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How To Fill Your Freezer for Less Than $100Jun 22 '02 Write an essay on this topic.
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The Bottom Line With careful planning and strategy you can purchase meats for more than 2/3 off of the price marked or even for free!
Summer is a great time of year for me. I get a break from motherhood for a while and the stores are filled with great bargains that I can not pass up. For the past three years, I have learned a great deal about purchasing meat products during this time of year and I would like share some of this information with you so that you can learn to fill your freezer for less than $100. Fill Your Freezer For Less than $100? Now many of you may think that this is absolutely impossible. How can anyone buy quality meat in quantity to fill your freezer for less than $100? Well, I've done it for the past three years over the summer months and I would like to share my secrets with you. Supermarket Shopping Even though I use the Wal-Mart Super Center for most of my grocery shopping, I do not use it for stocking my freezer. Instead, I have developed a methodology by learning the patterns that my neighborhood grocery stores have with their handling of meat and sales and then using that information to my advantage. These strategies include the following: Learn The Patterns of Your Grocery Meat Department Grocery stores mark down week on a daily basis. When fresh meats start to near their expiration date it is a great time to purchase these meats in quantity. While many people may feel this is a bad idea, it is a good idea if you have a reputable grocer who marks down meat while it is still fresh looking and offers a money back policy if there is a problem. I have used this methodology for the past three years to learn the patterns of my grocery markdowns to my advantage. For instance, I like Ingles ground beef (chuck, round, sirloin). However, I don't like the prices that these cuts of ground beef cost so I tend to avoid their stores for regularly priced meat items. Yet, I have learned that Ingles Supermaket marks down their ground beef cuts to 2/3 or more off on Sunday mornings. So, after I go to church, I head over to Ingles to stock up on my ground chuck, round, and sirloin for immediate and freezer use. This past Sunday Ingles had nearly 30 pounds of ground church and round for a reduced price of 59 cents a pound. I bought all of the beef at this price at a cost of $17.70. Then I went to Kroger immediately after this and found a great selection of center cut and boneless pork chops and chicken breasts. Center cut and boneless pork chops averaged about 79 cents a pound and chicken breasts were about 49 cents a pound. I purchased 25 pounds of pork chops for a cost of $15.80, and 20 pounds of chicken breasts for a cost of $9.80. Markdowns Or Coupon Reductions Most of these savings are designated as flat markdown amounts marked on the packages of the meat or with coupon savings. In the case of Ingles, the meat is straight marked down to a standard price. In the case of Kroger, they use attached dollars/cents off coupons onto the packages of meat that are to be marked down. The trick to using either one of these methods of markdowns it to purchase the highest weight of meat at the lowest price. This reduces the price per pound that you will pay. An example of this was at Ingles concerning the their ground chuck. The packages were all standard prices, $1, $2, or $3. However, if you look at the packages you can see that in some instances a $1 pack held 1 pound of beef, but in others it held 2 pounds of beef. By purchasing the larger weight you get more beef for a substantially lower price per pound. In the situation with Kroger, the reverse is in place. Instead of looking for the biggest weight of meat per container, you look at the coupons and then the package and then determine what weight works best for you with price. An example of this is the following: A package of center cut pork chops weighing 1 pound may cost $3. If that package has a $2 coupon on it then the chops will cost $1 a pound. However, if you see a package containing 2 pounds of pork chops this may cost $6. If the same coupon of $2 is on that package then you will pay $4 which is $2 a pound. So depending on the type of system that the meat is marked down, you have to use different methodologies. Combination Deals I've learned though that Sunday overall is a great day to shop, especially in the afternoon at Kroger. After going to my Sunday Ingles visit for ground beef and lunch at home, I read the Sunday paper and observe the Kroger ads. If there's a great sale there at Kroger then I head there immediately for combined offers. For instance, Kroger has whole chickens buy one get one free. Knowing that the meat department there marks down meat about 2 p.m., I go immediately to the whole chicken area where I find 4 chickens marked down $2 each. The price of these chickens is only about $3.50 to $4.25. Since the chickens are buy one get one free, I get the second one of each set free. However, I have the coupons attached to each chicken, and even though the chickens are "free" I get the coupon price off of each bird regardless. Each chicken had $2 off on it, making me purchase all four of my chickens for free in the end. Free chicken? Yes, and there's nothing "illegal" about this at all. The two $2 coupons were taken off of the one chicken I purchased making it become "free" or up to 25 cents for a whole chicken that will feed my family for two meals or so. Previous Week's Sales Finally a "trick" that you can use as a combination offer is to go to a store such as Kroger on a Sunday and then look for last week's "deals". Kroger has a store customer card program where certain offers are good for members only. If you go to the store on a Sunday, many of these deals are still marked on the packages with the old "sale" price. Because of that, Kroger has to honor that price when the package scans. If you also have a coupon reduction on that package that gives you yet another combined offer to save additional money. In addition to this fact, Kroger also has a program where if the item does not scan properly you get the item for free. So, if you have purchased a prior week's sale still marked with last week's sale price and it scans wrong, then you get the item for nothing. To get this deal though, you have to bring the package and the receipt to the customer service department, but if you can get a roast for free (or even make money by using a mark down coupon) then that is an even better deal. The dollars "off" just go against your other groceries. Regular Store Sales Finally, the last method that I use is regular store sales on their own. At Ingles this week chicken leg quarters in a 10 pound bag are being sold for 19 cents a pound. Because my kids like dark meat more than white, I purchased 40 pounds of leg quarters. The normal price of leg quarters at Wal-mart is 37 cents a pound for 10 pounds, and at the regular grocery it is up to 59 cents a pound. So, this sale makes the price be 1/2 to 2/3 off depending on what store you frequent. Closing Thoughts While I have given examples of purchasing more lower priced meats and poultry, the same kinds of methods work for higher cuts of meats such as T-bone steaks, rib eyes and so forth. With planning and strategy you can also purchase great cuts of beef for a substantially reduced price to fill your freezer with quality meats for future use. The following is a list of the items I have purchased for my freezer: 30 Pounds of Ground Chuck/Round at $17.70 (59 Cents a pound) 25 Pounds of Center Cut/Boneless Pork Chops at $15.80 (79 Cents a pound) 15 Pounds of Chicken Breasts at $9.80 (49 Cents a Pound) 60 Pounds of Chicken Thighs at $8.40 (8 Cents a Pound) 34 Pounds of Beef Stew at $8.50 (25 Cents a Pound) 10 Pounds of Sirloin Steak at $23.00 ($2.30 a Pound) 10 Packages of Armour/Ball Park Hot Dogs at $5.00 (50 cents a package) Total 184 pounds of meat for $88.20 Related Article How I Bought $900 in Groceries for $240 http://www.epinions.com/content_2054922372 Update 06/22/2002 at 6:30 PM I ran back to Kroger to get more hot dogs while they were on sale (I got these for 39 cents a package because of coupons.) After I got there, I saw a frenzy in the meat department and people going crazy. When I went over there, I found out that the store had double ordered their chicken thighs (that were buy one get one free) and their Tyson marinated boneless individual chicken breasts (that were also buy one get one free). They had coupons on these packages of chicken that were more than 1/2 of the price of the product. That means that if you "bought" two of these products the store would actually OWE you money! I ran over there and bought 6 more packages of chicken thighs (family packs) hoping to move things around in my freezer to make things fit. However, I really wanted the marinated chicken breasts because that would be a great thing for me to eat at lunch on the George Foreman small grill there. The cashier told me that since those were individually wrapped they could fit in spare space so I went ahead and got about 30 packages of marinated chicken breasts took them out of the packages (styrofoam) and now they are in my small freezer! After the cashier rang me up the system showed that the store OWED me money! So, I "bought" some items that were on sale (cereal, bottled water, etc.) and got some of those things for free. I know this sounds insane, but I am SO thankful that it happened. Now I have so much meat in my home that I won't have to go to the store for that for a LONG time! and with the marinated chicken breasts, I can have a nice lunch at work anytime I like! Shopping like this does take effort but it is worth it!  |
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