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When I used to stay with a friend of mine we’d go grocery shopping together since we both liked the same sorts of foods.  He taught me a little trick that seems incredibly obvious once you think about it, but until that point had eluded me.  It’s a quick trick that has saved me lots of money over the years, so I figured I’d share it with you.

Let’s say you’re shopping at your local grocery store, and you see that there’s a sale on frozen salisbury steak entrees – $4.00 for a 32 ounce package.  Let’s also say that you’re at least a  halfways competent cook, and that making your own homemade salisbury steak with gravy isn’t beyond your skill level.  How do you tell if the $4.00 is a good deal compared to the cost of making it yourself?

It helps to think of food not in terms of cost per package or cost per serving, but cost per pound.  The package price, divided by the number of ounces, times sixteen equals the cost per pound of that particular food.  Of course, that 32 ounce tray is 2 pounds – so we can just divide the $4.00 by two and get $2.00 per pound.

Now that we’ve got our cost per pound, we can run some numbers.  Let’s say you normally pay $1.75 per pound for hamburger.  The hamburger is the most expensive ingredient in that salisbury steak (perhaps not counting a few spices, but those are trivial because of the tiny amounts used), so at $2.00 per pound you’re paying a minimum of $0.25 per pound more than the raw ingredient cost.  Figure in that much of the weight in that package of salisbury steak is the water in the gravy (which is free or extremely low cost, depending on whether you use tap water or filtered water), and that package isn’t really a good deal at all.  Even if you normally pay $2.25 per pound for hamburger, the package is probably still not a good deal because of the amount of gravy compared to the amount of meat.

For the opposite side of the coin, let’s say the store’s deli has macaroni & cheese on sale for $1.00 per pound.  Now we do the comparison in reverse.  About the cheapest ingredient in that mac & cheese is the actual macaroni noodles – and they’re in the neighborhood of $1.00 per pound.  Now yes, I know the macaroni noodles absorb water which drives that cost down, but there are other, more expensive ingredients that drive the cost right back up.  As a general gut reaction, that deli mac & cheese is probably a good deal at $1.00 per pound.

The more you get thinking about food in terms of price per pound, the more obvious the overpriced stuff (and conversely, the deals) will become.   In fact, it will become such second nature that you almost don’t even see the offers that aren’t good deals, which saves you both time and money – it’s a win all around!

Do you have any tips for saving money at the grocery store?  Sound off in the comments!