Grocery Shopping Again
A while back I wrote a post on how to save when shopping for groceries (Grocery Shopping 101). Yesterday I encountered another example of one of the things I mentioned. Grocery placement on the shelves is not for your convenience. It’s intended to get you to buy things that make the grocery store more profit.
If I were arranging groceries, I would place all brands of the same product together. That, of course, suits my shopping method which is to compare the cost per unit and get the best price, assuming the quality is similar. (I don’t assume that always–I test it.) But grocery stores often don’t do it that way. One store where I regularly shop puts sale items at the ends of rows. Now that could be convenient for people who are browsing and want to see what’s cheap. But since I will have gotten a list from my wife, who went through all the sales brochures, I prefer the sale items with their brethren that are not on sale. One reason for this is that you will sometimes find that the sale item is not the best deal.
In any case, yesterday I had to find some heavy whipping cream, and I finally located some in small containers. Right after I’d picked two of those up, I found that a bit further along in the refrigerator there was an entirely different section of similar products, only this time they were generic brand and cost about 40% less. Sneaky, I think.
But that’s the story of shopping in general. You need to go out of your way to find out what all your options are, then intelligently choose by quality and price. The stores aren’t necessarily going to help you with that.
