Are you a last-minute kind of person? If you are, you might want to try this tactic for saving money on your shopping. It requires discipline, but then, doesn’t everything worth doing?
Supermarkets always want to sell as much as they can, and price things accordingly. Fresh produce is problematic, because they want to sell for good prices, but they need to get rid of as much as possible before it spoils. That means discounting it – often heavily – before it goes out of date. Anything that could spoil, from fresh fruit and vegetables, to packets of ham, through to pies, pasties, and pizzas, can all be discounted in this way.
But they don’t tend to start discounting items until the afternoon. The later it gets, the bigger the discounts get. So, the later you can leave it to go shopping, the more chance you have of picking up some real bargains.
Rethinking the way you go shopping
Of course, if you go shopping weekly, you will do all your food shopping in one hit. This means you don’t have much need to get things during the week. Shopping in the late afternoon or early evening is likely to result in you buying more than you need to. So, you might need to rethink your shopping habits if you want to take advantage of this method.
Conversely, you could do a weekly shop as usual, and then scour the local supermarket for late deals each weekday. If you pick up anything good, you can take it off your list for the following week. Lots of items can be frozen to make them last longer, so there is no need to use them straightaway. This even applies to vegetables, if you chop and prepare them prior to freezing.
Once you’ve been doing this for a week or two, you will know which shops have the best deals and when to get there for the maximum results.
Rethink your menus, too
Changing the way you prepare and cook food can also enable you to save lots of cash when looking for late deals in the food aisles. Let’s say you don’t usually buy pork mince because you get beef mince instead. If you spot a great deal on pork mince, why not find some new recipes you could try that will put it to good use?
Staying open-minded will allow you to widen your horizons, finding more recipes, more ideas, and more ways to use the cheapest ingredients when they have been reduced in price. This is one technique that gets easier the more you use it. Providing you don’t buy ingredients you know you don’t like, you should find this new way of shopping much cheaper, and more of a challenge as well. Some people treat it as a game, and if you know the tricks, it can be a great game to play.
If you want to save money on your food shopping, this might be the best way to save even more.