Saving money on food doesn't need to be too hard. While advice like substituting expensive food may work for some and not for others who'll find giving up something they like almost impossible, how about alternating between the pricier food products and the cheaper ones every shopping week? That would save you some money every two weeks and at the end of the year it would be enough money saved to buy some Christmas gifts or anything else.
This is where discount retailers like Lidl and Aldi do well as the substitutions are as good as or better than the brands. People are no longer as snobby about going to discount store like the Christmas Tree Shop, or the dollar store because some items are good quality. Some even have surplus branded goods at a discount price.
Looks like we are on the same page this morning. I just posted a thread about thinking about substitutions at the grocery store. Grocery shopping can be so expensive. I'm always trying to come up with ways to stretch my dollars. I like your suggestion of alternating between higher end meals one week and more economical ones the next.
If the person is really trying to save, then I think that they would not bother anymore with costlier meals, they would just stick with the cheap meals. I think canned food is quite cheap and I can subsist on different kinds if I'm trying to save.
Sounds like a good idea saving money by alternating expensive foods and inexpensive foods. We like veggie burgers and veggie bacon. The price for veggie bacon & veggie burgers just went up a lot from 4.99 to 6.99! One pound of bacon is on sale at Don Quiote for 2.39! I should get the regular bacon, but we watch our diet so I hesitate!
I do this myself. Sometimes I will treat myself to good but expensive takeout and think to myself that I'll just cut the budget on some other day to compensate. This way, I wouldn't feel like I was restricting myself too much just to save money, since I'm still essentially paying the same amount in expense but this way I still get to taste expensive dishes or ingredients. The times when I have to skimp aren't too bad either because there are always great cheap restaurants to buy from anyway, and there are countless great recipes online that will teach you how to maximize your dish with cheap ingredients.
It seems like people are going in two different directions - you either have the budget conscious folks who are focused on bargain shopping and keeping their grocery bills down as much as possible with coupons and price comparisons and other offers. Then on the other side of the spectrum you've got a growing group of people who go out of their way to only shop at places such as Whole Foods, and don't mind paying an arm and a leg for everything, and are more wrapped up in the experience of shopping at such stores. I'm definitely in the budget conscious camp, and refuse to pay the high prices at places like Whole Foods. There are many staple items that you can get at dollar stores which are the exact same quality as their brand counterparts. This is one of the reasons I don't even bother with coupons, since they are all for brand items which are more expensive to begin with. I just swap out the generic version whenever I can, and simply save on them each and every time.
I've had to cut back significantly on my grocery budget lately, as well as everything else. I mainly buy store brand or generics, rather than name brand, but sometimes I will buy the name brand if I have a coupon or other discount that will bring the cost down so it's comparable, or at least fairly close, to that of the generics/store brand items. Often, the price differences are significant, and I just can't see paying that money for the same item, when I could use it to pay for something else.
There are some items I refuse to get them from the mainline store because I know I can get the same item at the Dollar Store at a better price. Like chips or popcorn, the same product for only a dollar saving as much as $2 on some of the items.
I guess we do this differently. We tend to buy expensive meats like chicken or pork, we buy them from groceries from a known brand. My son has had an allergic reaction from the meat from the local market probably because of the feeds fed to the chicken. Anyway, with all other things we buy them generic. The vegetables here are really cheap so we can just buy them in the local market and they're fresher that way too. We don't usually alternate but with this process we end up spending less and saving more.
