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Spent 4 hours on a "quick" grocery price check and saved $23, feeling dumb and proud at the same time
I decided I was going to finally sit down and compare prices at the three stores near me (Kroger, Aldi, and the local Save A Lot) to see where I should be doing my big trips. I figured it would take maybe 45 minutes tops, just me and a notebook walking the aisles. Instead it turned into a whole thing because half the shelf tags were missing prices, the app for one store wouldn't load, and I kept forgetting which size can of beans I was supposed to be checking. I ended up going home, building a little spreadsheet with 20 items, then driving back out to each store twice because I forgot stuff the first pass. Four hours later I finally had real numbers in front of me and the whole trip saved me $23.58 on a sample cart, which works out to about $6 an hour for my time if you do the math. The part that really bugs me is Aldi wasn't even the cheapest on 8 of the 20 items, the Save A Lot was, and I had been skipping that store for a year because the parking lot looks rough. Now I don't know if I should keep doing this every few months or just accept I'm overthinking it. Does anyone actually keep a running price list or do you all just wing it at one store?
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patricia_gonzalez21d ago
Sounds like you turned a simple errand into a part time job for less than minimum wage. Twenty three bucks over four hours is not saving money, that's just paying yourself badly to do homework. Price checks make sense for big stuff you buy every single week, not for twenty mixed items where half the tags are missing anyway. Stores change prices all the time, so your spreadsheet is already going stale by the time you finish it. Pick the store that's cheap on the stuff you actually buy a lot of and stop driving yourself crazy over canned beans.
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