The All Important Price Book

When I was visiting my sister last week we were discussing groceries and she admitted that she wasn't always sure if a sale was a good deal. This used to be a problem for me as well, because-to put it kindly-my memory is like a sieve. Things just seem to fall right out of it.

The answer to her problem, and mine, was the price book. This week over at Frugal Living @ About.com Pat Veretto wrote a good article about what a price book is and how to make one. There is also the link to The Frugal Shopper that I posted in a previous entry.

At the most basic, a price list is a list of the prices for items that you frequently shop for. That's it, nothing too mysterious there. The actual format is up to the user. I use a small journal and have just written the names of items on the pages in rough catagories. (ie canned vegetables, meats, diary, baking). Under each entry I write the symbol for the store, the size of the package, the cost, and the unit price. The journal format is a bit awkward, as I can't add new pages. In the future I may move to a pocket sized 3 ring binder-if I can find one for cheap or free!

So, to use the example from my baked beans yesterday-when I looked up the price in my book for dried navy beans it said:

Navy Beans
SAL-----1lb-----$.59-----.037 per oz

SAL is my personal symbol for Save-A-Lot. The unit price (oz in this case) is important for comparing costs. If you simply write down the cost of the item without notating the size and unit price, you'll have a hard time comparing costs (unless you just happen to run into the exact same size package). For example canned vegetables can come in 12oz cans, 16 oz cans, 32oz cans or even larger if you are at someplace like Sams club, not to mention that you may want to compare the cost of frozen with canned and that is a whole different set of sizes! Without a unit price you might not really be buying the cheapest item. (and remember, just because an item is a larger size doesn't always mean it has the lowest unit price!)

I realize that accumulating all of this data for all your groceries seems like a daunting task. Since I just moved last spring and had to compile an entirely new price book I'll give you my method.

I started out by shopping at Save-a-Lot and Aldi's, assuming that they were the lowest cost options (which in most cases they are-barring sales at the other stores). After a shopping excursion I would just save my receipts. I took my notebook and listed off as many items as I could think of that I would buy and need the prices for (leaving plenty of blank pages in between for future additions). Then I took my accumulated receipts and a calulator and started filling in the data that I already had. That probably filled up about 1/3 of the basics in my pricebook. I took the remaining items, wrote out a list of them, and spent an afternoon at the stores gathering the remaining prices I needed.

For comparison I did go to one of the local big grocery stores-Price Chopper. I took my pricebook and calculator with me and spot checked a few items. The prices at Save a Lot and Aldi's were all better than Price Chopper's non sale prices. So now I just watch the sale fliers when they come in. If their sale price is better than SAL and ALD (my symbols) then I add in the info, and highlight it so I know that it is a sale price, not a regular price. In this way I can track the sales on meats, canned goods etc.

I not only use my price book at the regular grocery stores, but also at the two bulk food stores I shop at (the Pine Ridge Grocery in Bainbridge, and the Cheesetrap in Greene), the restaurant supply store (Maines in Binghamton-unlike SAMS club, no membership required!) and the Asian food store (Kims on Vestal Parkway). I can shop at any of those places, confident that I know when I'm getting a good deal! For me the small amount of time and legwork involved in setting up my pricebook was well worth the use I get from it.