Grocery Item Cost Tracker

As much as I enjoy 'playing the game' of finding discounts and saving money, there are times when it's just grinding away at the shopping basics:  Buy when something is on sale.  And, if it's a good sale...stock up.  Easy enough, right?  Yes.BUT...how do you know when something is on sale-and how do you know that a particular sales price is a *good* sales price?!?  Well, if you're (a little...) OCD like me, you track prices!

Now, I recognize this won't work for everyone or everything:  Sometimes, you can't plan to buy something, and goodness knows that the 3,437 varieties of the same item (ish) on Amazon can make it impossible to compare...but, there are still a few tricks for knowing when to pull the trigger on something-and especially when to stock up.  I'll talk about this concept often on a variety of areas over the upcoming years, but today, I want to focus on one specific area:  Groceries.  Food shopping.  

This trick will work whether you shop in person or online.  In fact...I have no doubt this trick would be much easier to pull off if the shopping was online, but it will ultimately work either way.  All you have to do is track prices.  Sounds obvious, right?  Kinda.  In fairness, we all probably have a vague sense of when the price of a handful of items is a 'good' price when it's on sale, right?  Or, we know when the price of something is higher at one grocery store versus another.  But, what do you do when you're buying 20, 30, 40 items each week at the grocery store?  You track prices.  On as many of the item as makes sense-like...the cat food you buy every week/every other week?  Track the price.  The mayonnaise you buy every two months?  Track the price.  Heck, even pack the razor blades you buy every 6 months?...Track.the.price.  The one-off impulse item you bought because you were curious to try it?  Probably not worth tracking the price unless it becomes a more regular purchase.

So, how-exactly-should you track the prices?  Below is a snippet of a tracker I created about 15 years ago to use at my local grocery store.  For *me* I divided the tracker up by main themes (Pantry, Cleaning, Beauty, Pet, etc...), and then have a column for the actual item (Mayonnaise, Spaghetti, Bleach, etc...).  To make sure I'm tracking apples/apples, I also have a column for Brand and Size.  You may not need to go this far-like, you may really *always* buy the same brand and size of something...but for me, I wanted the extra control in place.

From there, I track prices every time I shop, and if it's on sale, I make a little note in the field to indicate (you'll see the /S below, which is my way of saying 'sale')-which will then help me figure out the BETTER sales prices over time.  Once you put it all together, this is is what it looks like:

My only final comment about this-particularly in the time of high/rising prices:  You don't have to track prices every week forever.   BUT, for the first time you do this, I do recommend tracking prices at least twice a month for the course of a full year.  A lot of products have seasonality (baking items in Nov/Dec, Canned foods in January/Feb, etc...), and if you have a version of a full 12 months of data, you'll be able to better see the sales patters and figure out when to really pull the trigger on a sale item.-and you'll also have a general idea of *when* things will be on sale-so you can plan for the added expense of a shop.

As an added benefit, once you track these items, you will start to remember what a good price is going forward and just *know* when to buy.  Personally, I have it committed to memory that $3.99 for 48oz of Duke's mayo is a good deal.  Anything less than $3.99...and I stock up.  $1/pack of Starkist tuna is a good price for a 2.4oz pack.  Anything less-or that price for a bigger pack?  I stock up.

Once you do the first year-long tracker, I would then recommend still tracking prices once a month to continue to validate your data.  As prices seem like there is no limit to the increases (or no floor to the shrinkflation...), if you continue to keep an eye on pricing, you will continue to right-size your expectations and knowledge.

Of course, you should personalize ALL of this to your own needs.  This is just me. :)

So, if you decide to use a grocery item cost tracker, give me a shout.  Tell me what detail you capture, what sales prices you've found.  I'm always up for learning how others do this so I can continue to refine my own practice.

Happy Shopping!