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.

Many people don’t bother to clip coupons for various reasons, mostly revolving around the belief that a fifty cent coupon doesn’t make it worth the effort. On the surface, I agree - without a very clever coupon strategy, it’s probably not worth the effort.

About two months ago, I was talking about this very fact with a friend of mine who works for Hy-Vee, the large grocery store chain here in Iowa. He gave me a tip: he said to take the coupon section out of the Sunday paper and put it aside for four weeks - don’t even bother to look at it. Four weeks later, open it up and clip everything that’s even remotely of interest, whether you’d buy it normally or not.

At that point, take the wad of coupons to the store and just look at the shelves. Magically, most of those coupons you have will sync up very well with stuff that’s already on sale on the shelves. When you combine the sale price and the coupon, you’ll usually be able to get items for next to nothing.

I tried this myself, actually. I saved the flyers from mid-December and then just cut them up earlier this week to take them to the store. What did I find? About 40% of the coupons I cut out matched up with items on sale. I wound up getting T. Marzetti salad dressing for less than a dollar, a package of diapers at the cheapest rate I believe I’ve ever bought them for, and a container of quite good vanilla ice cream for $0.19 - and those are just the ones I remember.

Why does this work? Coupons in the newspaper are usually the first wave of a product push from large companies. They’ll put out coupons to start bumping up the sales, then they’ll move onto sale prices later on in the promotion. The reason for doing these in waves is so that the overall product sales trend looks solidly positive and not just a big spike with a fall-off. Plus, coupon users who use the product, like it, return to the store, and notice the item on sale are often willing to buy the item again. I’ll admit to noticing this working for me in the past with products like V-8 Fusion.

After discovering this nifty attribute, I’ve quickly moved to a big adjustment in my usual grocery shopping strategy. It no longer matters whether I “sync up” with the arrival of the Sunday paper - I just need to clip the coupons roughly a month after I receive the flyer and use them the next time I go to the grocery store.

So, as before, I make a shopping list each week. I just keep writing down staples that are getting low along with ingredients needed for any meals that I’m thinking about making. I usually use a notepad on the refrigerator for this, along with Remember the Milk.

Sometime shortly before I go, I get out a month-old coupon flyer and clip everything that might match something on my list. I’ll also clip anything that I know we can always use - like diapers - along with anything that’s a potentially reasonable purchase, like salad dressings because we often eat salad.

After that, I head out to the store when it’s convenient (often early on Saturday mornings) and use the coupons effectively. Whenever you see a sale item that you also have a coupon for, you’re usually doing quite well and can often get a pretty good item for just pennies - or at least far cheaper than the normal price and usually notably cheaper than the generic version.

This technique saved me about $20 during my last grocery store visit - compared to normal retail prices - for about thirty minutes of extra effort at the breakfast table, cutting coupons and putting together the grocery list. That $20 doesn’t include the fact that the grocery list kept me on task at the store, helping me find items I actually needed and ignore items I don’t. That’s a worthwhile frugal activity, in my opinion.

Many Americans (including many of my friends) are conditioned by many years of marketing to select name brand products at the store. They’ll skip right by the generic rice puffs and buy the identical Rice Krispies for a dollar more per box. They’ll skip by the 100% store brand juice and pick up Juicy Juice, the same thing with a fifty cent markup.

It’s completely understandable that people wish to choose the product they’re most familiar with, but it’s also an expensive choice in many cases. Generics are often prepared identically to name-brand products or are only slight variations on the name brand, but the cost is far less. Why? Advertising - with the name brand, you have to support the company’s marketing budget as well.

Yet, for many, there still remains a certain “taboo” about buying generics. If you feel that way, I encourage you to try the following things the next time you’re at the grocery store.

Find the “generic” parallel for some of your purchases. Many canned products, breakfast cereals, and so on have generic forms that are very similar. Quite often, people rush through the store and grab the name brand on instinct without actually bothering to find the generic item.

Compare the ingredients in the generic and the name brand. I was shocked when I first did this - many times, the ingredients in the two are identical - no difference at all. In a few cases, the generic was more healthy - it would have the same ingredients, but in a different order, indicating a smaller proportion of high fructose corn syrup, for example.

If there is a noticeable difference, decide whether the cost difference is worth it. Quite often, you’ll find the generic’s ingredients are just fine compared to the name brand one, even if there are some differences. For example, you might find that the name brand tomato paste has no salt in it, while the generic has a tiny amount of sodium in it. Is it worth $0.50 for that difference?

If it brings comfort to you, use the non-generic packaging at home. Something my mother used to do to reduce complaints in the morning is put generic cereal in the name brand box. I didn’t realize this for years, but if I didn’t actually witness my mother buying the cereal at the store, it was usually the generic form in the name brand box.

For most purchases, I buy the store brand - there are very few name brands that I purchase over the store brand, and the only reason I do in those cases is that I’ve tried both and the name brand has enough of a quality difference to make it worthwhile (diapers come to mind here). I also put in an effort to pore through the ads for the store and also the Sunday coupons to see if I can get a deal on the name brand that’s even cheaper than the generic - and it happens more often than you might think.

Most food purchases at the grocery store boil down to one of four factors:

Is it healthy? Is the food low in fat and provide good nutritional quality? Is it devoid of chemicals of mysterious origin? I also include ethical issues here, such as buying from local traders and such - healthy in a different way.

Is it cheap? Is the price reasonable compared to other similar food options? Is this item going to bend my food budget?

Is it tasty? Does this look like an enjoyable item to eat? Could this be part of an enjoyable dish?

Is it quick? Is the preparation time for this food relatively small? Will preparing this food interfere with other activities in my life?

Most people in the first world will take these four factors into account when considering a food purchase, but in varying degrees. For example, I focus on healthy above all when buying food that my toddler will eat, but I often focus on tasty for myself. During my earlier years, quick was the top factor.

However, I like to find items that manage to hit as many of these areas as possible. Here are eight techniques that I use to find home run food purchases.

Read through the sales flyer before going This takes care of the cheap, letting you use the other criteria to make a judgment on the food. For example, if I see produce at a great price in the flyer, I’ll often make a point to look up a recipe for it (making it tasty and possibly quick) - this turns into a home run purchase because produce on sale is already healthy and cheap.

Stock up on herbs and spices Herbs and spices are magical - they manage to turn a bland but healthy food into a tasty concoction. It’s worth an investment in some jars of quality herbs and spices of various types because of their amazing ability to take food that is healthy and make it tasty, too. Here’s an essential collection of herbs and spices to get you started.

Figure out how to make salads you like Salads are incredibly quick to make and are also very healthy (and lettuce is often cheap), but for me they’re often lacking in the tasty department. To make this a grand slam, I spent a lot of time trying various salad dressings and toppings until discovering the things that really make a salad pop for me (mushrooms, a sprinkling of cheese, onions, homemade garlic croutons, and a touch of vinaigrette dressing). It was worth the effort - now I have a staple food that hits a grand slam for me.

Use prepackaged foods as a template Prepackaged convenience foods are very strong in terms of tasty and quick and usually cheap, but they fail terribly at healthy. Instead of grabbing your favorite convenience food, try using it as a template for preparing your own. Match the ingredients with fresh and healthy versions and make several batches at home in advance so you can prepare them quickly when it comes time.

Try unexpected things This usually comes into the cheap realm: look for inexpensive and healthy items and give them a shot. Because of this, I’ve truly discovered the joy of cucumbers and onions - just slice a few cucumbers and an onion into a bowl with one parts water and four part vinegar (plenty to cover the onions and cucumbers), dash in just a bit of salt (to taste, you can add more if you like), and put it in the fridge. This is a delicious quick snack that’s very healthy, too, and it works as an appetizer before meals - my son even loves them and will munch on a cucumber slice before the main meal.

Look for recipes adaptable to the crockpot / slow cooker (or designed for it) This somewhat solves the quick aspect by allowing you to actually prepare the food whenever you’d like. One technique worth doing is to grab one of those frozen crock pot meals from the freezer section, reading the ingredients in it, then picking them up separately (making it more healthy) - in other words, use the template tip in conjunction with the crockpot. Another one is to find some crock pot recipes in advance. Here’s a primer on the crock pot and five great recipes for it.

If you’re picking up a canned item, see if it’s fresh Looking at the canned vegetables for an upcoming meal? See if that vegetable is fresh. The same goes for fruits and for meats as well - if you can get the item sans preservatives, you’re basically making a healthier choice, likely a cheaper choice, and also likely a tastier choice.

Buy lots of staples For me, chicken breasts and tomatoes are the two best staple foods one can get. You can make chicken marinara one night, then have chicken tortilla soup the next. Using such staples is quick (you can often prepare them all at once - making tomato juice or boiling the breasts) and also healthy (you’re starting off with the basic food). Plus, they’re so adaptable that you can make all sorts of delicious dishes from them.

A bonus tip: don’t be afraid of leftovers. Instead, learn how to use spices and other techniques to rejuvenate them.

For about the last year, my wife and I have purchased several household items in bulk from Amazon. Not only is the shipping free, but we don’t pay sales tax and we rack up lots of bonus points on our Amazon card by doing this. Our philosophy is that if Amazon has the same or even a slightly higher price than our local shopping outlets, we buy the bulk item from Amazon. Here’s the process we use to ensure that we’re getting a good deal.

First, we do weekly checks of the level of our supplies. We check the amount of diapers, baby wipes, laundry detergent, shampoo, soap, cleaning agents, toilet paper, and so on. This is part of our normal routine for preparing our weekly shopping list - if we notice an item is getting low, we add it to the list.

Next, we check for prices on Amazon for some of the bulk items before we go shopping. We just look up the items we need on Amazon and note their prices and their sizes. Here are four examples from a recent shopping trip:

Lever 2000 Energize (our preferred soap) @ $17.41 for 24 bars, or $0.73 a bar
Pampers Cruisers (stage 4) @ 39.79 for 140 diapers, or $0.28 a diaper
Pampers Wipes @ 23.54 for 770 wipes, or $3.06 per 100 wipes
Colgate Total @ 22.41 for 6 7.8 oz. tubes, or $0.48 per ounce

Notice how we’ve broken them down into cost per unit, so we can easily make comparisons at the store. Also, to save time, we keep most of our regular purchase items bookmarked so we can quickly run through them and retrieve prices - they actually vary quite a bit, and there are times when Amazon is the better deal and our store is the better deal.

What about other brands? We generally follow Consumer Reports’ recommendations for item quality and because of that we rarely have significant problems with items not working like we hoped. Even though the prices are often higher per unit, it’s worth the additional price on such items if you’re not finding them frustrating or of low quality. That doesn’t mean we completely abandon sale items; we generally find about four or five brands of each item acceptable and will buy these if there is a significant discount.

Once we have our Amazon prices in hand, we head to the store. We generally buy most of our bulk items at a warehouse store, so we buy our bulk items there first. We usually do any needed cost-per-unit math on our cell phones and then buy the option that has the lowest cost per unit - to a degree. If the prices are very close, we usually go with Amazon because (1) they deliver to the doorstep, (2) we earn more points through them, and (3) sales tax (in some cases).

What about coupons? If we happen to have a coupon for an item, we bring it along and use it in our calculations at the store. If the item is still cheaper at Amazon, we don’t use the coupon - in fact, I’ve actually handed coupons to other shoppers in this situation that were appearing to be about to buy the item.

Doesn’t this take a lot of time? Not really. Usually, both of us go shopping (we make an activity out of it with our child, trying to instill a healthy and rational way to shop, and we usually interrupt it in the middle with a trip to a park and a picnic lunch) and one of us is looking for items while the other is calculating prices. It doesn’t really add any significant time to the equation, especially if you would actually spend any time at all comparing two items and trying to decide which one is the better deal. That’s what we do - we just have a plan when we walk in the door.

In the recent past, I mentioned that our new home’s location has a Sam’s Club and a Costco almost the same distance apart, and now that we will finally have storage space, the opportunity to really take advantage of warehouse shopping became clear.

To decide which one we would go with (a significant decision, because both have membership fees in the $40 range), I took a trip to both stores in the last week, mostly to mill around, see what was available, check prices on some specific items I know we’ll buy in bulk, and then use that information to make a decision. Although Costco had some advantages (better electronics selection, somewhat nicer layout, and fresh produce while Sam’s had none), the advantages of Sam’s Club were too much to overcome. Here are seven reasons why I chose Sam’s Club over Costco.

Location, location, location Although the two stores are roughly equidistant from our future home, Sam’s Club is much closer to my daily commute. This is a significant advantage for Sam’s Club, though not a deal maker.

Diapers, diapers, diapers Sam’s Club has better diaper prices than Costco on the brand that we use (Pampers Swaddlers and Cruisers), but both are far better than the local department stores and also better than Amazon. Given that we have a child still in diapers and another one on the way in September, this is a very important factor for us.

Item selection I made a list of fifteen specific food items that we regularly buy that aren’t obvious common ones, ranging from specific fruit juices to our preferred brand of oats in bulk. Sam’s Club had a higher percentage of the specific items, and on the ones that they both had, the prices averaged out to be almost exactly even (Costco was cheaper by one cent on the total of seven items).

Help The help was highly variable in both places (depending on the person). I asked three questions of three separate people at each location. The best person at each one walked me straight to what I needed. The worst person at Sam’s Club got me to the right area quickly, then radioed for help. The worst person at Costco walked around in circles for a while, basically said that she couldn’t help me, then wandered away.

Distractions How many times did the store distract me into considering another item? This is mostly a way of seeing how the store’s layout convinces me to strongly consider items I wasn’t intending to buy or even look at when I came into the store, and the fewer such items, the better. Aside from the entrance area where I was distracted by a big screen television, I basically wasn’t distracted in Sam’s Cub - everything was spread out and open and sorted in an obvious enough fashion for the most part that I quickly found what I was looking for. In Costco, I was distracted several times - not good.

Checking out Since I was only in each store as a “guest,” I watched the checkouts for a bit and timed how long it took a few people to get through the line (I had time to burn when I made the visits, but when we have a house and another child, time will be important). The Sam’s Club checkouts were much busier (many more customers), but more checkouts opened quickly and the overall average time for both stores wound up being about the same.

Cleanliness Surprisingly (because I expected it to be the other way around), the Sam’s Club store seemed much cleaner than the Costco. Neither one was what I would describe as dirty, but the Sam’s Club had more of a “freshly-scrubbed warehouse” feel to it, whereas the Costco did not. Although this seems like an aesthetic choice, it does matter at a place where you may be buying foodstuffs.

While Costco did have a few specific advantages, Sam’s Club was the clear winner for me. Considering the membership fee is $40, the time spent figuring out which was better for me was worth the effort.

Where I live, there are no large grocery stores in a twenty mile radius (there are two small “town” groceries that are fine for incidentals, but their prices are rather high and their selection is limited). However, right outside of that radius are several different options for grocery shopping. When I first moved to the area, I more or less picked one of them at random, started shopping there, and never really looked back.

A few months ago, I decided to actually pick out the store that offers the best prices on the staples that I buy regularly so that I didn’t have to worry about always digging for bargains - I could be confident that my store had the best prices for the things I often buy. I wound up moving my shopping to a different store (a smaller chain) after doing the comparison, and I estimate that by making this change, I’m not missing out on anything at all, but I save $5 to $10 a week on groceries now without thinking about it.

Here’s the exact process I went through to figure this out. It’s pretty clever and quite simple, and you can do it with a spreadsheet program very easily.

For about six weeks, I went to a different grocery store each week. These trips were completely normal: I bought all of the normal things I buy on a grocery trip (lots of produce, meats, milk, and so forth). Even if an individual price made me cringe (this happened more than once), I would just buy what I needed anyway, because I found that almost always there was at least a handful of items at which the store was competitive. If a store didn’t have a large number of the items I wanted, I immediately decided I wouldn’t go there again.

Here’s the kicker: I saved the receipts from each of the trips. I usually enter the receipts into a money management program as soon as I get home (I use Microsoft Money) and then toss the receipts away, but instead I saved these receipts in a shoebox for later.

After the six weeks, I gathered up the receipts and did a comparison. I laid them all out side by side and looked for items that I bought at at least a majority of the six stops. This was a grouping of about fifteen items at the end. I then fired up Microsoft Excel and made a grid of these prices, awarding a score of 1 for the best price on that item down to 6 for the worst (and leaving the number blank if I didn’t buy it there). If two stores tied, I gave them both the “better” score.

After doing that, I just averaged the scores - and found a clear winner. It was actually fairly obvious as I was doing the receipts which store was going to win, but I ran the numbers anyway just to make sure.

Since then, I’ve been doing all my grocery shopping at Hy-Vee. In my area, for a married couple with a child who do a lot of cooking at home, they have the best all-around prices. The only other store chain that was even close was Fareway.

Give this simple process a try! It ended up shaving several dollars off of each grocery bill for us without any additional effort - if anything, Hy-Vee is actually slightly more convenient for shopping than our old place.