It's time for another HARO post. This one's about being a super-frugal grocery shopper in Gate City, Virginia.
For ultra-low prices people can try their luck at the "salvage" type stores. They come and go. They buy up outdated food from supermarkets and try to sell it for whatever they can get before the real USE-by date (a week or two past the SELL-by date). Usually what they sell is still acceptable, but there are no guarantees. Sometimes the original purchaser couldn't sell a batch of canned goods because word got around that some of the cans contained dirt. Sometimes oily food may smell rancid. Sometimes grains, nuts, or chocolate products contain weevils. You may want to open cans and packages outdoors. But the majority of the food they sell is as good as it was when the original store bought it. If you have a dog, hog, or possum who will eat any purchases that turn out to be unfit for human consumption, the salvage stores are for you.
For cheap food that's guaranteed to be edible, Save-a-lot is the local store that offers cheap brands. Sometimes they have good prices on respectable brands too. Before pesticide-saturated GMO "food" became a thing I used to save a lot of money buying off brands. Now I know they're where the GMO go.
Dollar General Stores also sell cheap food that's guaranteed to be edible—a lot of store brands and some name brands. They don't sell anything fresh, but they have competitive prices on a very limited selection of canned and dry food. To be fair, local Dollar General Stores used to offer enough different boxes and cans that a person could do a week's grocery shopping there if the person had a garden or could stop at a vegetable stand. They discontinued selling food items in the late 2010s when many people were having adverse reactions to canned and dried foods that had been artificially "ripened" with glyphosate. I was maintaining this web site from buildings within sight of a Dollar General Store, so I used to buy lunch and provisions for the weekend there. Week by week I watched food items be marked down and discontinued. GMO labelling, a total glyphosate ban, and a ban on allowing any "psticides" to come into contact with food, are three manifestations of common decency that should bring Dollar General Store grocery sections up to standard.
Moving up the ladder of respectability to chain supermarkets...Food Lion is a really easy store to hate. They have a big selection of good quality name-brand food, all priced at least twice what it ought to cost, and a fairly wide selection of store-brand food, all costing what you wanted to pay for the name-brand equivalent, all claiming to be comparable in quality. Usually any claim to comparable quality is a bad joke. There are exceptions—Food Lion chips used to be fried in fresh oil because Moore's chips consumers were used to the flavor the oil had the second time it was used. But whatever you buy, even if it appears to be sealed, not out of date, not subject to temperature damage, there is just a high possibility of food poisoning with all food from Food Lion. Obviously deli meats are just not a thing local shoppers buy at Food Lion, but that's not the end of it. People have got food poisoning, usually salmonella if a specific pathogen was identified, from factory-sealed, name-brand food sold at Food Lion. I would not have tried making that up. Their staff aren't very nice either; cashiers tend to play the chatter-cheat game. And, quality control? Last winter Food Lion tried to sell a brand of pre-seasoned canned beans that actually listed propylene glycol--y'know, the kind of antifreeze that may kill your dog--as an ingredient. Antifreeze as a novelty flavoring added to justify doubling the price of a cheap food item? That's our Food Lion.
Price Less is an easier store to like. They usually have reasonable prices and try to keep a good selection of food products in stock. They do incline toward cheap brands, but don't mark up the respectable brands to push sales of brands that are ten cents cheaper.
Wal-Mart is the baseline store. Super Wal-Marts have full-sized grocery sections and stock just about everything, usually at a reasonable price. The Wal-Mart in Colonial Heights, Tennessee, is sometimes said to be the original home of the chatter-cheat game.
Food City, Krogers, and Safeway each have their quirks but are similar in terms of price shopping. They run sales and offer discounts that make certain items a good bargain, while racking up the prices on other items you might want to buy to go with the sale items. If peanut butter is on sale, bread's not. If the price of cold cereal is down, the price of milk is up, and vice versa. Each of those chains has a mix of good quality brands, special luxury brands, and second-rate store brands, but prices are reasonably comparable. Food City actually promotes the chatter-cheat game, though not all the chatterboxes they put behind the cash registers play it.
Ingles is a smaller, locally owned supermarket located at the far end of Kingsport. I doubt that that store has ever advertised a price on anything that would justify the expense of driving out to it, but their selling point is quality, not price.
My frugal tip for all local shoppers is not to make eye contact with a cashier or participate in a conversation while they are ringing up groceries. If you do, you'll pay for more than you buy, every time. The overcharge will seem like a natural mistake and may be small, but once you realize it's an ongoing system you will be motivated to stop playing the game. If just watching the cash register while handing them one item at a time and watching the price ring up doesn't shut off the yap, you might have to escalate to reading the prices out loud and saying "Put that back!" if something rings up higher than the shelf price. (Scan prices and shelf prices not matching is one way the game is played. Then there's scanning an item twice, or if they have access to several similar items, scanning your (one) $1.29 can three times and (one of your three) 69-cent cans once. Over time, it pays to cut off the "friendly" chatter.
"But then the employees wouldn't liiike me," some people say. Bah. If you're a frugal shopper they don't liiike you anyway, and it's un-American for a store not to offer the same level of honesty and courtesy to everyone, whether the employees liiike them or not.
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