How to Make a Grocery Price Book
With today’s economy, we all need to try to save money wherever we can. It can be difficult to cut costs in areas where the cost is fixed, such as your car payment, but you can reduce your spending in other areas that are more flexible. Making a grocery price book can save you lots of money at the grocery store and is easy to create.
First of all, you can use any kind of notebook you’d like – anything from a full-size 3 ring binder to a small pocket notebook that easily fits in your purse. Just make sure that it is convenient enough that you will always remember to take it with you.
Next you will need a grocery price book worksheet, which you can either make yourself, or download here. The worksheet should have room for the item name, size and price. You will also need to make a notation at the store location at which you found the price.
When you are first starting out, you may not know what a good price is. It will take some time to visit several stores and to go through a few sale cycles before you start to see a trend. Then, once you can see what a regular price, sale price and super sale price look like, you can start to shop smarter.
Although you may not always be able to get the best deal (perhaps the item you need is not on sale anywhere during a certain week) – you can set a goal to not spend more than a certain percentage over the sale price. If you make it almost like a game, you will enjoy looking for bargains and seeing if you can beat your previous low price.
Always remember too, to keep an eye on the unit prices. Although items look cheaper at first glance, you will need to break down the price to make sure you are definitely getting the best price. Even if items come in different sizes at different stores, if you make a note of your unit price then you’ll be able to easily calculate the better deal.
Lisa, I really like the look of your blog!
I have GS if you’d like I’ll share! Drop me an email.
I’ve used a price book for several years, since Amy Dacyczyn’s book, “The Complete Tightwad Gazette” was published in the mid ‘90s. The pen and paper version has works somewhat efficiently, but is rather low-tech. A friend of mine and me have gone one step further and wrote an Android based app called PriceBookDB. This is a smart phone app that does everything a pen and paper price book does, and more.
It lets you track items, prices, and stores, over time to determine the best time to buy any particular item. It seems that most people buy the same products week in and week out, such as milk, bread, meat, and produce. They also buy the same monthly items, Toilet Paper, cleaning supplies, soap, etc. All of these items can be tracked, sorted, and categorized.
We let you create basic shopping list, which you can morph into exactly the brands that you buy. We let you share your shopping lists with your spouse’s phone, or a web site. You can sync shopping lists, check items off, and analyze your buying habits.
To top it all off, we crowd-source all of the users data, so that, if you want, you can see all of the item-price-date-store info that other shoppers have entered, in your area, so that you don’t have to do all of the grunt work.
It’s a neat app, and we’re pretty proud of it. We’re working on it almost every day to make it better. If you have an Android smart phone, we would love for you to download it, try it out, rate it, and leave a comment. You can visit our web site http://www.pricebookdb.com
You can download it from the Android Marketplace, for free, here:
http://market.android.com/search?q=pricebookdb
We really hope you enjoy it.
Save well and prosper!
Hi Lisa
I really enjoyed your article on making a grocery price book.
Technology has come to the rescue, well not exactly rescue but it can give us a little help.
I came across a site the other day which is very helpful and is called
my Supermarket . The URL is http://www.mysupermarket.co.uk.
This is a very good shopping comparison site comparing Tesco, Sainsburys and Asda across your shopping cart of goods and you can print out the prices.
Well worth a look.
Sandra
I have experienced to make worksheet for grocery items. It really helped me up to cope up day to day expenditure, forecasting and managing monthly budget of grocery items.
HI, Lisa , you did a great job , I have downloaded the link of grocery price book worksheet you provided. I think I may know what a good price is.
Being self-employed now, I have to be aware of how much I’m spending on groceries and how to budget. Thanks so much for the download, it is a life saver.
Using Price Comparison engines is a good idea as well. You can save money nearly on everthing, it takes time to get used to comparing prices but once in the game resoults will be amazing.
Great post.
The grocery price book was so important, because you can list what you want to buy in our daily needs. Thank you for the article that you post, it really help us.
It really helped me up to cope up day to day expenditure, well not exactly rescue but it can give us a little help.
I think I may know what a good price is.Forecasting and managing monthly budget of grocery items. Thank you for the post
I really enjoyed your article on making a grocery price book. I have to be aware of how much I’m spending on groceries and how to budget.
I recently took charge of my home’s shopping budget so I need to create a worksheet where I can see how much we’re spending on each item and which store sells it cheapest. I think you’re right though, you don’t get the hang of it straight away.
Nice post! Thank you for sharing this information now I will have the idea how to save money. Before I’m not making list I just go to the grocery and get whatever I want. But after reading this article that I will not do the same thing. I’ll see to it that I make my own list.
Wow. Very cool premise and great idea. Always nice to save a few bucks.
Does anyone know if there is an iphone or android app for a grocery store price book? There has got to be! I think having a price book be portable on my smartphone would make things very easy.
It’s great to save money, always was and always will. There are a few websites as far as I know with grocery price books. I think they’re extremely useful, helped me out at least a lot of times.