Market Epiphany

I had my eureka moment while grocery shopping last weekend. The sales flyer had advertised milk on sale for less than $2 a gallon. Skim milk is a staple in our diet and we drink about three gallons a week. When we arrived Saturday morning the dairy shelf was empty of the sale milk. We were assured that another truck was on the way and would arrive in about an hour. My first thought was that we would take a written “rain check” and break even over a two-week period. We would buy expensive non-sale milk this week and make up for the extra budget expense with rain-check milk the next week.

Then the light bulb went on in my brain. We would be going right passed a Walmart® on the way home and they advertised that they would match any competitors advertised price. We could buy cheap milk this week and next week just by grabbing three gallons and showing the cashier the competing sales flyer. The five minute stop saved us $5; as a wage that would translate to $60 an hour.

I realized that I could collect the mailed sales flyers of all three of Walmart’s local competitors plus a couple large chain drug stores which also advertise teaser food items to lure customers into their store and get the mega store to match all their sales. One store chain in our area was very bad about having small amounts of sale items, so that they could draw us into the store and then not lose money on their lose-leader sales items by being sold out. Their rain checks were pretty worthless too, because when we returned the following week they did not stock the rain-check item. It was a scam to keep us coming back for weeks to get our rain check. We stopped frequenting that chain, but we can still use their sales flyer at Walmart where the product will be in stock.

For those of you who are not big fans of Walmart (and there may be a few, even one at this typewriter) consider that you are not really doing the mega store any favors if you only buy their sales items and lose-leader draws from other stores. You are probably costing them profit on each item. I will continue shopping at the store where they were out of sales milk because I know this does not happen often or purposely and because their Kroger® store-brand products are many, of high quality and low price. I do want the mega store to have significant competition to force them to keep their prices low. But I expect to take the rip-off chain’s sales flyer, whose bait and switch teasers were always sold out, to wally world to see if they make good on their promise to match competitors advertised prices.

Actually, this is not my first shopping epiphany. Earlier I had realized that I could take aisle way canned soup coupons from a store where soup was not on sale and high priced and use them at another store which gave no coupons but had soup on sale. This strategy works well for many items other than soup. Another epiphany was when I realized I could buy whole wheat bread (a healthy staple in our diet) on Tuesdays at the bakery outlet store for 40 cents a loaf. We buy a month’s supply at a time and freeze it to keep it fresh. When there are good sales, we buy in bulk to stock our freezer and pantry so that we often eat out of the pantry and freezer rather than the grocery store. We make a lot of meals from scratch (not much “convenience food” on the table) and have simple menus based on what is on sale that week. We also have a lot of recipes based on inexpensive store-brand staples.

These are some of my strategies for “guerilla-warfare shopping.” If I come up with any new dirty tactics, you will be the first to know.