I have to hand it to them. Grocery stores are the masters of consumer psychology. How else can you explain walking into the grocery store for one item and coming out with a basket full of stuff?

In some ways they remind me of carnival pitchmen who’ve refined their sales pitches to perfection. In the process we spend more than we need to or would like to.

Let’s take a look at the subtle grocery store manipulation that drains hard earned money from our pocketbooks.

The Limited Quantities Trick

How many times have you ever heard a cashier say,

“No ma’am, you’re over limit on those mangos – there’s a limit of 3 per person you know.”

Do you really think that the store cares how many items each customer purchases? Of course not. Their only concern is making sure they sell as much as possible.

Here’s a simple fact – In the direct marketing world the two easiest ways to influence a person to make a purchase are (1) limit the time an offer is available or (2) limit the quantities of product available for purchase.

Don’t believe me. Just take a look at the Home Shopping Network or any typical late night infomercial to see what I mean.

It seems supermarkets have adapted these time tested marketing ideas for use on the grocery store floor.

Placing a limit sign on the side of a product automatically guarantees that more customers will buy. I mean if the quantities are limited it must be a great deal – right! Not only will more customers purchase but I’m quite sure each will make sure they get their limit.

So with a simple limit sign the grocery store has both increased the number of people interested in the sale and also guaranteed that those who do buy will buy more – probably the limit allowed by the sale.

Now don’t get me wrong. Sometimes these “limit sales” turn out to be great deals. I’ve run into a few great limit sales recently. I’m simply saying that you should always check out such a sale before reflexively placing items in your cart.

Check the regular price to see if you really are getting a deal. Sometimes you’re only saving pennies. Make sure to check the expiration date of the product or the condition of the items if they are perishables. A limit sale is a quick way for a supermarket to get rid of items past their prime.

Finally, if it is a legit sale be careful of going over the limit because the scanner may charge you full price for any extra items.

The Limited Time (4 Day Sale) Trick

This limited time sales trick is another adaptation from the direct marketing world. Typically supermarket sales run for a week. Sometimes, however, stores feature “special” 3 day or 4 day sales – the typical limited time offer trick. I believe they want to secretly give you the impression that the deals at these sales are especially good.

One night I was in the store to get some milk and noticed that a “special” 4 day sale was going on. I better make sure I check out all the deals as I won’t be back before the sale ends, I thought. Yes, I have to admit that there were a few great bargains – what I like to call “super sales” when you can get an item at 50% off or more.

But the truth be told, the normal week long sales also had many of these same super sales! Yet the difference is that because it was time limited – 4 days long only instead of the normal week long sale, I felt compelled to stay and shop.

The Sucker Sale

This is perhaps the most interesting of grocery store tricks I’ve come across. Supermarkets understand this simple fact. Everyone loves a sale. Don’t you? I have to admit my heart races just a little bit faster when I see the red sales sticker and the promise of a great deal.

Yet, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been in the process of putting a “sales” item in my basket only to notice how much I was really saving. Ten cents off a $3.29 box of cookies, twenty cents of a $2.99 carton of orange juice! Not quite a deal after all.

These “sucker sales”, as I like to call them, are particularly effective since they are interspersed amongst real bargains – items that are on sale for 30%, 40%, even 50% off their regular price. We’re so conditioned by the savings we get with the true sales that we blindly act as if all sales are deals.

Next time you’re about to throw a sale item in your cart take a second to figure out how much you’re really saving. You may be about to become the next victim of a “sucker sale”.

Do you have any grocery store tricks you’ve come across? We’d like to hear from you. Share your experiences with others by leaving a comment below.

Hello. Today I’m going to take you on a little trip around the blogosphere and highlight some great frugal food articles.

Everybody is trying to eat healthy. In a down economy, however, this can become quite difficult. Vic Magary at Bargaineering.com shows you how to Eat Healthy on $10 a Day.

TipHero.com is a great website that provides personal finance tips and advice. Site moderator Ray presents 5 Ways I Save Money on Groceries. Particularly interesting is his method for substituting expensive processed foods for cheaper healthier alternatives.

A very interesting post over at Out of Debt Again. Mrs. Accountability describes her first week using a cash only system for groceries. It allows her to save money and stay under budget. She mentions seven specific frugal moves that the cash system encouraged her to make in the first week alone.

Kris at Cheap Healthy Good provides a prescription for dealing with Food Affluenza – the tendency to allow our food costs to bloat as our incomes increase.

According to Slashfood.com, substituting top-shelf alcohol with generic booze and recycling baskets of chips are a few tricks some restaurants use to pinch pennies. Check out the site for 10 Dirty Little Restaurant Secrets.

J.D. at Get Rich Slowly shows you how switching to store brands can be a painless way to slash your grocery bill with his real life grocery store experiment.

In a much older article (from 2005 in fact) but a timely one never-the-less, Frank at Hello Dollar presents an interesting argument for how brown bagging your lunch can earn you a half a million dollars over your lifetime!

We’ve recently participated in the following personal finance blog carnivals:

Are You Leaving Money Behind at the Supermarket included in the Carnival of Personal Finance hosted by Simply Forties.

Save Money by Building a More Effective Shopping List included in the Carnival of Personal Finance hosted by Taking Charge.

4 Supercharged Coupon Ideas That’ll Have You Smiling All the Way to the Bank included in the Money Hacks Carnival hosted by Four Pillars.

Nine Simple Ways to Avoid Supermarket Impulse Purchases included in the Carnival of Pecuniary Delights hosted by Pecuniarities.

Shopping with a grocery list is one of the most effective ways to slash your grocery bill. Not only does a list help you avoid costly impulse purchases but it also prevents expensive repeat trips to the supermarket.

Unfortunately, most shopping lists are flawed, making them much less effective as money saving devices.

Below I list three common grocery list flaws and how you can correct them to save more money.

Flaw 1: We make our list right before we go shopping.

This is the most common mistake in making an effective shopping list. You jot down a list right before you step foot in the store. Unfortunately, this almost always results in items being left off the list, necessitating the return trip to the supermarket you’re trying to avoid in the first place.

You can easily create a more effective list simply by posting a pad of paper (with an attached pen) or a wipe board directly to your fridge door. This way you can easily write down items as you run out of them ensuring that you don’t forget anything.

Flaw 2: Not everyone is involved in making the shopping list.

The person responsible for the shopping may leave off things other family members need. A husband may forget that his wife has run out of her favorite coffee beans. A mother may not realize that the kids have run out of their favorite after school snack.

Again, posting a pad of paper or wipe board on the refrigerator door provides everyone in the family with the opportunity to contribute to the grocery list.

Flaw 3: We think in terms of consumables, not in terms of needed ingredients.

Its easy to notice when we’ve run out of milk or the kid’s favorite cereals. These are things that we consume without much preparation and are thus easily noticeable.

Less noticeable are the individual ingredients we frequently need to make many of our meals. These include items like sugar, salt, olive oil, margarine, seasoning salt, herbs, and spices – the very items that frequently send us back on repeat trips to the grocery store, sometimes right in the middle of cooking!

One way to prevent this oversight is to take a moment to think about the meals you might prepare for the week. Then check to make sure you have all the necessary ingredients.

Some people take it a step further and completely plan all of their meals for the upcoming week. This allows them the additional benefit of planning their meals around the items that are on sale that week.

By creating a more effective grocery list you can avoid expensive impulse purchases and costly repeat trips to the supermarket. Do you have tips for creating a better shopping list? If so we’d like to hear from you. Leave a comment below.

A common piece of advice frequently given to shoppers is to check grocery store receipts for mistakes. This advice is now more important than ever!

You see supermarket offers are becoming ever more complex. Instead of a simple price discount, you’re often required to purchase multiple quantities of a product in order to obtain an even larger discount. Buy 2 bottles of soda get 1 free. Save $3 when you purchase 2 jars of spaghetti.

This works for the supermarket as they sell more product and it also works for you as you frequently enjoy larger discounts for buying more.

The problem with these increasingly complex grocery store offers is this. If the store scanner is not programmed correctly, the mistake will cost you more money than usual.

Let me give you an example.

A recent Chicago supermarket offered Marie Callender frozen dinners on sale for $2.99, or you could get the frozen dinners for the super low price of $1.99 IF you purchased 5 or more dinners. Naturally I picked up five dinners and placed them in my cart.

The problem arose when I arrived at the check-out counter. My total appeared to be $5 more than I had mentally calculated.

As the cashier and I scoured the receipt looking for the reason behind the $5 discrepancy, the store manager walked by glancing at the five dinners sitting at the end of the checkout counter. She then quickly relayed to the cashier that the scanners were having a problem applying the discount. It seems that I was still being charged $2.99 when I should have been charge $1.99 for the frozen dinners, creating the $5 overcharge.

As the manager had just taken care of another gentleman who was similarly overpriced, she quickly took care of me and I was on my way with my $5 in hand.

But I wonder how many others paying less attention walked out of the store not realizing that they had left their hard earned $5 in store cash register.

Have you been a victim of scanner errors or mispriced merchandise? If so tell us about it. Leave a comment below.

Today I’d like to highlight some great food articles from around the blogosphere.

Linsey Knerl at WiseBread.com presents an easy way to start batch cooking for busy people on the go. If you’re not familiar with batch cooking, its a way to cook a large amount of food and then freeze the portions to serve later on when you have less time to cook. Linsey presents some amazing batch cooking tips that make the whole process easier.

Love your coffee but hate the price? The Mighty Bargain Hunter provides you with 7 tips for great coffee on a budget.

Mark Bittman at the NY Times tells you how to freeze many common household foods to save money and reduce waste. Included are tips for freezing fruits, vegetables, bread, fresh herbs, egg whites, and wine.

Karawynn at Get Rich Slowly provides an in depth journey through a grocery outlet store and shows how you can save money by visiting one of these non-conventional food stores.

Want to know how to grow your own organic produce even if you don’t have a backyard? Kerry Taylor at Squawkfox shows you how by using container gardening techniques. She even lists eleven fruits and vegetables you can grow in a pot.

We’ve recently participated in the following personal finance blog carnivals:

Frugal Food Tips From the Great Depression featured on the Carnival of Pecuniary Delights hosted by My Life ROI.

A Simple Way to Slash Your Grocery Bill featured on the Money Hacks Carnival hosted by My Life ROI.

How to Enjoy Your Grocery Store Indulgences Guilt Free featured on the Carnival of Personal Finance hosted by Good Financial Cents.

Has this ever happened to you? You run into the supermarket to grab a few items and end up walking out with a cart full of groceries.

You’re not alone. Supermarkets have designed it this way. Simple put, they are masters of the impulse purchase. In fact, depending on the study cited, between 40% to 50% of all our grocery store purchases are impulse buys!

For this reason alone, one of the easiest ways to reduce your grocery bill is to simply take fewer trips to the supermarket.

Unfortunately, your supermarket understands this all too well. That’s why they continually create new services and products designed to lure you inside the store.

One of the most ingenious are those Redbox video kiosks located outside many supermarket doors. These kiosks provide cheap $1 video rentals. Unfortunately, it naturally follows that once you rent a video you have to return it, risking the temptation of walking right into the supermarket again.

Yet cheap video rentals aren’t the only service luring us into the supermarket more than we need to. These services include:

• ATMs and even mini bank branches.
• Propane tank refill services.
• Lottery ticket vending machines.
• US postal service mailbox drop-offs.
• Large floral sections.
• Large greeting card sections.
• Photo development and printing services.
• Coinstar change counting machines.
• Dry cleaning services.
• Coffee shops and deli’s

All of these services are designed to get you into the store where you’re likely to make profitable impulse purchases.

To save money, make only one grocery shopping trip a week, or if you’re really brave try going only once every two weeks. While a little challenging at first, you’ll be amazed at how much money you’ll save.

Here are some tips to make it easier:

Make a List

Creating a good list is probably the best way to keep from visiting the grocery store more than once a week. Its always that one or two items you run out of in the middle of the week that forces you back to the store.  Creating a list helps make sure this doesn’t happen.

Many savvy moms and dads create a list of meals that they plan to cook for the week. This allows them to determine exactly what they need to shop for. One thing to remember when writing your list are the between meal snacks.

Many people plan their lists only with breakfast, lunch, and dinner in mind, forgetting that almost everyone drinks or snacks between meals as well.  Also make sure to check your pantry and fridge for staples like butter, sugar, and salt that may force you back into the store prematurely.

Reduce Your Waste

Its estimated that Americans throw away 14% of all the food they purchase. One of the ways to make sure your family is able to last a week between supermarket visits is to use all the food in your kitchen, making sure none of it goes to waste.

Rotate the items in your fridge and cupboards by moving newly purchased groceries to the back and older and half used items to the front. This helps ensure that the older items like that half empty carton of orange juice or those 2 eggs left in the carton are used up instead of being pushed to the back were they frequently languish and eventually spoil.

Try to use your left-overs instead of letting them go to waste. Use them for lunches the next day or turn them into new meals by combining left-over ingredients with potatoes, salad greens, taco shells, or pizza crusts for a complete left-over makeover.

Some smart cooks even save left-over vegetables and meat in the freezer as ingredients for delicious soups. Others have a smorgasbord night where the family is allowed to feast on the left-overs.

Pantry Cook

When you get close to the next supermarket shopping trip but are rapidly running out of food, try panty cooking. Basically this is where you take inventory of your fridge, freezer, cupboards and pantry, noting what items you have left.

Then visit websites like AllRecipes.com and type in the ingredients you have on hand. These websites will then provide you with a list of delicious recipes you can use to make meals out of your available ingredients.  This is a great way to make sure you use all the food that you have available.

Supermarkets are experts at getting us to make impulse purchases. They create a variety of services designed to repeatedly draw us back into the store. The best way to fight back and save an incredible amount of money is to visit your local supermarket once a week or less.

Do you make less frequent trips to the supermarket? What are some the the tricks and tips you use to make this work?  Feel free to share your suggestions by leaving a comment below.

Yes, I’ll admit it. I have my grocery store indulgences – those sinful over-priced temptations that quickly inflate shopping bills.

My particular Achilles heel is silky smooth, delicious Dove  ice cream.  At $4.79 a pint its nearly twice as expensive as quality ice creams like Breyer’s and Edy’s. Yet, I just can’t resist the taste of Dove ice cream.

I’m sure I’m not alone with my budget busting supermarket indulgences. For some its the Godiva chocolate bars in the candy aisle. For others its the Milano cookies, butcher counter filet mignon steak, or those premium coffee beans. We all have things that we enjoy but which dramatically inflate our grocery bills.

So how does one enjoy these expensive indulgences without feeling financial guilty in these tough economic times? Here are a few tips we use.

Offset Your Indulgent Spending.

So you’re addicted to Haagen Daaz ice cream bars or to Dofino Gouda cheese. That’s understandable. Just make changes in your normal shopping behavior to compensate for the indulgent purchases. Force yourself to buy store brand sugar, butter, canned vegetables, and bread to compensate for that expensive box of macadamia nuts you just placed in your grocery cart.

Tempted by that expensive cut of wild Alaskan salmon, offset the cost by visiting a bakery outlet for your bread and other baked goods.  Purchase the cheaper apples instead of the more expensive plums and pick up the heads of lettuce instead of the shredded and packaged lettuce in order to offset the cost of the premium brand of frozen cheesecake you just purchased.

Limit Your Costly Treats.

Allow yourself to indulge once in a while. Just limit the number of indulgences. Give each person two treats per shopping trip, for example. Just before hitting the checkout counter,  double check to make sure that you’ve stuck to your limit, or have spouse or child keep track of these purchases for you.

Stock Up on Expensive Indulgences at “Super Sales”.

As I said I love Dove ice cream, especially the chocolate cherry variety. Yet I also realized how extremely expensive this indulgence can be. Now when I see  this temptation I walk right past knowing I can get it on sale. Not just any old sale will do though. I have to wait for the “super sales”.

Every store item has a regular rotation of sale prices. At one point a product may be on sale at a 10% discount, a couple of weeks later at a 30% discount, followed by a sale a few weeks later at a 20% discount. Periodically an item will hit the rock bottom sales price in what I call its super sales price – typically discounted at 50% or more!

For my local Chicago stores the super sales price for my Dove ice cream is usually $2.50. Compared to the regular $4.79 price this is a bargain.  Its at this point that I stock up, allowing me to enjoy my sinful indulgence at half price.

Every family has expensive budget busting indulgences. But there are ways we can still enjoy our little pleasures while watching our budgets.

So what are some of your family’s sinful indulgences? What suggestions do you have for enjoying them without breaking the bank? We’d like to hear from you. Leave a comment below.

Companies spend millions of dollars each year promoting and advertising their brands. They do this with good reason.  It works!  Once we’re hooked on a particular brand we frequently become a customer for life.

Brand loyalty is often set at a very young age, passed along from parent to child like a family heirloom. Growing up my mother religiously cooked with Uncle Ben’s rice. No other white rice would do.  At a young age my brand loyalty to Uncle Ben’s was set in stone.

Now as an adult, when I need rice, my hand magically gravitates toward the store shelf containing that comfortable orange box of Uncle Ben’s rice.  But in my blind brand allegiance I frequently pass on other brands that might be on sale, often at a significant discount.

We are creatures of habit. Once we’re hooked on a particular brand it becomes particularly hard to change and our repetitive purchases of a particular brand week after week only serves to reinforce our brand loyalty.

Yet changing brands in what I like to call brand jumping can bring significant financial rewards. Simply put, brand jumping is the practice of purchasing whatever brand is on sale.

I have to admit, brand jumping can be hard at first. Its our natural tendency to think that our favorite brand tastes the best. But what I’ve found is that the new brands I bought on sale didn’t taste any worse than my favorite brands. They frequently tasted exactly the same. Sometimes they tasted a little different – no better, no worse  -just slightly different. Think Coke and Pepsi. Same quality, slightly different tastes.

Once you get used to this fact, brand jumping becomes much easier. Yes your family may have to get used to eating Jiffy peanut butter one week, Skippy the next week – but your savings will be worth the effort.

We are not sacrificing quality when we chose an alternative name brand. Why then are we so brand conscious?  It all goes back to massive branding campaigns and years of buying the same exact brands week after week. We almost can’t help ourselves.

But let’s take a look at the potential savings that brand jumping can bring us. Let’s say that every week you purchase two cartons of Minute Maid – your family’s orange juice of choice.  Sometimes its on sale, sometimes not.

(For the sake of this discussion lets say that Minute Maid orange juice goes on sale at the same intervals and at the same discount as the other national brands of orange juice.

At the end of eight weeks you would have spent $58.88 on orange juice for your family. You would have purchased Minute Maid at full price for six weeks and bought it on sale for two weeks.

Next lets look at the same scenario if had purchased whatever national brand of orange juice was on sale. Your total cost would have been $48.96 over the same time period – a 17% savings! With the average food bill for a family of four approaching $6500 a year, a 17% savings can be quite significant.

But let’s not stop there. I commonly advise people to shop at more than one supermarket chain or chain surf in order to cherry pick the sales at each grocery store.

In this case if you had shopped two supermarket chains and purchased the national brand that was on sale for the cheapest price you would have spent $42 on your orange juice purchases, saving you a whopping 29% on your orange juice bill.

While these examples may be slightly idealized for the sake of discussion, the point remains the same – by brand jumping you increase your chances of buying a brand name product only when its on sale. Shopping at more than one supermarket chain increases your chances of finding a name brand choice when its on sale.

An Overlooked Benefit of Brand Jumping

This additional benefit is related to Catalina coupons. Catalina coupons are those printed coupons that appear on the back of your grocery store receipt. They are named after the company, Catalina Marketing, that made the coupons popular.

The Catalina coupons you receive on the back of your receipt are related to the purchases you have just made. Frequently, you’ll receive a coupon for an alternate brand to one you’ve just purchased. If you purchase one brand of ice cream, for instance, you’ll receive a Catalina coupon for a competing national brand.

By brand jumping you can take full advantage of these Catalina coupons on future visits. Since most of these Catalina coupons are considered manufacturers coupons, on a future trip, you can combine your Catalina coupon with a store sale for an additional discount!

As shoppers we are often unaware of how strong our brand loyalty is. Repeatedly we reach for the brands we are comfortable with, often ignoring cheaper alternatives. By brand jumping we cut brand loyalty and purchase only those brands that are on sale. In addition to the impressive savings we can enjoy with brand jumping, we also get additional discounts with the Catalina coupons printed on our check-out receipts.

So have you broken your brand loyalties? How did you do it? We’d love to hear about it. Share your experiences below by leaving a comment.

As humans we are creatures of habit.  We settle into predictable routines repeated day in and day out. 

A person may read the same newspaper each morning, stop by the same coffee shop, socialize with the same handful of co-workers, and visit their favorite food truck for lunch every day. At home the same news channel are watched,  the same types of meals eaten, and the same type of music listened to.

Routine creates comfort and surrounds us with what’s familiar.  Yet our normal routines, our regular patterns of behavior can cost us dearly.  This is no more apparent than when it comes to shopping. Here routine behavior can be costly.   

Over years, even decades, our routine patterns of shopping behavior have been ingrained so that they become second nature. 

We’ve been shopping the same way for so long that it becomes almost impossible to change our ways.  In the process, our entrenched shopping routines – shopping ruts,  frequently blind us to cheaper alternatives. 

Yet every so often something comes along that forces us to change our routine behavior.  For some its a reduction in financial resources. For others its a health scare that necessitates more healthy eating. 

Yet, when we do venture out of our comfort zones and try new things a funny thing happens – we inevitably find new ways to save money!  

For me the jolt to my normal shopping routine came in the form of an nationwide economic meltdown just as I was making a crucial career change.  As a result I was forced to tighten my financial belt and make serious changes in how I spent money. 

Here are just a few of the ways in which my routine, my shopper’s rut cost me hard earned money. 

For nearly eight years I’ve known about Aldi supermarkets. Yet week after week, year after year I’d bypass Aldi stores and shop at my favorite local supermarket. 

Yet it took an economic downturn to force me out of my comfort zone and check one of these supermarkets out.  To my surprise, what I found was a clean store with great low prices.

Aldi’s claims that the typical consumer will save  20%  to 37%  off of regular supermarket prices.  I routinely save $20 a week simply by shopping at Aldi’s. 

But what if I’d stepped out of my comfort zone eight years ago when I first heard of Aldi’s? I could have saved $20 a week for nearly 12 years, making me $8320 richer today!

Bakery outlets are another change in my routine for which I am now grateful. I was first introduced to the concept of bakery outlets by my grandfather when I was a small kid.  

Yet once I was an adult my weekly shopping routine never entailed shopping at one. It was only in the past year that I was forced out of my shopping rut and experienced the enormous benefits of shopping at a bakery outlet. 

Not only can you get bread and other baked goods at a 50% to 75% discount over supermarkets but the products are frequently just as fresh as those found in your supermarket.  

I can easily save $25 a month by making a monthly visit to my local bakery outlet. My normal shopping routine was costing me $25 a month, or nearly $3000 over the last decade!

It was these changes as well as several dozen others that got me thinking of how my routine way of grocery shopping blinded me to cheaper and often better alternatives. 

So how do we break those shopping patterns that have been so deeply entrenched through weekly repetition?

You could wait for external factors to force a change in your shopping behavior or you could take the plunge yourself and just decide one day to do something different.

As the Nike commercial fondly advertises:  “Just Do It” 

Either way you’re bound to save money. 

Here are some examples of simple ways to break your normal shopping routine: 

• Try a local bakery outlet. Find an Entenmann or Wonder/Hostess bakery outlet near you.
• See if your supermarket has a store brand guarantee that allows you to return store brand products if you don’t like them. Then try a few of these products risk free. 
• Check out a local Aldi’s supermarket. Find a location near you. 
• Purchase a Sunday newspaper and clip a few coupons for things your family normally purchases. 
• Instead of just picking up the name brand item that you’ve been buying for years, try the item that’s on sale. If you are true to Tropicana Orange Juice but its not on sale, try the brand (say Minute Maid) that is on sale. 
   

Anything that gets you thinking or acting different when it comes to your same old shopping routine is a step in the right direction. 

Have you changed your shopping behavior to save money? If so what did you do? How’d you do it? We’d love to hear. Leave a comment below.

We are the products of our advertising environment. The seductive lure of popular name brands incessantly calls us. So seductive the lure that the attraction to name brands seems impossible to break, even in today’s tough economic times.

And who could blame us, we’ve been inundated with marketing messages since birth.

In fact, in one study it was found that kids as young as five years old preferred food wrapped in McDonald’s packing over the same identical food wrapped in packaging without the McDonald’s logo.

So its no wonder that many of us have not broken the chains of brand loyalty when it comes to the foods we buy. Instead of trying store brands, trip after trip, we continually reach for the more expensive name brands.

Part of the allure of brand names is that purchasing the same product year after year creates a comfort zone. When we buy that box of Ragu spaghetti sauce we know exactly what to expect. We know what it looks like, what it smells like, how long to cook it, and more importantly we know exactly how it will taste.

So what can you do to smash brand loyalty in order to buy store brands and save your family’s hard earned money?

Start small with the basics.

Venture out of your comfort zone by beginning with the basic staples. Instead of jumping right in the pool and purchasing store brand spaghetti sauce, test the water. Stick your big toe in and purchase items like sugar, flour, bread, salt, and butter.

These are items for which you may not have built up as strong a brand loyalty and for which there is likely not to be a huge difference between the taste and quality of the name brand and store brand.

This one small change in shopping behavior alone could save you hundreds of dollars a year.

After successfully replacing some of your basic staples with store brands, try switching from name brand to store brand when it comes to more complex food products such as peanut butter, cereal, and ice cream.

Realize its OK to fail.

Many people are reluctant to try store brands because they’re afraid that they’ll buy a product that their family will just not like. Some are bothered with the thought of failure. Others are concerned with money wasted on something their family doesn’t like.

Well quite simply there will be store brand products that your family will not like or refuse to eat. That store brand strawberry jelly may just not be to their liking.

Once you accept this simple fact you’re in a much better position to dive into the world of store brands. You will buy some duds. This is just the price you’ll pay for discovering great store brands that will save you money week after week, year after year.

The hundreds of dollars you save each year from finding replacement store brand products will far outweigh the few dollars you spend on store brand products your family doesn’t like.

Discovering one store brand that saves you just 75 cents a week will save your family $39 a year. Discover 10 such store brands and your family can save $390 a year!

And more importantly, you don’t even have to pay for your failures.

Yes you’ll find a dud store brand product that your family will not like but the best thing is that most grocery stores offer a money back guarantee on all of their store brand products. If you don’t like the item just bring it back for a full refund.

This simple guarantee allows you to try store brand items virtually risk free. Check with your store’s customer service desk to find out about their particular policy.

Taking a step away from our comfortable name brands and trying store brands can be an emotionally trying task. But the savings are undeniable.

Have you taken the plunge and tried store brands? How did you do it? How’d your family react? Leave a comment and share your experiences below.