Save $3,000/yr on Groceries – Unit Pricing at Scale

How to save on groceries by lazily picking the lowest price per ounce

This is the second in a continuing series on ‘the basics.’ Here we look at how you can ignore all the hard parts and save big on groceries by picking the lowest unit price of all the items you were already buying.

Part 1: How to Use Unit Pricing to Save a Ton on Groceries (no coupons required)
Part 2: How to Save $3,000/yr on Groceries – Unit Pricing at Scale
Part 3: How Packaging Designed for Convenience Really Adds Up

In this installment, we’re going to take those lessons that were illustrated with a few small examples and see how it scales up when we apply the method to our whole shopping cart.

THE CHALLENGE: SAVE ON GROCERIES

Fill a whole cart with groceries, and then fill another cart with the *exact same brand/flavor/variety* of every product, but this time choose the package based on lowest unit price, and see what the difference is between those two carts. No coupons, no calculators, no waiting for sales.

So I logged onto the website of my local Wegman’s and went through all the aisles, adding only items I’d normally buy (yes I know…my diet is not great):

THE RESULT

It’s not even close. If you bought the exact same amount of each food, down to the ounce, but chose only the packaging that had the lower unit price, you would have saved $113.33! (the total from the red column at the far right compared to the total from the green column beside it)

Yes, you’re spending more money *overall* but you’re getting significantly more food for your money. In fact you’re getting 180% more food for only 85% more money.

THE TAKEAWAYS

It’s usually the case that the bigger package (family size!) has the lower unit price, but we’re not talking about anything crazy like you’d find at a wholesale club. We’re a child-free couple and have no hesitation about buying a family-size package when it’s got the cheaper unit price.

You don’t need to cut coupons, bring a calculator, shop at Costco, choose a store brand, or do anything inconvenient to start saving money on groceries *this week* – just look at the item you want, look on either side of it for the same brand in a different size, and pick up the size that has the lowest unit price.

Since this was a scaled-up version of our introduction to unit pricing, and we applied the lessons from a jar of Smuckers to an entire cart full of groceries…how does *this* scale up?

If this amount of groceries would last you 2 weeks, you’d be saving $113 every two weeks. Over a year, it would cut your grocery bill by $2,938! Keep doing the math and see what you could save on groceries in a few years without inconveniencing yourself in any other way!

What’s your favorite lazy food spending hack?