How to Shop for Food

Something that I have learned over the past few months is the art of grocery shopping, which for me is more fun than clothes shopping. Depending on where you are located, you might have a large variety of stores or you might have very few places to chose from to do your grocery or like me you just chose to go to the closest store to you that sells food because you don't have your own transportation. For me, the place I am closest to is a market or at least that is what I call it since 'market' is in the name. Within a mile radius of here, there is a Walmart (which sells much more than just food) and a Grocery Outlet. For me, my place is called McKay's Market.

You might have the basic idea of how to go grocery shopping if your mom or another relative used to take you along with them. Where I came from, we had a variety of stores so I knew which foods were good from which store since we had Giant Eagle, Sam's Club, Marc's, Aldi, Save-A-Lot, Walmart, and an Acme all within I would say a 3 mile radius. Some stores are great for bulk foods like Sam's Club and other stores are better for smaller quantities such as Save-A-Lot and Aldi.

This is how I go grocery shopping:

1. I come up with how much I want to spend so since I should be on a budget, I care with how much I spend one one grocery trip.

2. I see if the store I am going to has a weekly ad which some places post their weekly ads online for example Aldi has a weekly ad and asks you for your zip code as well to ensure they pull up the correct one for you: https://www.aldi.us/en/weekly-specials/our-weekly-ads/. McKay's Market has a weekly ad online as well which asks you to select a store before seeing the ad: https://www.mckaysmarket.com/WeeklyAd/Index/.

3. Then I look through the ad to see what items are listed and any one of them that looks good I write down on a piece of paper knowing that once I get to the store, there is a chance there are going to be other brands that might have a better price. I also start before looking through the ad, I go through in my mind of what foods I am interested in buying so create kind of like a staple food list before looking at the ad. Also, something you might enjoy doing with this is if you have a friend that is a good shopper or knows how to give tips on food and prices, pass the weekly ad by them. This is something I actually do and get the other person's input so sometimes she says this particular item is a good price and so is this one.

4. Once that list is done, I go to the store and see what I can find and fill up my chart. This last time when I went grocery shopping, I wrote down extra items and the price I got them for so after I was done fetching all the items I wanted to get, I could total them by using the calculator on my phone and seeing how much I was going to spend before I got up to the cash register so I was not surprised by anything and re-evaluate if I wanted to bring anything back to the shelf or switch out items. In some stores, the store will have their own brand and usually the generic brand will be cheaper than a particular brand and some stores have a brand that they endorse very highly so that brand will be cheaper than other brands so keeping that mind tells you that sometimes two items which are identical in ingredients can have a significant price difference.

For me a typical shopping trip includes these types of items:
A type of carbohydrate product so can be tortillas, bread, pasta
Vegetables most likely lettuce, tomatoes, cucumber and other ones I get are whatever else is a good price like peppers and mushrooms
Meat so sometimes I get fresh meat like ground beef, sausage, or chicken or if my house environment is not the most stocked with kitchen stuff I will get already cooked meats like deli meats

Photos after my last shopping trip: