can make, and choose ones that aren’t overly complex. For me, spaghetti with a tomato sauce is the perfect meal for people just starting to cook at home - it’s very simple to prepare in its basic form, most of the stuff you’ll need is easy to acquire, and when you want to start kicking it up in complexity and healthiness (making sauce or pasta or breadsticks from scratch), the basic form is very adaptable.

Eat more vegetables, especially leafy ones.
Our bodies are designed to eat more fruits and vegetables than meat. This harkens back to our hunter-gatherer days, where our diets would consist of mostly gathered fruits, nuts, and vegetables and an occasional large helping of meat when a hunt would be successful. Millions of years of adaptation attuned our biochemistry to this - only in the last few hundred years has our diet changed significantly from that basic structure.

Eat a wide variety of vegetables and fruits, especially fresh ones. Try everything. You’ll find some you like and some you don’t - that’s okay. Just make sure you’re not eating the same vegetable over and over or it will get boring (and it’s not particularly the most healthy choice, either). You’ll also find some stuff that surprises you - my parents both hated okra and so I never tried it until I was in my mid-twenties, when I discovered that I quite liked it.

Eat at least one salad a day. I really, really enjoy a basic salad (lettuce, spinach, radishes, carrots, etc.) with a bit of ranch or blue cheese dressing on it. It’s a very healthy thing to eat, very easy to prepare, and not very expensive, either. We eat one as part of our evening meal almost every night and I occasionally eat one as my lunch, too.

Eat a larger portion of vegetables than meat at any given meal. It’s not very fair to give an exact amount for each one because there are so many variables, but you can rarely go wrong with simply making sure there are more vegetables on your plate than there is meat. Keep that as a constant rule of thumb and you’ll be doing fine.

Avoid heavily processed foods.
Again, the logic for this harkens back to the foods that our bodies are biochemically adapted to eat. We’re made to eat the nutrients found in fresh foods, not the ones found in heavily processed foods. Here are a few things to keep your eye out for.

High-fructose corn syrup appears in a lot of foods. It’s a sugar substitute in many industrial foods because it’s cheaper, easy to blend, and leads to a long shelf life. Because of these properties, HFCS appears in abundance in expected foods and even pops up in significant quantities in food you wouldn’t expect. The consequence of this is that it raises your sweetener intake significantly - and increased sugar intake is not a good thing. You’re far better off just sticking with naturally-occurring sugars - if you need a sugar fix, eat an orange or a banana and avoid foods with HFCS.

Startling health claims are usually a sure sign that a food has been significantly altered in an industrial process, quite often with additives of some sort that are very hard to figure out from the label. Don’t buy a processed food because it has plant sterols added to it - just go eat a vegetable instead.

A large number of ingredients that you can’t easily identify is another sign of serious processing. Again, staple foods have all of the nutritional value that a person needs, so why would you consume this stuff, especially if you don’t know what it is? When you buy a food, check the ingredients label and if you start seeing a lot of stuff you don’t know, reconsider putting it into your body unless you’ve done the research on this stuff.

Buy foods from people who care about food quality.
The best way to buy food is to buy it from other people: people you can talk to and can tell you how it was made or grown or produced. Around here, I’m a big fan of the local Picket Fences Creamery. They’re local, give public tours pretty much whenever you want, maintain a blog, have “Sample Sundays” where you can stop by and try lots of the things they make, and generally wear their passion for what they do on their sleeve. They make a quality product out in the open that I can witness and know what goes into the food.

Buy local. Whenever you have a chance, buy your food from a local source, particularly one where you can literally visit the place where the food came from and follow it every step along the way. This way, you know exactly what’s in that food. You can carry that even further and have a garden yourself.

Attend a farmer’s market. I love our local farmers market - I get a lot of produce there during the right season and I’ve even considered selling something there a few times. Here are some tips for newcomers - the best advice I can give is to just go, see what’s there, and talk to people. You might even consider getting involved in a co-op, where you pay for a share of a farm and in exchange they deliver vegetables to you on a regular basis.

Set time aside for meals if at all possible, and avoid eating on the run.
One of the true highlights of my day is dinner with my family. We all sit around the dinner table - even my six month old daughter in her high chair - and we eat together with conversation. My wife and I talk about politics and current events, my son tells us about his day’s adventures at daycare (usually involving a blue truck), and my daughter usually passes around a lot of smiles and gurgles at everyone.

Taking the time to devote to food is not only spiritually fulfilling, but it can be beneficial to your diet as well.

Never eat alone. Dinner conversation is the single best way to keep you from bolting down your food. Get engaged in the conversation and eat the meal slowly - you’ll find yourself enjoying the food more and not eating as much of it.

If you must eat on the road, avoid places where they bring the food directly to your car. It’s a pretty safe rule of thumb that food preparation that is put directly into your car is probably not the healthiest choice to make. If you do have to eat on the run, bring something from home or stop at a grocery store to get something remotely healthy. A drive-thru is a dangerous place for your health, no matter how yummy it is.

In a nutshell, I think Michael Pollan nails it when he says “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” Live by that and you’ll be all right.