I prefer quality over quantity. I would rather pay more for quality products and potentially get less for my money than I perhaps would have, if I had bought them somewhere cheaper where the quality of food was lower. I can't always afford to do this as our income is low but I do when I have the money. I have also found that I can get a much better quality of meat and such at our local butchers which is reasonably priced, than at the local supermarket. Also stores like Marks and Spencer do have reasonably priced quality foods. It just depends on what you are buying. For example they do beautiful cuts of steak and meats for the same price you would find in your supermarket. But the quality is much better.
I prefer quality as well. It's difficult to achieve when you are on a budget, but it is not impossible. You just have to have your eye open for the best deals, and those deals are not necessarily going to be at the grocery store. I've even found some great quality brands at Dollar Tree. Sometimes, you can find well known national brands for only a dollar. As far as meat goes, I am stuck with whatever I can get at the grocery stores here since we do not have any local butcher shops.
Always preferred quality. I understand why some people may prefer quantity because it is pretty nice to get more of something, but usually it just tastes extremely cheap to me or even like it's gone bad.
Quality of course. I want to get the best value for my money, so I always choose the best. I only prefer quantity when the brand I am buying has already been tried and tested.
Quality matters, quantity is useless if it tastes bad and if it has less nutrients. It ends up being a waste of money and it's better to eat a small amount of something that is tasty and nutritious than a larger plate of something bland. It's a false economy, so I always check the ingredients for the breakdown and percentages of water and vegetables.
I prefer both, so I go to farmers markets and to select farmers themselves throughout the year. Cheaper and healthiest. I don't understand why people think it's so expensive to eat right. It's not. We save so much money not eating fake foods. We're healthier than ever and we look better than ever. Organics are expensive in grocery stores.. your paying for more than the food itself. Go to someone that deserves your business and get BOTH quality and quantity.
Being able to afford quality would be preferable, but at the moment I can't spot the cash for it. I hope in the future I can afford quality food, but for now I have to think about quantity and how long the food will last versus how good it tastes or other aspects of the food that would make it either healthier or even easier to bare. The best price is the one that's going to snag me away.
I like getting the best of both worlds. For me this means shopping at more than one place. I've pretty much tried all the different brands that are available in my area, so I know which of the cheaper ones are good and which ones are not. I know that certain items of certain brands are good, and I stay away from others. I always try to save money on things that don't have much of a difference such as a bag of sugar. It's hard to mess up a bag of sugar. The cheapest brand around here is as good as the pricey brand, so I'm not going to pay more for the name.
Depends on where you live. I live in an agricultural zone. When you find something being sold cheap then probably the sellers want to get it off their hands before it goes bad because people here mostly buy "food that's fresh from the farm." If you freeze, it's no longer fresh. For that reason I normally prefer buying in quantity because I'm know it's got nothing to do with whatever I'm buying being of a lower quality.
I buy the highest quality I possibly can because quality and nutrition go together and nutrition is the biggest factor in long term health. I try to stay away from cheap foods that are actually not nutritious or are highly processed. Same with produce. I have found that cheap frozen vegetables do not taste good at all, they taste like they are grown in depleted soil, which means they do not have many nutrients in them. I would rather eat a boring but nutritious diet than be able to buy things that are more interesting but are not very good.
I will always pay that little bit extra for quality. I think for most people it is about the taste and not the size or weight of a product. Unless you are really struggling, quality will always win. I know of a family who will buy inferior products, only because there are many family members, but their trick is to prepare the food really well, so that the food won't taste bland. I think the best thing will always be to grow as much as possible by yourself. That way you always have good quality vegetables, herbs and fruit.
I definitely prefer quality over quantity, as long as the price difference isn't too outrageous. I might go for a slightly lower quality product as long as it's not a significant difference and the price difference is. No way I would buy a much inferior product just to save some money.
While shopping for food, I always prefer quality of food rather than the quantity of food. I believe it is very important to choose food that is healthy and good for your health. Underestimating the quality is equal to underestimating the health and I would never do such a thing. I do not mind the cost of the food, hence I take as much as required for the family.
Like most here, I prefer quality than quantity when it comes to food. Quality foods usually taste better because choice ingredients were used. It's safer because it has gone thru the process according to safety standards. Like Dora, I'm willing to pay extra to get quality foods and like Strykstar - only if the price difference is not outrageous. Although it doesn't always mean that "quantity" products are of inferior quality. There are some that we can call quality and quantity at the same time - depending on where the source is. As sometimes quality product becomes more expensive because of other factors such as transportation and other "business" stuff that can make it more pricey.
I've been looking into this service I read about online called Zaycon foods, which supposedly sells you cartons of meat at prices per pound which are much cheaper than the grocery stores. They do it by eliminating the middle men, mainly the distributors and the grocery stores, and get the meat directly from the suppliers and sell it to you in bulk. The catch is you have to buy it by the case and order it in advance (I believe you pay for it in advance too) so the meat manyfactuers knows how many chickens or whatever they need to produce in advance. Then Zaycon schedules pickup dates and locations near you to get your stuff. I will pay a little extra for fresh meat, vs the meats in the freezer section that are soaked in a brine or salt solution and lord knows how old they are. The texture of those frozen brined meats is awful, and you're paying for a lot of water in them - when you go to cook them they shrink down to a fraction of their frozen size.
When I am shopping in a regular grocery store like Publix, I shop for quantity over quality. I am trying to stretch my food dollars. When I shop in stores like Earth Fare or Fresh Market, I shop for quality over quantity. These stores offer more pure, organic specialized food. Larger and better produce too. Their meat is air cooled, fresh and not wrapped in plastic.
I go for the quality. I wouldn't want to fill my stomach with tons of unhealthy foods that are cheap that I could by more than what I could consume. Even if the quality foods are that expensive and that I don't have enough money to fill myself with them for a certain period of time, I would still opt for that. I also thought that if I am eating those nutritionally dense food, I think that even if I don't eat a lot of them, I would still be healthy, unlike with those without at all nutrition, no matter how much you eat, you'd remain unhealthy.
I go for quality as much as possible but whenever there is a product that doesn't need to be so high quality then I opt for quantity instead. For example, I'd most likely just grab more cheap pasta noodles than expensive ones since no one will notice the difference there anyway, but when it comes to the instant pasta sauce I'd spend a bit more because that one is very noticeable when it is cheap and also you'd end up just wasting the whole dish anyway if it turns out that nobody wants to eat it.
I prefer both, so I buy a lot of lentils, rice and ingredients that I can use to make food instead of prepared boxed meals. There are things like pudding and bread that I make from scratch because it's cheaper and better quality.
I'm not a total brand-fanatic either though. There are many items where the cheaper non-big-brand counterpart is just as good and is saving you several dollars at the same time. It just takes some trial and error to find which ones are acceptable to you. For example, I like the Emeril Lagasse brand "Essence" seasoning, which is usually around $4+ for a small bottle of it. However our grocery stores also sell a lesser known, cheaper brand of spices called Spice Supreme which makes their own Cajun seasoning blend, which not only tastes virtually identical to Emeril's, but it's only $1 and the bottle is more than twice the size. That's kind of a no-brainer, considering I would have to buy at least two bottles of the brand name stuff, coming in at around $8 vs. $1 for a larger bottle of the off brand stuff. That's around $7 right there I just saved. Something else I won't bother splurging on are frozen fries. There's a more expensive brand called Alexia, which are "all natural", but they cost twice as much and there is like half the amount of potatoes in the bags. Besides, even regular Ore-Ida brand fries are basically all natural to begin with, they are trying to create the false impression that brands other than Alexia are loaded with chemicals, which isn't true. Granted the Alexia fries are good but they are not worth the cost, and I don't even bother with Ore-Ida either, I go for the store brand frozen fries which taste just as good and cost several dollars less. Whole Foods is another place I avoid shopping at for the most part. They sell fresh chicken that has only been refrigerated and never frozen, of course at a much more expensive price. I've tasted it along side the regular chicken I get at my regular grocery stores, and it's really not worth the difference in price imo. Even better, if I buy my chicken from our local farmers market (they have meat vendors too), I can get the best of both worlds for less.
