How Understanding Your Store’s Sales Cycles Leads to Huge Savings

With food prices expected to rise even further in 2009, its more important than ever to shop strategically in order to get the best value for your money. One key to reaping huge savings is to understand your store’s sale cycles.

Almost every product in your local supermarket has a natural sales cycle. Every few weeks or so that product will go on sale. Yet not every sale will be a bargain. Sometimes the item will be sold at a 10% discount. At other times it may be sold at a 50% discount or more! Same product, vastly different sales prices.

Let’s take a closer look at how a normal sales cycle works. Over a nine week period, Marie Callender brand frozen dinners might be priced as follows:

As you can see the sales prices vary considerably. The sale price during week 2 of $4.09 per dinner, offers only a measly 20 cents off the normal price. The $2 per dinner sale price on week 9, however, provides a discount of over 50% off the regular price!

The smart thing to do here is to avoid the “fake” sales during weeks 2 and 7, and stock up only when the sales are significant during weeks 6 and 9.

However, this is easier said than done. It can be difficult to know exactly when a particular product is at the lowest point in its sales cycle. If, for example, you had walked into the store on week 7 and noticed these frozen dinners on sale for $3.99 a piece, you might have thought that this was a great deal and snatched up several.

How do you know when the store is offering its rock bottom price? The answer is a price book. This is a simple notebook where you write down the lowest prices you find for the items you commonly purchase.

In your price book, record the date, unit price, and store where you bought items for the lowest price. If you see the same item at a lower price on a different day or in a different store you again record it in your price book.

This price book will quickly give you a reference for deciding if a sale is really a bargain. Simply compare the current sale price to the prices recorded in your price book.

With a price book you start to notice the sales cycles of products and you can quickly recognize when an item is near its rock bottom price. Yes it does take a little more work to keep a price book, but the savings can be incredible.

In this example, using your price book, you’d notice that it is better to stock up at $2 per dinner, rather than at $3.99 per dinner, saving you nearly $1.99 per dinner. Multiply this type of savings over the multitude of products you buy for your family and you can see how quickly the savings pile up.

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Tagged as: grocery store sales