A couple of years ago, I was out with a friend, and we stopped at one of those gourmet, high end grocery stores. You know the kind - the deli and bakery have you drooling; they carry varieties of cheese that you never heard of, and produce that you only read about. I had never thought about these stores as a way to CUT my grocery spending - I thought they would just increase it.
Well, yes, they would increase my spending if I gave in to every temptation I saw there (and there could potentially be a lot of them!) But since this hadn’t actually been a shopping “destination” - my friend and I did not say “Let’s get together this weekend. We can go grocery shopping” - I really hadn’t planned on buying anything there. It was more of a “hey, this store just opened, let’s check it out” moment (we knew it was more of a high end store than where we usually shop, so we figured it could be fun.)
What I didn’t expect to find were, well, BARGAINS. They had a “reduced” table in the produce section. Well, let me tell you, that “reduced” produce looked pretty fresh to me! As I recall, I picked up 10 limes for $1 and some AMAZING cherry tomatoes for 98¢ a package (amazing because these tasted like I had grown them in my garden). I know I bought other things, too, but it’s been a few years since my initial venture into this store. Subsequent “markdown” deals have included packages of “gourmet” mushrooms - oyster, shitake, portabella - for 99¢ each (I’ll buy all the markdown mushrooms they have, when I see them. I saute the extras in a bit of olive oil with a little chopped garlic, flash freeze, then bag them to store in the freezer for future use). I could go on and on about what I’ve found (and probably would, if I remembered them all.)
The markdown table is a gamble - I never know what, if anything, it will have. But I still go to this store regularly. I check their loss leaders in the paper, and if I see some good ones (almost always produce) - I’m there! This week they had several items I thought would make the trip worthwhile. Having just returned from there, here are a few of the deals I found:
Fresh asparagus for 99¢ a pound. Now, another grocery store chain - a chain that would be known as more of a “good deal” type store - also has asparagus on sale this week - for $2.49 a pound. It’s St. Patrick’s Day, and cabbage is on sale lots of places - for 39¢ a pound. Here at the gourmet store, it was 29¢ a pound. Leaf lettuce was on sale for 79¢ a pound - and lettuce has been pretty expensive around here lately.
In the past, I’ve found red peppers for far cheaper here than anywhere eles.
As I said previously, the quality of this stuff is awesome. And the moral of this story is, in the quest to lower your grocery bill, don’t automatically rule certain store out. You might be pleasantly surprised at what you find!