Act 14: If the Price is Right

I made a price book this week!  Woot!  Wondering what a price book is?  A book of prices.  End of post.

Just kidding :-)

I learned about the price book idea from reading Time Magazine's blog It's Your Money.  This blog has been a bit disappointing as it is mostly about ways to save money and not about money management and financial things in general.  I didn't know that at first.  But it did once give me a 30% off coupon to a shoe store so I finally got to replace my worn out boots, so I keep it around.  Regardless, it linked to an article one day about price books.  It talked about how people don't really know what they pay for their goods and don't comparison shop the way they should.  It recommended that each person make a list of items they buy regularly and pick 3 to 5 stores at which you might potentially shop.  Then print out your list and go price your items. 

I had a hard time keeping my list under control.  I think the article recommended the basket of goods be around 30 items.  Mine was 51.  I covered all your major grocery categories... meat, dairy, produce, packaged foods, and toiletries.  The stores I priced at were Hy-Vee, Jewel, Walmart, Target, and Walgreens.  For the purposes of experiment I eliminated Target and Walgreens from the results.  Neither of the ones near me sells produce or meat so the data just wasn't as comparable (no Super Target over on this side of the river!).

It was a little time consuming to price my items at the different stores, but really it ended up only being a couple of hours.  I wanted to upload my spreadsheet but I don't seem to be able to do that, which is too bad because it was pretty cool!  For each item the lowest price is highlighted in yellow and the highest price is in red font.  Unless you have a Mac, in which case Microsoft chose not to include support for conditional formatting in your software and you won't see any of my pretty colors.  Not that I'm bitter.  Doesn't matter though, currently none of you can see the spreadsheet at all.  Moving on.

The first thing I learned from viewing my results was this:  NEVER buy anything at Walgreens.  Holy crap.  Ibuprofen, allergy medicine, and body wash are $3 more expensive there than anywhere else.  Same item size and everything.  They were consistently expensive on all the products they had.  Convenience is not cheap.

The results were as I expected between the big three.

	# of Goods	Total Price	Difference ($)
Jewel	51	$224.73
Hy-Vee	51	$203.56	-$21.17
Wal-Mart	51	$186.45	-$17.11

 I should probably say that I currently shop at Hy-Vee.  I switched about a year ago when my roommate went there and discovered how much cheaper it was.  This kind of proves it.. $21 in savings is probably worth driving an extra half mile.  Turns out though, I could drive a mile farther down the road and save another $17 by shopping at Wal-Mart.  I kind of already knew that.  And it would be worth it.

Here's my issue:  have you seen their produce?  It's possible other Wal-Mart stores have better looking fruits and veggies but I am never impressed when I go in the store near me.  Not by the selection or the quality.  And after looking at it, I'm not all that impressed with their meats either.  Now it's a quality issue.  I buy a lot of produce and I want it to be good.  Great even.  I'm all for saving money but I'm not having financial hardships and at this point I'm not sure I want to sacrifice quality for $17.

 Being the analytical person I am though, I couldn't leave it at that.  There has to be a compromise.  What about shopping at 2 stores?  Experts recommend it to save money and get better deals.  Here's the breakdown:

	# of Goods	Total Price	Savings over Hy-Vee only
Hy-Vee Dairy, Produce, Meat	29	$97.88
Wal-Mart Grocery, Toiletries	22	$94.58
Total	51	192.46	-$11.10

I chose to buy produce and meat at Hy-Vee because of the quality issue.  Dairy is actually the only sub-category that was cheaper to buy from Hy-Vee.  The grocery category (packaged foods like bread, cereal, snacks, pop, etc) and toiletries come from Wal-Mart.  This setup would save me $11 over shopping at Hy-Vee alone.  Not bad.  Worth shopping at two stores?  I lean towards no, but I haven't had tried it either.  They're on the same road basically so the logistics are easy.  It would be the extra time and hassle that will ultimately make the difference.  

Maybe on weeks when my shopping list doesn't have much meat or produce on it, I'll head to Wal-Mart and save a few extra bucks that week.  Or maybe I won't change my actions at all.  The point of the exercise was to become a more educated consumer, and I have.  My behavior, whatever it is, is now a deliberate choice driven by actual data rather than just being driven by whatever store I happen to feel like going to that day.  Which is probably a lot more reliable!