by the author of
The Ultimate Guide to Frugal Living and The Flat Broke Cookbook
Even if you do NOT use delivery or pickup for your groceries, you can still use online carts for comparison shopping. Gas prices are utter madness right now, and nobody has the money to spend, driving from store to store to save a few bucks here and there.
I’ve written before about how using services like grocery delivery and curbside pickup can sometimes save you money. (When you can’t be distracted by impulse buys, it’s a whole lot easier to stick to your list.) Further, for me, the ability to order groceries online has been incredibly helpful because I don’t have to depend on anyone else’s schedule to get food to the house.
There’s a strategy I use to decide which of four local grocery stores I’m going to visit on a particular shopping trip. All it takes is registering with a service like Instacart.
How to get started
It’s easy peasy – you don’t have to put your credit card number in if you aren’t actually making a purchase, but they’ll need your phone number. They will not call or text you unless you are making a purchase through the service, and then, if there’s a substitution because your original choice is not available, they’ll message you for your OK. Simply go here and set up your account. (If you DO decide to use the service, you’ll save twenty bucks with that link.) For the record, I have never had any issues with credit card fraud using these services. The shoppers don’t have access to it – only the company does – and the purchases are made through the app on the shoppers’ end as well as yours.
Make your list
Then, make your shopping list. You have to be specific. You don’t want to just compare apples to apples. Compare Red Delicious to Red Delicious.
The items I’ve chosen aren’t grocery recommendations. They aren’t necessarily the least expensive options. I just wanted to cover a general grocery list as an example. Here’s my list for this exercise:
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- 1 gallon of whole milk (store-brand)
- 1 lb of Land O Lakes butter
- 12-ounce box of store-brand Cheerios
- 1 loaf of Nature’s Own whole wheat bread
- 16-ounce jar of Jif Natural peanut butter
- 2 lb of ground turkey
- 1 rotisserie-cooked chicken
- 1 head of romaine lettuce
- 5 lb. bag of gold potatoes
- 3 lb. bag of yellow onions
- 3 lb. bag of Gala apples
- 2 lb of carrots
Now, fill your carts.
Then, choose the stores you want to compare. If you aren’t in the area of those stores, click “pick up” or change your zip code on your account so that you are in the area. Remember, you aren’t actually ordering.
I chose Publix, Food Lion, Harris Teeter, and Aldi.
Go to each cart and put in the items on your list. Make your choices as similar as possible. You’ll also have the benefit of learning whether or not your item is in stock at the time you build the cart.
Note that Aldi doesn’t always carry the same brands or even the same items as the other stores, and this threw off my numbers a little. Just get as close as you can.
TIP: When looking for the generic option, use the sidebar to choose a department, then find the dropdown box that says “brand”. Then opt for “store brand.”
Here are my local results.
I was able to find all items (at least some version of them) at the stores where I “shopped.”
Here are my results for this week.
The same list was compiled at each store.
- Food Lion $62.42
- Aldi $63.53
- Harris Teeter $71.41
- Publix $79.38
This week’s winner was Food Lion. It was about a dollar cheaper than Aldi and had the exact items I was looking for, which Aldi did not. Harris Teeter was almost $10 more, and Publix was about $16 more. This was a very small list (and I’m dying that it cost 62 bucks, but that’s a story for a different article), so you’d probably find a bigger difference with a bigger list.
Ways to make the most out of online shopping carts
If you go on the left-hand sidebar, you can find stuff like “Sales” and “Deals” listed. I always click on these to “shop the fliers.” This way, I can be sure I’m getting the most bang for my shopping buck, and if one store is having an awesome sale, I can say “to heck with it” and just go there and get the loss leader to stock up my pantry. (I wrote a whole book on building a pantry – check it out here.)
I can calculate pretty accurately what my bill will be ahead of going. I can also see if a dollar or so is worth the extra gas to get to a more distant store.
I calculate that I save $30-40 every time I shop by comparing my lists online at different stores.
Things to remember
Here are a few things to keep in mind when comparison shopping online.
- Sometimes it’s worth it to pay more for a single item to get the rest of the cart way cheaper.
- Sometimes you may want to skip an item that is just more than you want to spend that week.
- You can change your list based on good sales if there’s something that is a staple in your home that is on for a great price.
- Figure out the cost of mileage if your stores aren’t close by. If you’re spending $3 extra in gas, it’s not really worth it to save $2 in groceries.
As always, be flexible, and you’ll do far better financially!
How do you do comparison shopping?
Do you use online carts for comparison shopping? Would you consider giving it a try? What are your thoughts on this method? Let’s talk about it in the comments section.
