Shopping

Shopping For Strange Foods

October 27, 2005 By Jeffrey Strain 4 Comments

As I mentioned earlier, I have friends visiting me this week. Day one was spent at the hospital (long story that I’ll get to in another post when I have a bit more time to write) and today we’re off to Himeji to see the famous castle there.

One of the main goals of my friend is that he wants to eat as many strange foods as he can while he is out here. This being Japan, there is absolutely no problem with this request. While it isn’t an issue because this is something that he wants to do and has been budgeted as part of his travel plans, it has shown me is the great importance once again of shopping with a specific list of items you want and sticking to that list.

We went to the store last night to get toothpaste which he had run out of. We left the store with $30 worth of snacks and other food items he decided that he needed to try.

Dried squid – the perfect snack with beer

As we were walking down the isles we were putting in placing items in left and right. I’m sure that if I didn’t shop with a list, it would be extremely easy to add extra items as we were doing last night. There was a lot of, “oh, this looks interesting. I have to try this” and I’m sure in my everyday shopping if I didn’t have a list to focus on while shopping, I would come across items and say the same thing. No doubt they would end up in my grocery basket whether I needed them or not.

candy covered fish – a favorite of my wife

I know this to be a fact. We were able to reduce our shopping bill be over $100 a month when we started to use lists and never missed the food that we didn’t buy. While it’s fun searching for strange foods for him to try and I hope to show more over the coming week, it’s also nice knowing that shopping with lists has changed our personal finances for the better.

Gift Cards – Why I Don’t Like Them

October 20, 2005 By Jeffrey Strain 2 Comments

I was interviewed by the Associated Press about gift cards the other day and my opinion on them. To be quite honest, I think they’re a terrible gift from a personal finance perspective, but I do understand why some people use them. It’s kind of like a convenience store. It’s not a place that I want to buy my items on a regular basis, but sometimes I do buy stuff there.

If you don’t know what to give as a gift, creatively giving money is a much better option or just sending a check. The problem I have with gift cards is that if they are bank based gift cards, they come with a lot of fees that can significantly reduce the amount you are giving and Mall Gift Cards are usually not much better. While store brand gift cards usually don’t have the excessive fees, you limit the choices the person has to that particular store and give the store a free loan of your money.

I guess the way I look at it is that if I am giving a monetary gift of my hard earned money, I’d like the entire amount to go to that person and not have bits and pieces taken away for fees or other things. I also assume that the person receiving the money would rather have $20 in their pocket rather than $15 and a plastic card.

Wait An Hour, Get 50% Off

October 11, 2005 By Nate 1 Comment

When I was in college, I worked at a local pastry shop part time in the evenings. 30 minutes before closing, we were told to mark all the items left over at 50% off and sell as much as we could. The reason was simple – anything that wasn’t sold was thrown away so it was better to sell it at 50% off than not at all. Knowing this, there was a regular clientele that arrived when the markdown took place and had wonderful pastries to take home that would have cost them double the amount an hour earlier.

(the sticker that loves my wallet – it indicates that the price is 50% off at the register)

I was reminded of this because we have been cutting back our budget quite a bit with my decision to try and make this a full time job. While you’re told to make your own meals in the US to save money, that isn’t always the case in Japan. Prepared obento (boxed lunch) can be much less expensive than buying the individual ingredients as my earlier post on the prices of fruits and vegetables indicates. Therefore we find that we purchase boxed lunches on a regular basis because they are less expensive than making the meals ourselves. We often double the savings by eating a couple of hours later than usual and taking advantage of the same process that my old pastry shop used.

Many perishable items will be marked 50% off a couple of hours before the grocery store closes which includes the boxed lunches. The only problem is selection. Your choices are left to whatever is left over which means you may not get exactly what you want. If you’re flexible with your meals, however, it’s a great way to save money out here. We also tend to opt for this strategy on rainy nights – we find that when it rains, there is always a wide selection to choose from (presumably because people don’t like to go out in the rain).

Finding establishments that offer this type of service can be great for your budget. You get the same quality food for half the price and don’t give up anything except for having to wait an extra hour or two. If it is a small family run place, be friendly and get to know the owners or register people. They may even put aside extras for you if you become a regular customer (we did).

High Fruit & Vegetable Prices

October 10, 2005 By Jeffrey Strain 2 Comments

One of the most difficult aspects of budgeting in Japan is getting fruits and vegetables into my diet. It’s not that they aren’t available, just that they are outrageously expensive. The last time I went to the grocery store a took a few photos for example. For reference, $1.00 = about 110 yen

As you can see in the above photo, the melon for sale is priced at 1980 yen which makes it a $17.75 piece of fruit.

The above bunch of grapes runs 684 yen or just under $6.25. As you can see, the skin of the grapes has a whitish residue on them. Japanese don’t eat grape skins…they peel their grapes which was something totally foreign to me when I first came here…

The above celery stick is priced 128 yen or a bit more than a $1.00. What you might notice is that celery isn’t sold as an entire unit in Japan…the plant is pealed and celery is sold in individual sticks at a buck a pop.

As you can imagine, with prices like this it is a creative challenge staying within budget and still eating fruits and vegetables. One way we’ve gotten around these prices is to by 100% fruit juices. They’re still expensive by US standards, but a much better deal than the fruits themselves.

The first time I went to the US with my wife, I took her to restaurant with an all you can eat salad bar. She spend the entire afternoon eating fruit from the salad bar – as you might imagine.

How Shopping Around Can Cost You

October 10, 2005 By Jeffrey Strain 1 Comment

Bargain hunters beware! Running across town to save a few cents is probably costing you more money that you’re saving. This is a classic trap that bargain hunters run into: wasting money when they think they are saving money.

The problem is that the bargain hunter only factors in the price of the item (product x is $10.00 at store A, $12.00 at store B) without taking into consideration the cost of traveling to the store. The automatic assumption is that you save $2 by shopping at store A instead of store B, but what if store A is 7 miles further away from you home than store B?

According to AAA the cost of gasoline alone is now approximately 10 cents per mile for a 2005 Dodge Caravan and has a total operating cost of 16.2 cents per mile (this includes maintenance and tires).

That means a trip to store A would cost you $2.27 in gas and maintenance for the extra 14 mile round trip meaning that the bargain hunter actually lost money getting the “bargain.”

A good way to get your bargain without the cost of extra driving is to find the closest store that will match competing offers. In addition to getting the best price on goods, it will also save you a lot of time running around to all the different stores.

Fake Savings – Grocery Store Loyalty Cards

September 23, 2005 By Nate Leave a Comment

Almost everyone I talk to about grocery store loyalty cards say that they save them a bunch of money. So how do you resolve this with a widely quoted article by Katy McLaughlin of The Wall Street Journal that was written Jan 21, 2003. According to the article, consumers generally spend more money by shopping at grocery stores with store loyalty cards than at stores that don’t use them.

Basically, the article had shoppers shop at a store using its discount card, and then went to a nearby store that didn’t have a card and bought the same items. The result? In all five comparisons (Dallas, Chicago, Brooklyn, Atlanta and San Francisco) the shoppers ended up spending less in the grocery stores that didn’t offer a discount card – in one case 29% less.

I think that supermarket loyalty cards breed a “Fake Savings” that can cost you a lot of money. Because you see all this money being discounted at the register when you use the loyalty card, there is an automatic assumption that you are saving a lot of money. As the WSJ article shows, this may not be the case.

To know if you are truly getting a deal, you really need to begin a Grocery Price Book. By relying on this rather than what looks like a good deal according to the stores, you’ll know when you have saved money and when you are being deceived. Grocery stores are out to get you to spend as much money as possible so it’s your responsibility to understand when a price is a good deal and when it’s merely fake savings.