Costco/Sams - Canyou really save money?

[kristinecfp]

My grocery and household item bills seem to be getting out of control. We are spending at least $100/wk an that's just for 2 people.

I don't have time to clip coupons or play the grocery game, but I do want to shop smarter.

My first question - can you really save money with a Costco/Sams Club membership? What are your experiences - good and bad - with these membership clubs?

Second question - what are some other ways to save money on groceries? Our biggest problem is going to the store too often, so one way we can save on groceries is to do some menu planning and cut the grocery store trips. Any other ideas?

Thanks!
Kristine

[LuxLiving]

What stores are you presently going to? I shop at Aldi's & Save-A-Lots for the most part, with the monthly trip to the scratch n' dent stores, and with the occasional fill in at the local grocer. Shopping w/a list and menu plan in hand is helpful.

Taking the menu plan along is rather key as well - when you get to the store and find a substitute meal/meat on sale you can easily determine which meal you want to replace and which items you can scratch off the list as unnecessary for that trip. For instance - you are planning on tacos and find ribs at deep discount, you can scratch all of the veggies, meat, chips & shells off the list and perhaps just add a jug of bbq sauce and save yourself some money and shelf space. I've tried to do this w/o the menu plan WITH ME and crossed off all the tomatoes when I needed some for a salad later in the week in another meal plan.

We used to do the Sam's Club thing, but my boys thought that just because we had two tons of potato chips - enough to last two months - that they could eat all they wanted and hence they'd be gone in two weeks. Not a savings then.

[poundwise]

Nope. Not in my view anyway.

Costco, BJs, and Sam's Club all offer some nice features but when all is said and done, I save more without them than with them.

Meal and grocery list planning definitely help. I also find it useful not to make it overcomplicated. We don't run around to 5 stores to save the most. We shop the Wal-Mart Supercenter for most staples, hit a local grocer to shop the loss-leader sales for meat, produce, and sometimes the BOGO deals. We always use coupons, though mainly for non-food items as we don't buy pre-packaged foods. We use coupons for laundry detergent, deodorant, paper products, etc., etc. I get coupon multiples from a coupon clipping service. This enables us to save a lot of money each trip.

Between buying qty, shopping for low prices, shopping sales and offers, and using coupons, we save the most that we can buying the things that we buy.

[disneysteve]

Originally Posted by kristinecfp

I don't have time to clip coupons

I hear this often and I simply can't understand it. I spend no more than 3-4 minutes every Sunday clipping coupons. What's the big deal? If you can save 50 cents or a dollar on 8 or 10 items each week that you would be buying anyway, isn't that worth 3 minutes of your time?

As for warehouse clubs, I don't think you save any money. We've belonged to them at various times over the years and we never renewed our membership at the end of the year. Regular supermarkets with sales, store brands and coupons provide deals as good or better IMO.

So how do you save? Clip coupons, buy in bulk when feasible, take full advantage of sales and "loss leader" items, don't be brand loyal, don't be store loyal, buy store brands.

[Vapors]

The store you shop at is important. I can buy regular priced items at Foodlion cheaper than Safeway's sale prices. So when I buy a sale item at Food Lion I know it's a good deal, plus I like to also have a coupon for it. I cut coupons watching TV. It only takes a few minutes.

Clubs are good for some items, especially if you can't wait for a sale, but overall, we save more money at Food Lion/Bloom.

[PrincessPerky]

depends on the club, on what you buy, on how far away it is and how often you would go...and on how often you 'impulse buy'

we save the cost of the membership on milk alone, add in blueberries, bread and ect, and it is worth it to us.

before you pay for a membership, check out the prices on what you would buy..see if any of your most frequent needs are less and by how much...for us milk at the store is often over 3$, but at BJs it is usually less than 2.50 (and often closer to 2) so for 50 cents each you might think not to great, but multiply that by 5 gallons a week...

.50 cents savings*5gallons*52weeks = 130 (and like I said, often more than 50 cent savings)

But you said you are a family of 2..might not be able to find any one thing to save you the membership, you might find it by figuring out multiple things though......

Or the number one advantage of BJs for us isn't actually the milk, it is the 20 minute drive, and not on the way home from anywhere...we wont go that far out of our way more than once a week..so we don't. less shopping equals less impulse buys (and really how terribly impulsive is it to buy say an extra pack of grapes? grapes are good for you! but they are also expensive, so less shopping equals less buying)

Anyway if I were to list the tricks we use in order,

-less shopping is one (once a week)
-Buy mainly to restock essentials, and not fill a new recipe..beans and rice are cheap, capers are not.
-buy healthy, but don't get sucked into fad labels 'great source of calcium' err at 10%? a serving of broccoli beats that for way less cost!
-stock up when what you use is on sale, make a price book, or get your brainiac husband to keep track.
-go gradual...100 too much, cut down to 75 or 80 for a time, when that is easy go down to 65, work down till you are happy, keep your eyes open for new tricks, but don't feel you have to switch to white bread just to cut down the grocery bill.
-never say never..just because I haven't found a good coupon in months doesn't mean I never use them

[kristinecfp]

Originally Posted by disneysteve

I hear this often and I simply can't understand it. I spend no more than 3-4 minutes every Sunday clipping coupons. What's the big deal? If you can save 50 cents or a dollar on 8 or 10 items each week that you would be buying anyway, isn't that worth 3 minutes of your time?

Now I'm curious as to how many people actually use coupons.

I said I didn't have time to clip coupons, but it's really that I rarely found any for items that I buy, and even when I did clip coupons I would forget to take them with me, or they would expire before I needed the item, etc. It just didn't appear to be a good strategy for me at the time. Having said that, I do use coupons occasionally, I just don't spend time each Sunday clipping and saving coupons because the savings didn't seem to be worth the effort. I'm willing to try again if others are having good luck with coupons though...

What about others? Do you use coupons? Do you feel like it's a good cost savings strategy? I'm sure it took me more than 3-4 minutes a week when I did try coupons - how long does it take others to clip and organize coupons each week?

[jmjj215]

We save on gas, milk, cottage cheese, frozen boneless skinless chicken, and eggs. Given the volume of thos purchases, we more than pay for the cost of membership.

[disneysteve]

Originally Posted by kristinecfp

I said I didn't have time to clip coupons, but it's really that I rarely found any for items that I buy

That's a different point entirely and I wouldn't argue with that one.

We do a lot of from-scratch cooking and also buy a lot of store brand items, so we also don't find many coupons we need.

We used to keep a huge coupon file and we did probably spend too much time maintaining that. Now we just clip a few coupons each week that we think we are likely to use. We grab that pile when we head to the store and usually use a few of them.

[tinapbeana]

i don't shop club stores, but i keep a sales book for 4 stores. actually, it's a spreadsheet. regardless.

i peruse the weekly sales papers for public, bloom, walgreens, and CVS online while i'm watching TV. we buy the same things 90% of the time, so i simply glance over the ads to see if what we use is on sale. if it is, 2 things happens: 1) it goes on my shopping list 2) i enter it into my spreadsheet item / price / store / date of sale.

i go shopping, and keep my eyes out for unadvertised sale items. if i buy one, the same item / price / store / date of sale information goes into the spreadsheet. this part is important, because it turns out that almost half my purchases come from unadvertised sales and they frequently account for a large portion of my savings.

by keeping a "sales book" (rather than a regular price book), i get a good idea of what stores have what items on sale when. for instance, bloom puts sirloin steaks on sale for $2.99 per lb every 13 weeks or so, and it's been about 3 months since i've seen them so they should be going on sale soon. when they do, i stock up big time. this past week, coke or pepsi products were on sale 4/$11 at 3 of the stores because of the upcoming memorial day holiday. they'll be on sale again about 1 week before the 4th of july.

[bigsaver]

I think the milk at Costco is a good deal. I enjoy eating out, so I use the credit card for the 3% on eating out. Also, costco has prepackaged stuff that the supermarkets don't have. The chicken they have their along with the fish is a pretty good deal also.

[momof1in150]

I get my BJs membership through my church so it only cost $20.00 so I easily save that each year. That being said, I only shop with a list and avoid certain aisles. Our BJs on this island is a smaller one so I don't have a lot of the bells & whistles that other clubs have but BJs takes coupons that is helpful. They also mail coupons out each month and I use those if I am already going to purchase the item.

We saved our membership for 4 years just in tires for my DH's car.

[aurielle]

I try and menu-plan around the store's weekly sales, and pick up a couple extra of things I use that there's a good sale on but not necessarily going to use that week.

I never use coupons either because the rare few I find that I can actually use are no big money-savers anyways, plus all the other reasons that others have already mentioned in this thread.

Unfortunately my food bill is about to start going up quite a bit, as DH and I have decided to start buying organic pastured chicken and beef.

[LivingAlmostLarge]

I have been using coupons and not saving very much, but all my toiletries and toilet paper is now free. I also have costco but for DH and I the savings comes from meat. I love meat, seafood, etc, and have found it's a better quality select versus choice (1 cut higher at Costco) than the supermarket for a lower price. I also like the fact I don't have to wait for "sales" on meat, they have good prices.

For example at Costco chicken breasts frozen cost $1.89/lb where I live (remember where you live matters). At the store the best deal I've ever found was $1.79/lb. Now I can wait and bulk up or buy a package at costco, I'll do both depending on what I need. Ground beef is $1.99/lb at costco, but for the same 12% at the store I can get it for $2.19 sometimes.

But I don't usually get coupons for meat, bread, milk, etc. But other stuff I don't use too much from costco, instead i just use the coupons/grocery store. Costco is also cheaper for stuff like tires, tvs, etc. I don't shop too much there since couponing about once every 2-3 weeks and i'll buy meat and portion it out. That is awesome.

[poundwise]

Originally Posted by Vapors

The store you shop at is important. I can buy regular priced items at Foodlion cheaper than Safeway's sale prices. ...we save more money at Food Lion/Bloom.

Re: Food Lion

I ONLY buy sales items (mostly loss leader meats and produce) at Food Lion. Wal-Mart beats Food Lion's regular prices on everything I've ever compared. (I would say, "With few exceptions" except I can't remember any exceptions.) Unless you are not near a Wal-Mart Supercenter, or are of the anti-Wal-Mart crowd, I'd recommend you check them against each other in your area. I was shocked when I actually did a real, notebook-in-hand, price comparison between the two. I had previously always thought of Food Lion as a low-price store.

[zetta]

I also found that clipping coupons didn't save me much (I don't buy much "brand-label" food), and am not willing to invest the effort that a price book or meal-planning takes. What worked for me was a subscription to Welcome to SavingDinner.com -- you get 6 recipes and a shopping list each week. Just by using the shopping list and recipes our weekly grocery trip dropped from averaging over $100 to around $75-$80. Our family has 2 adults and a toddler. We also pick up a lot of "fun food" from Trader Joes -- about $100 - $150 a month, including wine -- but could cut this out if we needed to.

[CoryWM]

Originally Posted by kristinecfp

My grocery and household item bills seem to be getting out of control. We are spending at least $100/wk an that's just for 2 people.

I don't have time to clip coupons or play the grocery game, but I do want to shop smarter.

My first question - can you really save money with a Costco/Sams Club membership? What are your experiences - good and bad - with these membership clubs?

Second question - what are some other ways to save money on groceries? Our biggest problem is going to the store too often, so one way we can save on groceries is to do some menu planning and cut the grocery store trips. Any other ideas?

Thanks!
Kristine

Club Membership. It's not that you won't save money on the products. Because you will. You will pay less per peice than if you were at a normal store.

That being said. You WILL spend more money at a club shop as opposed to a normal shopping trip. Let's say, you're buying multigrain bread. Normally at the store lets say it's 3.00 a loaf. And at the club, it's 2.25 a loaf! Great! Except it's always packaged in 2+ bundles. So you have to buy 2-3 loafs a time. You will waste some. You will buy more than you NEED, Because it's cheaper. Club places know this. Thats why it's always clearly shown the price per unit on everything. Soda, cheese, crackers, whatever it is, it's broken down to show you, you're saving.

You have to be very desciplined, to come out ahead from a club membership, freezing extras, comparing it to other stores etc. Most people, don't shop at the club place to save money, they do it, because it's the trendy place that has everything they need.

You may go there, because you need 5lbs of shredded cheese. And hamburger buns. The cheese is a good deal. Then you go to get the buns, and say costco only sells them 24 at a time... And you only needed 8? Even though, it's cheap, 2.50 for 24... you Still paid 2.5x the amount at say safeway, 99cents for 8-12... They count on the convience of shopping there to make their profits.

I used to work there as a food deminstrator. They actually move the bottled water around every day in costco, so that customers will have to search the grounds for it, because it increases sales on items they happen to walk by.

I also advise never taking anyone but yourself there, if you take kids or a husband, you'll end up buying things that arnt groveries. Clothes, dvds, computers, tvs, camping, sports, etc. Everything gets rotated through Costco seasonally, they know they have a captive audience, as soon as you sign up, so they can put anything they want in there, to entice you to buy it.

From being around costco alot. I always hear in my head, when someone gets outa there for under $100, that they're getting outa there cheaply.

[disneysteve]

Originally Posted by CoryWM

It's not that you won't save money on the products. Because you will. You will pay less per peice than if you were at a normal store.

I don't think that is a fair assumption. We've gone into the warehouse clubs with our price book and found many items that we commonly buy were more expensive than in the regular supermarket, even though they were being sold in bulk. Add in sale prices and double coupons and the supermarkets come out even farther ahead. I think the warehouse clubs thrive on people assuming things are cheaper there.

[Scanner]

Coupons are tricky business. Most Sunday coupons are for name-brand stuff. It's better to just buy generic.

But if you are brand loyal (let's say Hellman's Mayo vs. Generic Mayo) then yes, go for the coupons.

As far as Sams/BJ's, it's the same thing - you gotta watch the name brand stuff. Berkleys is BJ's generic brand and yes, I do think you make out. Diapers alone pays for the membership but other things too - laundry detergent, soda, contact lense solution, Ibuprofen, batteries, etc.

[LivingAlmostLarge]

Another tip, it depends on where you live. I like in a terrible area for prices, coupons, and stores. I've found that grocery prices vary a lot and people elsewhere pay substantially less than I do. I don't have a meijer, super walmart or target, food lion, publix, etc. I have crappy stores with bad prices in general. So Costco saves me a lot and I've got a price book so I know when I'm getting a deal at the store. But when I've price against others on message boards my prices are "bad".