Save 15–20% or more on Groceries Despite Rising Prices

This easy strategy will save money and hours of your time.

7 min readNov 19, 2020

The first week after the mad run on grocery stores and everyone hoarding toilet paper, hand sanitizer, and disinfectants, I was appalled to discover that my grocery bill was over $400. I had collected one cart-load and did not have duplicates of anything, except maybe hamburger. I barely had any meat at all.

What would have cost me between $150–200 before had almost doubled in cost. I’m sure the same thing happened to you, too. Why, I thought, had this happened? And then I realized that nothing in the store was on sale, and many things had gone up at least 50 cents to $1.00. Price gouging? Certainly! Obvious and reportable? Unfortunately, not.

As the weeks went on, my 6–8 bags of groceries were costing way more than they should. However, I need to shop at stores with an order-pickup option because no one wears a mask, and my husband has type-2 diabetes, which puts him at high-risk. This means I can’t shop at the deep discount stores.

What to do, what to do.

I could damn-the-torpedoes and go to that discount store anyway. I could shop the so-called sales ads and go to multiple stores. I could begin shopping at the dollar stores near me. I could purchase off-brand or store-brand products. None of these appealed to me. Call me spoiled.

I needed a solution, as I could not continue spending $300 on average each week for just two people. Although my grocery bill was high, I also realized that we were eating out less, and not at all until the end of July. Our grocery bill should have been somewhat higher, but not almost doubled.

Then, I thought about what I had done before I retired. I hadn’t wanted to take up all day Saturdays at the grocery store, so each week I made a menu. Then I would purchase only those items that I needed to make the meals on the menu that week. When I had done that, my grocery bill was on average 15–20% less. I thought, I can make this work again.