Cut your grocery bill

Six great shopping tips:

• Shopping with a list can be a tricky experience, as many of us give in to temptation when among the shelves. It’s far better to shop to budget. Work to a figure, take a calculator with you and have fun deciding whether to buy olives and calamari steaks instead of chocolate éclairs and a bottle of wine.
• Remember to bend and stretch. The highest mark-up items tend to be at chest level, with cheaper goods, house brands and so on on the higher or lower shelves.
• Check your receipts and don’t be shy to query amounts, as it sometimes happens that items marked R15,99 on the shelves are actually R18,99 at the till.

  Pick n Pay explains how this can happen:
  “Pick n Pay does thorough label checks every single day in stores, but when working with incredibly high volumes of stock, shelf prices can sometimes be erroneously moved around during the course of the day, so when the customer gets to the till, the price charged is not what was reflected on the shelf-edge label,” says spokesperson Tamra Veley. Pick n Pay’s Scanrite policy states that if a customer is charged more at the till point than indicated on the shelf, the first product will be free of charge and the second will be discounted, as long as the barcode on the product corresponds with the label on the shelf.

• Shopping in bulk works on the principle of economies of scale — the cost per unit falls as output increases. When a company buys inputs in bulk it can take advantage of volume discounts, which trickle down to the consumer.
• Money-saving coupons have long assisted cash-strapped consumers — you can find two pages of coupons in each copy of Pick n Pay’s monthly magazine, Fresh Living. The cover price of your next issue will be covered by a coupon, so it’s money well spent.
• Buy fresh fruit and vegetables in season – they are cheaper, better tasting and healthier, plus it’s better for the environment.

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