Wednesday, September 24, 2008

Is rising food prices frightening the pants off you.

If it is, you are one of the Canadians who have noticed the dramatic increase at the grocery market registers.
With everyone so focused on rising oil prices and prices at the pump food companies and grocery stores are hiking prices on another necessity of life, food . While Canadians are focused on energy costs and transportation costs soaring. they may not have noticed that rice has tripled in price and the cost of flour has at the very least doubled. Leading to higher prices for the very basic in life.

A lot of people in a forum I frequently visit www. frugalshopper.ca have noticed, and we are reacting with measures to keep our food budgets buying what it was before. But a lot of people are still not quite in the know. It seems logical that unless you paid attention to what the prices were before it is hard to know how much it has jumped. Consumers just look blankly at the grocery bill wondering what they bought that put their weekly grocery bill 20+ dollars higher than it was two weeks ago. they look at the chips and cookies or ice cream and think aha! that must be the culprit! chances are it is the things like rice, flour products, milk, vegetables and meats. in fact a lot of the snack food type items are still setting lowest price ever records.

Another thing to note is even if the prices on your favorite items have not gone up you should take note of the package size as that may have gone down. A popular example of this is the big bricks of cheese. it used to sell for 4.99 on sale for 600g. And it still occasionally goes on sale for this price the package size is now 520g sneaky sneaky!

first thing anyone can do is look at what it is they buy and note what it costs. knowing your prices is key. without knowing what it regularly sells for you will not know when you come across a good deal. ie if your families favorite bread normally sells for 2.29 and you do not know this when you buy it on sale for 1.69 you may pass up the opportunity to save money by buying a few extra loaves and freezing them.

There are lots of other things you can do as well such as menu planning, stocking up , coupons , and more. but if you are new to this at first just focus on what are you paying for your favorite things . when you have that knowledge the door opens to saving money on your families groceries. Then you have the money to spend on fun things for the family or to pay for those ever rising gasoline prices.

3 comments:

brysgirl said...

thanks to your information and information and tips I get from frugalshopper.ca, I have managed to avoid a huge increase in my grocery budget and I have learned the concept of stockpiling when things are on sale and pricematching! thanks for the great information!

headly said...

thank you for your comment. i know that the little tips and tricks us frugallers do certainly helps doesn't it. i think more and more people are being awakened to the fact that groceries is becomming a huge part of the reasons they are over budget all of a sudden. I think we will start to see an increased amount of newbies to the site. and I say welcome newbies!

marlaene said...

im also a member of frugal shopper.ca

im confident with the use of coupons and loyality program rising food prices wont really hurt too much

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