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Supermarket Shopping: Halve your weekly bill by beating the system

10 March, 2009 06:33:00

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The cost of food is rocketing, yet with a few focused techniques you can save $1,000s annually on supermarket shopping. This step-by-step guide includes when to shop to maximise discounts, how to do the downshift challenge to get the same for less, compare online supermarkets and get $100s of grocery discount coupons for free.

A supermarket's job is to make us spend

Supermarkets are cathedrals of consumerism; they're almost perfectly honed marketing environments, benefiting from millions of pounds of research into how to encourage and seduce us into buying and spending more than we need.

It's one reason that if you want to teach an eight-year-old about money, the best place to start is a supermarket. Ask them what they can smell: it'll usually be bread or a bakery, as the scent makes us hungry and likely to buy more food, so the supermarket profits.

This means, as consumers, we must learn counter-moves. Obviously eating before shopping helps, but this is just one trick. Others include the following:

* Sweets and magazines placed by the till.

      These are impulse buys, so putting them near the till gives them one last attempt to grab our cash.

* Store layouts make us walk the whole distance.

      Regularly bought items tend to be spread around the store, so we need to pass many other tempting goodies to complete our shopping.

* Eye level products are the profitable ones.

      The most profitable stock is placed at eye level (or children’s eye level if it's targeted at them), yet profitable goods tend not to be the best deals. The age old adage ‘look high and low for something’ really does apply.

* Same goods, different prices, depending where in the store you are.

      Supermarkets charge as much as possible and differentiate prices around the store. For example, if you're buying snacks such as nuts or dried fruit, they're much more expensive in the snack area than in world food or baking.

* Sales type signage for non-sales items.

      Seedless grapes and other attractive treats are usually near the store entrance, often below cost price, to entice us in. Similar signs and displays are used elsewhere to promote deals, even when they're not on sale. Bright colours and the words 'discount' and 'sale' make us feel good, yet the reduction may be pennies and cheaper equivalents hidden elsewhere.

Don't let them steer your trolley

The beauty of supermarket design is that it's all aimed at making us impulse spend. Almost all the techniques in this guide are designed to put you back in charge. For those on a strict budget, it's important to get in the right mindset.

Replace "What's the cheapest way to get all the goodies I want?"

With “On my $xx budget, what's the best value I can get with it?”

Of course, working out a budget is part of a wider strategy and how much to prioritise food shopping depends on your other expenditure. Use the free Budget Planner tool to help.

The Downshift Challenge

Over the years, supermarkets have hypnotised us into spending more and moving up the brand chain. Many people gradually buy increasingly more expensive versions of the same thing.

The downshift challenge, which provides ENORMOUS savings, has a simple premise:

Drop one brand level on everything and see if you can tell the difference. If you can't, stick with the cheaper product.

Let's applaud the sheer marketing genius of this. The system allows supermarkets to justify huge price variations. Think about it for a second: when you're in Tesco, you assume Tesco Finest is glam and gorgeous and Tesco Value is cheap and nasty, so the immense price difference feels legitimate. Yet who actually decides this? Tesco of course! Its packaging and product placement are all designed to support this myth.

Don’t get me wrong, there are differences in ingredients and production quality. Yet it isn’t uniform: just because the salmon en croute is great, it doesn’t mean the same brand's gourmet mousse, made in a different factory in another part of the world, is too.

The downshift technique ... typical saving $800/year

Don’t worry, I'm not about to argue you should buy no-frills everything; my bottom certainly requires smoother toilet paper! The aim's to downshift only where you can't tell the difference and, for many families, this alone can save 15% a year on shopping bills, typically $800.

* The Downshift Challenge in-store.

      The next time you shop, swap one of everything to something just one brand level lower. So if you usually buy four cans of Tesco's own-brand baked beans, this time buy three and one Tesco Value. If you use luxury lavender shower gel, drop to Asda’s own brand.

* The Downshift Challenge online.

      The supermarket comparison site mySupermarket now includes a downshift challenge section based exactly on this theory. So when you enter your shopping trolley, as well as comparing the price across online supermarkets, it gives you the downshifted option.

      This is a quick system and a great way to see the scale of the savings, even if you don't shop online.

The impact is enormous:

Drop one brand level on everything and the average bill's cut by a third. On a $100 weekly shop, that's $1,700 a year less.

The proof of this stat is based on detailed research. I've done a number of TV programmes where we've downshifted a family's shopping and the 33% saving is staggeringly consistent. Yet for ITV1's Tonight Supermarket Cheap programme, we went a step further and number-crunched hundreds of prices from the big four supermarkets.

Again, there was a standard 33% average saving by dropping one brand level for every product. This consistency indicates that supermarkets deliberately devise their price structures this way. It's worth noting the biggest downshift savings aren't from premium brands to manufacturer brands, but for those already lower down the brand chain to begin with.

Downshift Challenge Savings by Supermarket

Downshift from…	Tesco (1)	Morrisons (2)	Sainsbury’s (3)	Asda (4)
Luxury to Brande d	8%	16%	22%	12%
Branded to Own Brand	31%	36%	31%	35%
Own Brand to Value	37%	39%	45%	41%
An average one brand	29%	34%	34%	35%
(1) 400 items compared (2) 266 items compared (3 ) 314 items compared (4) 319 items compared

Downshift Challenge Example Savings

Product	Mainstream Brand	Supermarket own	Supermarket economy
Jaffa cakes (36pk)	$1.88	$1.15	$1.08
Teabags (240 pk)	$2.99	$2.19	$0.87
Toilet roll (4 pk)	$1.81	$1.54	$0.40
Toothpaste	$1.76	$0.39	$0.31
Lager (4 X 500ml cans)	$4.78	$2.19	$0.88

Remember, downshifting's about 'trying' not 'switching'

The downshift challenge isn’t about automatically dropping a brand level, it’s about seeing if you can notice any difference. If you don’t like the lower brand level or the drop in quality is too severe, all but those who are in drastic need of urgent savings should switch back. Yet you'll be surprised at how few things you notice the change.

However there's an important point to watch for when trying downshifted goods:

Taste with your mouth, not with your eyes

The packaging and look of a product has a big psychological effect: just knowing something is more expensive means, after years of retail hypnosis, we assume it’s better. Taste with that knowledge, and you often prefer it. If you can taste the food blind, great. If not, at least don't have the packaging out when you do.

A quick story: for a TV experiment, a professional chef cooked up two identical three course meals, one using normal ingredients, the other downshifted.

Off camera, I spoke to one of the assistant chefs; he'd dipped his finger first into a pack of I can't believe it's not butter and then the generic version, probably called I can't believe it's not better. He pointed at the cheaper brand and said, "you can tell the quality's worse as it's much saltier."

Yet a chef I independently asked said salty butter isn't automatically a bad sign. Was the assistant's reaction simply cognitive dissonance; spotting a difference and using it to justify it better, just because it was the expensive one?

Either way when the family tasted the three courses blind, they actually preferred the cheaper produce, never mind couldn't spot the difference.

Most spot the difference only on half the goods

The results of the downshift challenge again fit a standard pattern. Most people seem to only note the difference on around half the shopping. Therefore, it's worth quickly running through the maths.

For a family shop of $100 a week...

    * Annual Expenditure: $5,200
    * Downshift everything - annual savings: $1,700
    * Downshift only 'no-difference' items - annual saving: $800

Downshifting can cut 15% off a family’s shop saving over $800 a year, without noticing the difference

More quick downshift tips

If you're following the Downshift, there are a few more things to consider which can help boost the savings.

* Downshift cleaning products and cosmetics.

      Rather strangely, reports show people are more likely to stick with branded washing powders, shower gels and other cleaning products than food. Yet these products don't even need tasting and the saving is huge. So try downshifting these too.

      Then again, Old Style MoneySavers wouldn't forgive me if I omitted to say you can clean the whole house with white vinegar and lemon juice (read more on Old Style Cleaning and full info in the charity Thrifty Ways book).

* Don't assume downshifting is worse nutritionally.
      Often lower cost products can be better, as there are fewer flavourings, colourings and chemicals; always check the label if this is a concern.

* Downshifting is about price not brand.

      Some people religiously downshift brands, even if the higher brand is on special offer and cheaper. In that case, there's no need, pick the cheaper product, comparing on cost per gram.

* Don't stop your downshift.

      Once you've successfully downshifted once, try it again a few weeks later; you may be

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