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brin_bellwayHello, folks! I'm going to be teaching a class on advanced grocery-shopping techniques for KW Rationality (currently planned for the evening of Thursday, February 27th March 6th). If you'll be in the Waterloo, Ontario area, I encourage you to come out and join us!
Below is the "textbook" for this class. The further away you are in space and time from late-2024 Kitchener/Waterloo, the less of it will apply to you (in particular, advanced grocery shopping looks very different in the United States), but you may still get useful tips out of it and/or find it anthropologically interesting.
This work distills many years of refinement to my techniques, and to this day I am still learning. If it seems overwhelming trying to take it all in at once, try picking up just some of the new tactics, and expand later. I have tried to put the most important aspects first, where feasible.
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Table of Contents
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Where to shop
I mostly shop at four places: No Frills, Real Canadian Superstore, Walmart, and Costco.
No Frills is fantastic. Their baseline prices are low, they price-match, they have an excellent loyalty program. It is often worth going to No Frills even if other grocery stores are closer.
Superstore is *slightly* fancier and *sometimes* has higher prices than No Frills, but for some things the prices are the same. Their selection is much better than No Frills: if you tried a thing at No Frills, liked it, and No Frills later stopped carrying it, there's a good chance Superstore still has it. They also price-match and give PC Optimum points. I mostly stop by here on off weeks when I happen to be in the Highland Hills area, to price-match things that are good deals that week; sometimes I stop in during on weeks when I'm in the area, to price-match things No Frills had run out of.
Walmart's prices are roughly the same as No Frills *on average*, but some things are better and some things are worse. Also, no price-matching and no loyalty points, which means something that looks cheaper at first glance can work out to be more expensive when all is said and done. I recommend making a spreadsheet noting down things you buy that are available at both stores, their prices, and when you last checked what those prices were (especially if it's an item that doesn't show up in No Frills' catalogue).
Costco generally has great prices on pharmaceuticals, both OTC and prescription. (For some OTC meds, Costco only has brand-name and the brand-name premium overwhelms the Costco discount; however, for Flonase, Costco only has brand-name but for so cheap that it's *still* cheaper than buying Walmart store-brand.) If you are price-sensitive on prescription medications (tip: if you spend more than 4% of your income on prescriptions, you are not price-sensitive on prescription medications because you can convince the government to pay your marginal dollar (and also some non-marginal dollars)), buy them from Costco: they even offer free shipping on drugs that are low theft risk, though last I checked their mail-order pharmacy struggles to accommodate people on government pharmacare (so that's another reason to not go there if you're on it).
(Similarly, if you need hearing aids their prices are fantastic, literal thousands of dollars cheaper than what my mom was seeing elsewhere. I haven't tried their optometry, but I probably should.)
For food, Costco tends to be better than other places' full prices but worse than their sale prices. If you try grocery optimising and find that it's not a good fit for your psyche or situation, the best non-optimised solution is usually to buy your food at Costco; if you *are* optimising, Costco is a good backup place to buy food you ran out of if you misjudged how much to keep on hand. I also personally think the quality on their toilet paper, their pesto, and their baguettes are worth the price.
For the non-vegetarians in the audience, Costco has very cheap rotisserie chicken, often cheaper per pound of yield than buying raw chicken (*and* you don't have to deal with raw meat). It doesn't keep as well as sticking a pack of raw chicken in the freezer, of course, but if you're going on a Costco trip, consider making a chicken-based dinner the next couple of days.
I don't actually have much experience with Food Basics--the local branch sucks--but they have a loyalty program now and there's a different and potentially better branch not far from Superstore. (They still don't price-match, but then neither does Walmart, and Walmart still has its place.) Further research is needed.
If you're willing to risk making your decisions more complicated in exchange for more enjoyable food, you might want to take your staple foods and buy samples of each of the store-brand versions to test (though I admit I haven't been as systematic about this as I would endorse). It may be that you like the taste of the Food Basics version much better than Loblaws, to the point that it's worth picking it up there instead. In many cases, it's also worth including name brands in this test: sometimes it is better not to know, but the name-brand premium can often be defrayed (on-sale Gay Lea butter is cheaper than full-price No Name!), and sometimes it's worth any premium that remains.
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Before your shop: Rotated stockpiles
I wrote a guide for this in February 2020, and it was *especially* helpful to do in 2020, but it's very helpful every other year also.and only partly because you don't *always* know in advance when your supply chains are about to go to shit
The link explains the basics, and you should start with that, but once you're comfortable with it you can also get a little more complicated.
* Are pinto beans only on sale a *little* bit? Do you know, from your experience watching their sale rhythms, that you can probably do better? Maybe wait a little longer.
* Is dry pasta 60% off? Do you have a 10%-off loyalty offer on *top* of that? Maybe get six or nine months' worth instead of three. (If you can find storage space for it: we have an overflow shelving unit in my parents' bedroom for this sort of thing.)
Some people like to make spreadsheets noting how often things tend to go on sale at what prices to help them with these kinds of decisions, though personally I tend to just soak in the vibes over time.
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Before your shop: Price-matching
Price-matching! The centrepiece of an optimised Canadian grocery trip! I would have put it first on the priority list if it didn't synergise so well with rotated stockpiles!
"Price-matching" is when you show a store an item in a competitor's flyer, and the store gives you that item at the competitor's sale price. You don't need to go to six different stores to hit six different stores' sales!
The stores that do price-matching are No Frills, Real Canadian Superstore, FreshCo, and Giant Tiger. Of these, the most useful are No Frills and Superstore, because they price-match *each other* (plus other Loblaws subsidiaries), and this means you can often get store-brand items on price-match. Not to mention the PC Optimum points, of which there are many.
Back in the day, you had to comb through paper flyers by hand and mark out the ones you wanted in pen, but everyone went digital during the first couple COVID waves. You can search flyers with the aggregator website/app Flipp, mark items you want for your favourites list, and show the cashier on your phone.
(Flipp did, unfortunately, drop support for offline flyer caching a year or two back. Even downmarket grocery stores usually have Wi-Fi now, though, and in any case even a 100MB data plan is sufficient.)
Most stores run their flyers on a Thursday to Wednesday cycle; Giant Tiger does Wednesday to Tuesday; Shoppers Drug Mart does Friday to Thursday. Bear this in mind when making your price-match lists: you don't want to show up at No Frills on a Wednesday only to realise that your Giant Tiger sale has expired.
Flipp will show you preview flyers one day in advance. KW Rationality meetups are on Thursdays, so when making your grocery list for the class you may want to start with the preview flyers on Wednesday, to give yourself more time. When using Flipp near the end of the sale week, make sure you're not looking at this week's flyers when you actually wanted next week's or vice versa: take particular care when using the search function to check for specific items.
You can generally get up to 4 of an item. If the sale specifies a brand, the item must be the same brand: you can't get No Name if the sale specifies Great Value. Produce sales often don't specify a brand, and in that case the item *doesn't* have to be *un*-branded: you *can* get President's Choice white mushrooms matched with a Giant Tiger sale on generic white mushrooms.
(Tip: Giant Tiger measures mushrooms in ounces, while PC measures in grams (but in a way that was clearly originally ounces and then translated). Remember that 8oz = 227g and 16oz = 1lb = 454g. Most cashiers do not object to matching an 8oz mushroom sale against a 227g box, but sometimes you get cashiers who don't know the conversion: I find that showing them a unit-converter app is usually enough to convince them.)
You will need to use a full-service checkout lane, not a self-checkout.
You can't price-match anything labelled "buy one get one" or similar. You can't price-match prices that are only for loyalty-program members, not even if the loyalty program in question is PC Optimum and you are at another Loblaws store.
If the item is more than 50% off (threshold may vary by store, I'm not sure), the cashier will need a supervisor override (unless you happen to get a cashier who is also a supervisor). If you have more than one type of item with a discount this large, it's polite to do them all in a row and notify the cashier, so that the supervisor doesn't have to come back a second time.
Stores vary on which other chains they price-match; even different branches of the same chain in the same area may disagree. The Waterloo No Frills, where we will be practising, does Farm Boy, Food Basics, FreshCo, Sobeys, Real Canadian Superstore, Walmart, and Zehrs. Superstore additionally does Giant Tiger, T&T, and Shoppers Drug Mart (as well as matching No Frills).
Stores often do not communicate the details of their price-matching rules very well to their employees. In particular, you will likely get inconsistent results on whether you're allowed to stack price-matching with coupons. Never make a plan that *relies* on being able to stack price-matching and coupons, but it is sometimes worth asking. I don't recommend putting up a fight if the cashier says no.
They will usually, but not always, require you to buy multiples-of-2 of an item that is, say, 2 for $5.00.
You *can* price-match an item sold by weight, though it's possible you'll get a cashier who doesn't know how. I've only had them try to claim you can't once or twice: usually you can politely get them to ask another cashier to show them how.
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Before your shop: Loyalty programs
"But Brin," I suspect many of you are saying, "don't loyalty programs steal your shopping-profile data?"
To which I say: no, they *buy* your shopping-profile data, fair and square. It is up to every individual to decide at what price they are willing to sell information about their grocery-shopping habits. Loblaws pays us about $800/year for ours, and personally, we are more than happy to sell for a price that high.
In exchange for tracking your grocery-shopping habits, loyalty programs offer personalised (and occasionally non-personalised) discounts in the form of loyalty-point rebates. At time of writing, a few of my PC Optimum offers this week (their loyalty-offer week, like their flyer week, runs Thursday - Wednesday) include:
* 100pts [$0.10] for every can of No Name tuna, purchased at any Loblaws store
* 100pts [$0.10] per dollar spent on onions, purchased at any Loblaws store
* 300pts [$0.30] for every bag of No Name frozen vegetables 750g, purchased only at No Frills
* 6,000pts [$6] if you spend a cumulative $40 on fruits and vegetables at No Frills by January 1st
Notice the progress bar? If an offer *doesn't* have a progress bar on it, that means you can only apply it to your *first* relevant transaction. If you buy two cans of No Name tuna, that will use up the 100pts per can offer, and it won't trigger again if you later buy five more cans in a different transaction: make sure to put all your cans in a single transaction that week.
Needless to say, this, too, synergises extremely well with rotated stockpiles: you can buy 20 cans at once, get points back for all of them, and often afford to wait until the *next* tuna offer before replenishing your stock.
If you would, say, like to wait another week and see if next week gives you an opportunity to stack that tuna offer with a $1 tuna sale, the offer can be postponed. You can postpone up to four offers each week, and only offers in the "Your weekly offers" section. (The names of the "Your exclusive offers," "Your weekly offers", and "Offers you may like" sections are not intuitive, and I don't actually mentally refer to the sections by their names, but you'll soon get a sense of which types of offers appear in which section.) You *can* keep postponing the same offer week after week, hoping for that 60%-off Italpasta sale to come back (it probably will! there are generally multiple 60%-off Italpasta sales each year).
(Tip: there is a longstanding bug(?) where you can't postpone Cracker Barrel offers, so don't make plans that rely on being able to postpone one.)
Multi-accounting
My household's multi-accounting was a historical accident--Mom held the family PC Plus account and I held the family Shoppers Optimum account, back before the programs merged--but it's come in handy. We get two chances at an offer we're hoping for each week, and can manipulate the algorithm (see below) into two different areas of possibility-space. In particular, we never use my card at Real Canadian Superstore, only Mom's: we want *my* store-specific offers to stay a mix of No Frills and Shoppers Drug Mart, where we can best make use of them.
I am not sure I recommend aiming for this setup on purpose--it's a bit shady, and using two people's accounts at once would combine poorly with non-car-based shopping trips because you can't just switch which card you're using each cartload--but it's worth noting.
Algorithm manipulation
We are not privy to the inner workings of the software that decides which offers to give you each week based on your data profile, but to an extent it is possible to observe its inputs and outputs and strategically feed it data to push it towards an outcome you want.
A very important discovery I stumbled into during spring-2020 lockdowns: *shop fortnightly*. Perhaps even go 3 - 4 weeks between trips, from time to time. You get *way* more "spend $X on almost anything and get 10 - 15% back in points" offers (hereafter "total-store offers") that way: I suspect the algorithm gets worried that you're shopping elsewhere on the off weeks, and thinks it needs to give you extra-good offers to win you back. This is a big part of where the $800/year is coming from.
(You might be able to mimic this by multi-accounting and alternating which account you use each week? Further research is needed. I actually just shop every 2 - 3 weeks, but I *would* experiment with this if I were lugging stuff back by bike/foot/bus and not just shoving everything into my dad's hatchback: I would need to do smaller trips then.)
If you haven't gotten an offer for something in a while and your stocks are running low, it may be useful to buy a single instance of that item to remind the algorithm that you're interested in it. If you can prod it into giving you an offer next time, you can stock up then.
The carousel and Shoppers Drug Mart
Shoppers Drug Mart has terrible baseline prices, but its sales are sometimes very good. The trouble is, they don't always *tell* you when they are having a good sale. In particular, I've found that they don't put sales on blueberry fibre bars or stovetop popcorn in the flyer; you may find other things, more relevant to your own tastes, that fall through the same cracks.
I almost never see No Name stovetop popcorn go on sale anywhere *else*, which means on-sale Shoppers Drug Mart popcorn is generally the cheapest popcorn around. But how do you know when it's on sale, if it's in neither the flyer nor the store catalogue?
I've only found one way around this that doesn't require showing up in-person to check, and that's the carousel. (technically termed "Your home store deals", but I never call it that)
If you feed the algorithm enough Shoppers Drug Mart purchases (buying only things that were on sale such that the price was reasonable there, naturally), it will give you a Shoppers Drug Mart carousel underneath this No Frills one, with a list of things that are on sale this week that you tend to buy. It's *not* limited to things that appear in the flyer.
(If you figure out a better way to get Shoppers Drug Mart to tell you when they have fibre bars or popcorn on sale, I'd appreciate it! I recently lost my SDM carousel, having apparently not shopped there often enough lately, and anyway it only shows a limited number of sale items and the algorithm might not agree with me on which sales are most important to convey.)
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Before your shop: Coupons
You've probably heard the term "couponing" used to refer to the overall process of price-optimised grocery shopping.
Coupons are actually a lot less useful than you might think! As a general rule, only items that were expensive to start with have coupons: the point of a coupon, from the manufacturer's perspective, is to convince you to develop expensive tastes so that you keep paying extra even when there aren't coupons.
Still, sometimes you *do* have expensive tastes. Sometimes you think that Ensure really does taste better than the store-brand meal-replacement drinks; that Cracker Barrel cheese really does taste better than President's Choice; that Cheez-Its really do taste better than Cheese Nips (let alone PC). Sometimes, somehow, Aveeno oat-and-shea-butter moisturiser works better than Life despite the extreme similarity of their ingredient lists. Coupons can be helpful for these occasions.
If you are someone who thinks that Ensure is better than PC (and hasn't moved even further up the scale to Soylent or Hol Food), I *highly* recommend Ensure Club. You get up to two signups per household, and each signup gets a $3 coupon in the mail about once a month. The coupons are valid for about a year, so you can save them up and then pounce when a good sale appears to stack them with (this will probably require going to that store specifically, and it may take a while for a sale to appear at a conveniently-located store). You can sometimes get the cost of a six-pack of Ensure down to $9.
(Tip: because the Ensure discount is a flat $3 per pack, it actually works out cheaper to buy 6-packs than to buy 16-packs, because you can apply more coupon per bottle.)
Grocery stores will sometimes have coupons posted at the front of the store or near the item they're for: in my experience this is mostly useful for Cracker Barrel. If there are still plenty of coupons left for the next guy, check the expiration date and consider taking a couple extra for future trips, if you expect to buy more before the coupon expires.
If you have a Windows computer (for the DRM) and a printer, webSaver's printable coupons--while *mostly* useless--do have occasional gems, like Cheez-Its or Aveeno.
(Edit, 2025-03-02: To DRM-strip webSaver coupons so you can print them on Linux, open the .fdf file in a PDF reader that supports working with layers (such as Okular), disable all the layers except "couponimg", and save it as PDF to get a regular DRM-free PDF with a printable coupon in it. (The PDF reader built into Firefox does support layers, but I had trouble getting it to save-as-PDF with the DRM layers still disabled, so I just installed Okular.) Thanks to Mae for figuring this out!)
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Before your shop: List-making
A well-crafted list is vital to an optimised shopping trip; it brings together the things you've learned so far.
The meta-list
When making individual grocery lists for specific trips, it helps to have a meta-list: a list of all of your staple foods, OTC medications, and so forth, all the grocery items you *tend* to buy. Consulting your meta-list reminds you of things you might be running low on that you should inventory, and of things that might be on sale that you should check.
Start by writing down all the ones you can think of: if you have old grocery lists lying around, use these for inspiration. Whenever you notice you've forgotten about an item, add it to the list. Eventually, you can build it up into something reasonably thorough.
Online store catalogues
This is the 21st century, and it is often possible to comparison-shop remotely! You don't have to trek out to No Frills and check the shelf to learn that they are selling store-brand dark-chocolate-covered almonds for a regular price of $8, on sale (at time of writing) for $7.50. (Which is still a bad price, by the way. Even with how bad the cocoa harvests have been lately, $6 is entirely doable.)
This is very helpful when deciding whether to buy something at (say) Walmart instead of No Frills, and it's helpful when deciding which things to price-match (it's not uncommon to find that No Frills has *already* lowered their price to match the other store's sale, so you don't have to).
Some store catalogues are limited: most notably, No Frills is missing most pharmacy items while Shoppers Drug Mart is missing most food items. Costco, meanwhile, often puts hidden delivery fees in its online items, so you can't trust the figures you see to reflect what you would pay in-store. Keeping the price data yourself in a spreadsheet still comes in handy in some cases.
The grocery list
To make a grocery list, I recommend doing it in stages:
First, is there anything you already know you need to buy this week, even if it means paying full price? Write these down.
Second, look at the front page of each price-matchable store's flyer: you can do this on Flipp. (You may want to favourite the stores that your store price-matches.) What are their loss leaders? Is there anything you want that is *shockingly* cheap this week, such that you might want to get extra beyond even a normal stockpile top-up?
Optionally, go through each flyer and see if any of the non-front-page items stand out. This is less useful after creating a meta-list, but it helps you orient when you are starting out, and you may even catch the occasional item that Flipp failed to index correctly in their search function. My mom likes to do this step and present me with her results; I don't think I would do it myself, in my current situation.
Next, take that list of items you're going to buy regardless. Are any of them on sale? Check the Flipp search function for each one. (If the search function only shows you thumbnail results and won't let you click through to see details, try using their mobile app instead (you're going to need it later anyway, for the price-matching): I've been running into a bug with this lately.) The Flipp search function is pretty good but not perfect: you will sometimes get noticeably different results for plural (say, "mushrooms") vs singular ("mushroom"), and sometimes noticeably different results for "Coke" vs "Coca Cola". It may be worth checking both "mushrooms" and "mushroom" for good mushroom sales.
Before writing down a sale as a price-match, remember to double-check in your store's catalogue that it isn't already that cheap or nearly that cheap. (Personally, I will only price-match something if it saves more than $0.10 per item: sometimes you find sales that are only one or two cents better than No Frills, and I don't bother matching those.)
Now, look through your loyalty offers. (You may want to write down an abbreviated version of their offer list for the week, containing only the things you could potentially want (and not, like, fancy sodas you never buy) and taking up only one line of screen real estate per item: this will be much more compact and easier to consult.) Which of these offers can be stacked with sales you already know about? Which of them would be worth using as long as you can stack them with a sale, and (check Flipp) *are* there sales on those things? Are any of the offers you can't stack right now good enough to be worth using despite that?
Next, the meta-list. Which of these things are you running low on? Which of these things are you less-than-fully stocked on, and are they on sale? Go and check your supplies for things where you're not sure off the top of your head if you need more yet: I usually note down which things these are as I'm going through the meta-list, and do all the inventorying at the end.
Finally, look over your list as a whole. For items that are on sale in multiple places, did you list only the best sale? If you have a coupon for something, did you mark that down to remind you to use it?
Because the list goes through multiple rounds of edits, I don't recommend making it *directly* on paper. Digital-only might work if you're already accustomed to using checklists on a smartphone, but personally I draft up my list in a text document on my laptop and then print out a copy to take to the store. As a bonus, you can put your printed-out list on a clipboard, and everyone takes you more seriously when you have a clipboard (try it during your next home repair or doctor appointment!).
(The clipboard is also where I keep my stack of not-yet-used Ensure coupons.)
I like to format my list in two columns, with the left column being non-price-matched items and the right column for price-matched ones.
Let's look at an example to see how this works in practice:
Some things of note:
Things that are on sale at No Frills have their prices marked, while things at full price are unmarked.
The items on the left column are arranged roughly in order of where we will encounter them in the store (this is pretty helpful, even when it's not perfect); the items on the right column are arranged alphabetically by what store we're price-matching with, which is the order Flipp will display them in.
10lb is a lot of onions, but because of the $2.77 sale, it actually costs less than buying a 3lb bag!
Naproxen is cheaper at No Frills than Walmart (so it's on the No Frills list), but dimenhydrinate and Liquid Plumr are cheaper at Walmart (so we will *only* buy them here if it makes the difference in whether we hit the $200 threshold for the total-store offer; otherwise we'll wait until we're at Walmart, since we aren't that desperate for them).
Butter freezes extremely well and the gap between the full price and the sale price tends to be very large (especially if you like the flavour of Gay Lea better than No Name), so it's an excellent candidate for stockpiling.
Notice how two things on the Walmart price-matching list are not actually price-matched? This is because they are part of the same loyalty offer as things that *are* price-matched, so they need to be in the same order. If you are buying everything in the same transaction, you don't need to worry about this: I do it this way because I buy my family's food one cartload at a time, packing each cartload into my dad's trunk before heading back in for the next portion. (This also lets me do the non-price-matched items at the self-checkout, where there is less time pressure.)
Notice also that there are 5 Wonder bread listed, even though the price-match limit is 4. We will buy the 5th at full price in order to hit the $12 threshold on the loyalty offer.
Can you tell that this example is adapted from a pre-Thanksgiving grocery list? We're getting apple cider, dinner rolls, celery for stuffing, and bacon for cheesy cauliflower casserole. We are *not* getting turkey or cranberry jelly, because we already bought those during the Canadian Thanksgiving sales in October (this list is for American Thanksgiving).
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Before your shop: Payment methods
It's time to talk cashback!
I generally get 7% cashback at Loblaws. Yes, *seven*. Even if you can't swing 7% in your particular situation, 3 - 4% is eminently doable, and 3% off everything adds up fast.
BMO CashBack Mastercard
This is often the simplest way to 80/20 things. BMO CashBack Mastercard gives 3% cashback at grocery stores, up to a maximum spend of $500/month (this cap may pose an issue if you are shopping for 3+ people, but a single person and perhaps even a couple should be fine). The card is pretty easy to qualify for, and you can redeem your cashback monthly with a minimum of $1.
(Tip: Mastercard considers Walmart to be a type of grocery store, while Visa treats it as miscellaneous. A grocery-cashback Mastercard is more useful than a grocery-cashback Visa, all else equal!)
As always with credit cards, know yourself and know if you can handle having access to credit. *Always* pay your bill on or ahead of schedule, and consider setting up autopay (many Canadian credit cards make autopay setup difficult, but this is not one of them).
Rogers Red Mastercard
If you have a Rogers or Fido plan (mobile or home), the Rogers Red Mastercard gives 3% cashback on *everything*, up to the (post-tax) price of your plan each month. (If you earn more cashback than that in a given month, the excess will sit there and you can claim it against a later month's plan.)
Everything.
If, as my family did, you ate the fairy food of an ISP email address and ended up swearing eternal loyalty to Rogers...well, I *do* recommend digging yourself out of that hole, it *is* more or less possible if you chip away at it over the course of a couple years (I did, though my parents did not follow me out), but if you *are* going to have a Rogers plan anyway this credit card is incredibleso to speak. And, unlike credit cards with a specific grocery-store category, it *fully stacks* with buying discounted grocery gift cards (see below). Thus, 7% cashback at Loblaws: 3% Rogers + 4% MyGiftCardsPlus.
Again, always pay your bill on or ahead of schedule. I actually pay this card off manually every 1 - 2 weeks, because they were concerned about Dad's low income and gave him a pretty low credit limit that we often cycle through more than once in a month. We do have autopay set up as a backup: Rogers is also one of the easier Canadian credit cards to do that on, though not quite as easy as BMO.
MyGiftCardsPlus
MyGiftCardsPlus is a site that gives you kickbacks for buying gift cards through them. It's run by Swagbucks, and pays in Swagbucks points: you will need a Swagbucks account. (Ask me for a referral link if you're cleared to know my legal name.)
It will say things like "1% back", but the cards are CAD-denominated and the kickbacks are paid in USD *at parity*, so a 1%-back card is actually more like 1.4% or at worst 1.33.
Two weeks a month, during Swago promotions, there will be an extra sale on gift cards: buy your cards then. Usually, this is a flat extra USD$1 if you buy a gift card of CAD$50+, for a total of USD$1.50 back or 4.2% (give or take exchange rate) on a $50 card. (The percentage works out lower on cards above $50, making $50 cards the best deal.) The promotion will be "limited" to "one card per merchant", but *every Loblaws subsidiary counts as a separate merchant*, so you can easily circumvent this limit by buying one Loblaws, one No Frills, one Real Canadian Superstore, one Zehrs...
(Check out their other gift cards too: while most of them are expensive bullshit, there are some other ones that are often useful, such as Walmart, Esso, and Home Depot.)
(Tip: most Loblaws stores use the same gift-card system, but Shoppers Drug Mart is still separate. If you're looking to get those non-price-matchable Shoppers Drug Mart deals, consider buying a Shoppers Drug Mart and/or Pharmaprix card to use there.)
There are significant downsides to using MyGiftCardsPlus, and I don't think it's for everyone. Loblaws gift cards are a pain to use, especially at self-checkout (a cashier has to come put in the PIN for it). The security on electronic Loblaws cards is shit (anyone with the URL can use it!), and the $50 cards are only available in electronic format (though you can accept a lower percentage discount and buy larger physical cards). If you *do* use $50 cards, you can easily go through 3 - 4 of them in a single transaction when buying groceries for a household, and you and the cashier will have to jump through the PIN hoop (which doesn't even make the security less shit) every time. ~2 CAD per card adds up pretty fast, though.
(Tip: if using electronic gift cards of any kind, try storing them on Catima for (relatively) easy access. Catima has a note field where you can put the PIN, and a balance field for noting when a card has been partially used.)
(Other tip: if you do choose to use Loblaws gift cards and you're getting prescriptions from a Loblaws-based pharmacy, you can sometimes pay your deductible with gift cards. Not all pharmacists know how to do this: I suspect you're more likely to get one that does if you go during white-collar business hours.)
CardSwap
CardSwap also gives you kickbacks for buying gift cards through them. Their rates are not as good as MyGiftCardsPlus and I have never used them, but--unlike MGCP--they do offer Food Basics, which seems like it might come in handy.
Prizeout
Exploiting casino promotions is beyond the scope of this course. It's where I get my Walmart cards, though.
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During your shop: Clearance
This is not a very large part of optimal grocery-shopping, but it occasionally comes in handy.
When things are about to expire, stores will sometimes put 30% or 50% off stickers on them. Sometimes these items will be moved to a specific part of the store where you can browse them all at once; sometimes they will be left where they are.
In order of where you will encounter them in the store:
* As a rule, I never buy clearance produce: the quality on produce is always awful by the time it reaches the point of being clearanced.
* Clearance bakery items are the most likely to be useful: the hit rate is higher, and most baked goods freeze well (at least for a couple months) so the short remaining shelf life is less of a concern. It's especially useful if you like whole-wheat, which is less popular and therefore less likely to be bought before it reaches clearance age. Sometimes you can also find non-whole-wheat items, even garlic naan!
* Clearance meat is often still too expensive even after the large discount, but if you like to keep a couple steaks in your freezer for the occasional treat, clearance steak is a good opportunity to pick one up.
* It's been a long time since I found anything in the shelf-stable clearance section I wanted, and I don't think you should bother with it if you find it a chore, but it can be neat to take a look at the assortment of oddities and see if there's anything appealing.
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During your shop: Error-catching
Grocery stores sell many thousands of different items, with prices that change frequently, and they're not going to have a 100% accuracy rate when programming their cash registers. Keep an eye on the items as they come up on the screen (much easier with self-checkout), and point it out to a cashier if anything doesn't match what was on the shelf tag. (Or, well, point it out if the discrepancy is *against* you. Sometimes it's in your favour!)
When you're new at this and don't yet have an internal sense of how much to expect something to cost, it can help to write prices down on your grocery list.
If you're not at self-checkout, it's often not feasible to check the items as they come up, but you should still go through the receipt before you leave the store. It's harder to correct problems after you've paid (because it goes through the "refund" mechanism rather than the "price override" mechanism), so you should have a higher mental threshold for how big a discrepancy has to be before you complain about it, but if they overcharged you $0.30 each on 20 cans of tuna you'll probably want to bug them for that $6 refund.
Some stores adhere to the Scanning Code of Practice, which means that if you catch them overcharging you, they give you the item for free (or for $10 off if it costs more than $10). (This applies only to the first instance of the item: if you're buying, say, three of them, the other two just get the real, lower price.) Other stores don't, but even they will generally at least lower the charge down to what it said on the shelf tag.
Occasionally, the loyalty system will glitch out and not award you points you should have qualified for: sometimes it will fail to give any points for an entire transaction, while other times only a single offer will fail to trigger. Keep an eye out for this, and file a points inquiry if it happens. (This will *not* work if the problem is that you forgot to scan your card, but if you scanned the card and didn't receive the promised points, they will usually award them to you.)
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And there you have it! Good luck, good skill, and remember that every bit helps.
Below is the "textbook" for this class. The further away you are in space and time from late-2024 Kitchener/Waterloo, the less of it will apply to you (in particular, advanced grocery shopping looks very different in the United States), but you may still get useful tips out of it and/or find it anthropologically interesting.
This work distills many years of refinement to my techniques, and to this day I am still learning. If it seems overwhelming trying to take it all in at once, try picking up just some of the new tactics, and expand later. I have tried to put the most important aspects first, where feasible.
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Table of Contents
- Where to shop
- Before your shop
- During your shop
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Where to shop
I mostly shop at four places: No Frills, Real Canadian Superstore, Walmart, and Costco.
No Frills is fantastic. Their baseline prices are low, they price-match, they have an excellent loyalty program. It is often worth going to No Frills even if other grocery stores are closer.
Superstore is *slightly* fancier and *sometimes* has higher prices than No Frills, but for some things the prices are the same. Their selection is much better than No Frills: if you tried a thing at No Frills, liked it, and No Frills later stopped carrying it, there's a good chance Superstore still has it. They also price-match and give PC Optimum points. I mostly stop by here on off weeks when I happen to be in the Highland Hills area, to price-match things that are good deals that week; sometimes I stop in during on weeks when I'm in the area, to price-match things No Frills had run out of.
Walmart's prices are roughly the same as No Frills *on average*, but some things are better and some things are worse. Also, no price-matching and no loyalty points, which means something that looks cheaper at first glance can work out to be more expensive when all is said and done. I recommend making a spreadsheet noting down things you buy that are available at both stores, their prices, and when you last checked what those prices were (especially if it's an item that doesn't show up in No Frills' catalogue).
Costco generally has great prices on pharmaceuticals, both OTC and prescription. (For some OTC meds, Costco only has brand-name and the brand-name premium overwhelms the Costco discount; however, for Flonase, Costco only has brand-name but for so cheap that it's *still* cheaper than buying Walmart store-brand.) If you are price-sensitive on prescription medications (tip: if you spend more than 4% of your income on prescriptions, you are not price-sensitive on prescription medications because you can convince the government to pay your marginal dollar (and also some non-marginal dollars)), buy them from Costco: they even offer free shipping on drugs that are low theft risk, though last I checked their mail-order pharmacy struggles to accommodate people on government pharmacare (so that's another reason to not go there if you're on it).
(Similarly, if you need hearing aids their prices are fantastic, literal thousands of dollars cheaper than what my mom was seeing elsewhere. I haven't tried their optometry, but I probably should.)
For food, Costco tends to be better than other places' full prices but worse than their sale prices. If you try grocery optimising and find that it's not a good fit for your psyche or situation, the best non-optimised solution is usually to buy your food at Costco; if you *are* optimising, Costco is a good backup place to buy food you ran out of if you misjudged how much to keep on hand. I also personally think the quality on their toilet paper, their pesto, and their baguettes are worth the price.
For the non-vegetarians in the audience, Costco has very cheap rotisserie chicken, often cheaper per pound of yield than buying raw chicken (*and* you don't have to deal with raw meat). It doesn't keep as well as sticking a pack of raw chicken in the freezer, of course, but if you're going on a Costco trip, consider making a chicken-based dinner the next couple of days.
I don't actually have much experience with Food Basics--the local branch sucks--but they have a loyalty program now and there's a different and potentially better branch not far from Superstore. (They still don't price-match, but then neither does Walmart, and Walmart still has its place.) Further research is needed.
If you're willing to risk making your decisions more complicated in exchange for more enjoyable food, you might want to take your staple foods and buy samples of each of the store-brand versions to test (though I admit I haven't been as systematic about this as I would endorse). It may be that you like the taste of the Food Basics version much better than Loblaws, to the point that it's worth picking it up there instead. In many cases, it's also worth including name brands in this test: sometimes it is better not to know, but the name-brand premium can often be defrayed (on-sale Gay Lea butter is cheaper than full-price No Name!), and sometimes it's worth any premium that remains.
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Before your shop: Rotated stockpiles
I wrote a guide for this in February 2020, and it was *especially* helpful to do in 2020, but it's very helpful every other year also.
The link explains the basics, and you should start with that, but once you're comfortable with it you can also get a little more complicated.
* Are pinto beans only on sale a *little* bit? Do you know, from your experience watching their sale rhythms, that you can probably do better? Maybe wait a little longer.
* Is dry pasta 60% off? Do you have a 10%-off loyalty offer on *top* of that? Maybe get six or nine months' worth instead of three. (If you can find storage space for it: we have an overflow shelving unit in my parents' bedroom for this sort of thing.)
Some people like to make spreadsheets noting how often things tend to go on sale at what prices to help them with these kinds of decisions, though personally I tend to just soak in the vibes over time.
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Before your shop: Price-matching
Price-matching! The centrepiece of an optimised Canadian grocery trip! I would have put it first on the priority list if it didn't synergise so well with rotated stockpiles!
"Price-matching" is when you show a store an item in a competitor's flyer, and the store gives you that item at the competitor's sale price. You don't need to go to six different stores to hit six different stores' sales!
The stores that do price-matching are No Frills, Real Canadian Superstore, FreshCo, and Giant Tiger. Of these, the most useful are No Frills and Superstore, because they price-match *each other* (plus other Loblaws subsidiaries), and this means you can often get store-brand items on price-match. Not to mention the PC Optimum points, of which there are many.
Back in the day, you had to comb through paper flyers by hand and mark out the ones you wanted in pen, but everyone went digital during the first couple COVID waves. You can search flyers with the aggregator website/app Flipp, mark items you want for your favourites list, and show the cashier on your phone.
(Flipp did, unfortunately, drop support for offline flyer caching a year or two back. Even downmarket grocery stores usually have Wi-Fi now, though, and in any case even a 100MB data plan is sufficient.)
Most stores run their flyers on a Thursday to Wednesday cycle; Giant Tiger does Wednesday to Tuesday; Shoppers Drug Mart does Friday to Thursday. Bear this in mind when making your price-match lists: you don't want to show up at No Frills on a Wednesday only to realise that your Giant Tiger sale has expired.
Flipp will show you preview flyers one day in advance. KW Rationality meetups are on Thursdays, so when making your grocery list for the class you may want to start with the preview flyers on Wednesday, to give yourself more time. When using Flipp near the end of the sale week, make sure you're not looking at this week's flyers when you actually wanted next week's or vice versa: take particular care when using the search function to check for specific items.
You can generally get up to 4 of an item. If the sale specifies a brand, the item must be the same brand: you can't get No Name if the sale specifies Great Value. Produce sales often don't specify a brand, and in that case the item *doesn't* have to be *un*-branded: you *can* get President's Choice white mushrooms matched with a Giant Tiger sale on generic white mushrooms.
(Tip: Giant Tiger measures mushrooms in ounces, while PC measures in grams (but in a way that was clearly originally ounces and then translated). Remember that 8oz = 227g and 16oz = 1lb = 454g. Most cashiers do not object to matching an 8oz mushroom sale against a 227g box, but sometimes you get cashiers who don't know the conversion: I find that showing them a unit-converter app is usually enough to convince them.)
You will need to use a full-service checkout lane, not a self-checkout.
You can't price-match anything labelled "buy one get one" or similar. You can't price-match prices that are only for loyalty-program members, not even if the loyalty program in question is PC Optimum and you are at another Loblaws store.
If the item is more than 50% off (threshold may vary by store, I'm not sure), the cashier will need a supervisor override (unless you happen to get a cashier who is also a supervisor). If you have more than one type of item with a discount this large, it's polite to do them all in a row and notify the cashier, so that the supervisor doesn't have to come back a second time.
Stores vary on which other chains they price-match; even different branches of the same chain in the same area may disagree. The Waterloo No Frills, where we will be practising, does Farm Boy, Food Basics, FreshCo, Sobeys, Real Canadian Superstore, Walmart, and Zehrs. Superstore additionally does Giant Tiger, T&T, and Shoppers Drug Mart (as well as matching No Frills).
Stores often do not communicate the details of their price-matching rules very well to their employees. In particular, you will likely get inconsistent results on whether you're allowed to stack price-matching with coupons. Never make a plan that *relies* on being able to stack price-matching and coupons, but it is sometimes worth asking. I don't recommend putting up a fight if the cashier says no.
They will usually, but not always, require you to buy multiples-of-2 of an item that is, say, 2 for $5.00.
You *can* price-match an item sold by weight, though it's possible you'll get a cashier who doesn't know how. I've only had them try to claim you can't once or twice: usually you can politely get them to ask another cashier to show them how.
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Before your shop: Loyalty programs
"But Brin," I suspect many of you are saying, "don't loyalty programs steal your shopping-profile data?"
To which I say: no, they *buy* your shopping-profile data, fair and square. It is up to every individual to decide at what price they are willing to sell information about their grocery-shopping habits. Loblaws pays us about $800/year for ours, and personally, we are more than happy to sell for a price that high.
In exchange for tracking your grocery-shopping habits, loyalty programs offer personalised (and occasionally non-personalised) discounts in the form of loyalty-point rebates. At time of writing, a few of my PC Optimum offers this week (their loyalty-offer week, like their flyer week, runs Thursday - Wednesday) include:
* 100pts [$0.10] for every can of No Name tuna, purchased at any Loblaws store
* 100pts [$0.10] per dollar spent on onions, purchased at any Loblaws store
* 300pts [$0.30] for every bag of No Name frozen vegetables 750g, purchased only at No Frills
* 6,000pts [$6] if you spend a cumulative $40 on fruits and vegetables at No Frills by January 1st
Notice the progress bar? If an offer *doesn't* have a progress bar on it, that means you can only apply it to your *first* relevant transaction. If you buy two cans of No Name tuna, that will use up the 100pts per can offer, and it won't trigger again if you later buy five more cans in a different transaction: make sure to put all your cans in a single transaction that week.
Needless to say, this, too, synergises extremely well with rotated stockpiles: you can buy 20 cans at once, get points back for all of them, and often afford to wait until the *next* tuna offer before replenishing your stock.
If you would, say, like to wait another week and see if next week gives you an opportunity to stack that tuna offer with a $1 tuna sale, the offer can be postponed. You can postpone up to four offers each week, and only offers in the "Your weekly offers" section. (The names of the "Your exclusive offers," "Your weekly offers", and "Offers you may like" sections are not intuitive, and I don't actually mentally refer to the sections by their names, but you'll soon get a sense of which types of offers appear in which section.) You *can* keep postponing the same offer week after week, hoping for that 60%-off Italpasta sale to come back (it probably will! there are generally multiple 60%-off Italpasta sales each year).
(Tip: there is a longstanding bug(?) where you can't postpone Cracker Barrel offers, so don't make plans that rely on being able to postpone one.)
Multi-accounting
My household's multi-accounting was a historical accident--Mom held the family PC Plus account and I held the family Shoppers Optimum account, back before the programs merged--but it's come in handy. We get two chances at an offer we're hoping for each week, and can manipulate the algorithm (see below) into two different areas of possibility-space. In particular, we never use my card at Real Canadian Superstore, only Mom's: we want *my* store-specific offers to stay a mix of No Frills and Shoppers Drug Mart, where we can best make use of them.
I am not sure I recommend aiming for this setup on purpose--it's a bit shady, and using two people's accounts at once would combine poorly with non-car-based shopping trips because you can't just switch which card you're using each cartload--but it's worth noting.
Algorithm manipulation
We are not privy to the inner workings of the software that decides which offers to give you each week based on your data profile, but to an extent it is possible to observe its inputs and outputs and strategically feed it data to push it towards an outcome you want.
A very important discovery I stumbled into during spring-2020 lockdowns: *shop fortnightly*. Perhaps even go 3 - 4 weeks between trips, from time to time. You get *way* more "spend $X on almost anything and get 10 - 15% back in points" offers (hereafter "total-store offers") that way: I suspect the algorithm gets worried that you're shopping elsewhere on the off weeks, and thinks it needs to give you extra-good offers to win you back. This is a big part of where the $800/year is coming from.
(You might be able to mimic this by multi-accounting and alternating which account you use each week? Further research is needed. I actually just shop every 2 - 3 weeks, but I *would* experiment with this if I were lugging stuff back by bike/foot/bus and not just shoving everything into my dad's hatchback: I would need to do smaller trips then.)
If you haven't gotten an offer for something in a while and your stocks are running low, it may be useful to buy a single instance of that item to remind the algorithm that you're interested in it. If you can prod it into giving you an offer next time, you can stock up then.
The carousel and Shoppers Drug Mart
Shoppers Drug Mart has terrible baseline prices, but its sales are sometimes very good. The trouble is, they don't always *tell* you when they are having a good sale. In particular, I've found that they don't put sales on blueberry fibre bars or stovetop popcorn in the flyer; you may find other things, more relevant to your own tastes, that fall through the same cracks.
I almost never see No Name stovetop popcorn go on sale anywhere *else*, which means on-sale Shoppers Drug Mart popcorn is generally the cheapest popcorn around. But how do you know when it's on sale, if it's in neither the flyer nor the store catalogue?
I've only found one way around this that doesn't require showing up in-person to check, and that's the carousel. (technically termed "Your home store deals", but I never call it that)
If you feed the algorithm enough Shoppers Drug Mart purchases (buying only things that were on sale such that the price was reasonable there, naturally), it will give you a Shoppers Drug Mart carousel underneath this No Frills one, with a list of things that are on sale this week that you tend to buy. It's *not* limited to things that appear in the flyer.
(If you figure out a better way to get Shoppers Drug Mart to tell you when they have fibre bars or popcorn on sale, I'd appreciate it! I recently lost my SDM carousel, having apparently not shopped there often enough lately, and anyway it only shows a limited number of sale items and the algorithm might not agree with me on which sales are most important to convey.)
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Before your shop: Coupons
You've probably heard the term "couponing" used to refer to the overall process of price-optimised grocery shopping.
Coupons are actually a lot less useful than you might think! As a general rule, only items that were expensive to start with have coupons: the point of a coupon, from the manufacturer's perspective, is to convince you to develop expensive tastes so that you keep paying extra even when there aren't coupons.
Still, sometimes you *do* have expensive tastes. Sometimes you think that Ensure really does taste better than the store-brand meal-replacement drinks; that Cracker Barrel cheese really does taste better than President's Choice; that Cheez-Its really do taste better than Cheese Nips (let alone PC). Sometimes, somehow, Aveeno oat-and-shea-butter moisturiser works better than Life despite the extreme similarity of their ingredient lists. Coupons can be helpful for these occasions.
If you are someone who thinks that Ensure is better than PC (and hasn't moved even further up the scale to Soylent or Hol Food), I *highly* recommend Ensure Club. You get up to two signups per household, and each signup gets a $3 coupon in the mail about once a month. The coupons are valid for about a year, so you can save them up and then pounce when a good sale appears to stack them with (this will probably require going to that store specifically, and it may take a while for a sale to appear at a conveniently-located store). You can sometimes get the cost of a six-pack of Ensure down to $9.
(Tip: because the Ensure discount is a flat $3 per pack, it actually works out cheaper to buy 6-packs than to buy 16-packs, because you can apply more coupon per bottle.)
Grocery stores will sometimes have coupons posted at the front of the store or near the item they're for: in my experience this is mostly useful for Cracker Barrel. If there are still plenty of coupons left for the next guy, check the expiration date and consider taking a couple extra for future trips, if you expect to buy more before the coupon expires.
If you have a Windows computer (for the DRM) and a printer, webSaver's printable coupons--while *mostly* useless--do have occasional gems, like Cheez-Its or Aveeno.
(Edit, 2025-03-02: To DRM-strip webSaver coupons so you can print them on Linux, open the .fdf file in a PDF reader that supports working with layers (such as Okular), disable all the layers except "couponimg", and save it as PDF to get a regular DRM-free PDF with a printable coupon in it. (The PDF reader built into Firefox does support layers, but I had trouble getting it to save-as-PDF with the DRM layers still disabled, so I just installed Okular.) Thanks to Mae for figuring this out!)
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Before your shop: List-making
A well-crafted list is vital to an optimised shopping trip; it brings together the things you've learned so far.
The meta-list
When making individual grocery lists for specific trips, it helps to have a meta-list: a list of all of your staple foods, OTC medications, and so forth, all the grocery items you *tend* to buy. Consulting your meta-list reminds you of things you might be running low on that you should inventory, and of things that might be on sale that you should check.
Start by writing down all the ones you can think of: if you have old grocery lists lying around, use these for inspiration. Whenever you notice you've forgotten about an item, add it to the list. Eventually, you can build it up into something reasonably thorough.
Online store catalogues
This is the 21st century, and it is often possible to comparison-shop remotely! You don't have to trek out to No Frills and check the shelf to learn that they are selling store-brand dark-chocolate-covered almonds for a regular price of $8, on sale (at time of writing) for $7.50. (Which is still a bad price, by the way. Even with how bad the cocoa harvests have been lately, $6 is entirely doable.)
This is very helpful when deciding whether to buy something at (say) Walmart instead of No Frills, and it's helpful when deciding which things to price-match (it's not uncommon to find that No Frills has *already* lowered their price to match the other store's sale, so you don't have to).
Some store catalogues are limited: most notably, No Frills is missing most pharmacy items while Shoppers Drug Mart is missing most food items. Costco, meanwhile, often puts hidden delivery fees in its online items, so you can't trust the figures you see to reflect what you would pay in-store. Keeping the price data yourself in a spreadsheet still comes in handy in some cases.
The grocery list
To make a grocery list, I recommend doing it in stages:
First, is there anything you already know you need to buy this week, even if it means paying full price? Write these down.
Second, look at the front page of each price-matchable store's flyer: you can do this on Flipp. (You may want to favourite the stores that your store price-matches.) What are their loss leaders? Is there anything you want that is *shockingly* cheap this week, such that you might want to get extra beyond even a normal stockpile top-up?
Optionally, go through each flyer and see if any of the non-front-page items stand out. This is less useful after creating a meta-list, but it helps you orient when you are starting out, and you may even catch the occasional item that Flipp failed to index correctly in their search function. My mom likes to do this step and present me with her results; I don't think I would do it myself, in my current situation.
Next, take that list of items you're going to buy regardless. Are any of them on sale? Check the Flipp search function for each one. (If the search function only shows you thumbnail results and won't let you click through to see details, try using their mobile app instead (you're going to need it later anyway, for the price-matching): I've been running into a bug with this lately.) The Flipp search function is pretty good but not perfect: you will sometimes get noticeably different results for plural (say, "mushrooms") vs singular ("mushroom"), and sometimes noticeably different results for "Coke" vs "Coca Cola". It may be worth checking both "mushrooms" and "mushroom" for good mushroom sales.
Before writing down a sale as a price-match, remember to double-check in your store's catalogue that it isn't already that cheap or nearly that cheap. (Personally, I will only price-match something if it saves more than $0.10 per item: sometimes you find sales that are only one or two cents better than No Frills, and I don't bother matching those.)
Now, look through your loyalty offers. (You may want to write down an abbreviated version of their offer list for the week, containing only the things you could potentially want (and not, like, fancy sodas you never buy) and taking up only one line of screen real estate per item: this will be much more compact and easier to consult.) Which of these offers can be stacked with sales you already know about? Which of them would be worth using as long as you can stack them with a sale, and (check Flipp) *are* there sales on those things? Are any of the offers you can't stack right now good enough to be worth using despite that?
Next, the meta-list. Which of these things are you running low on? Which of these things are you less-than-fully stocked on, and are they on sale? Go and check your supplies for things where you're not sure off the top of your head if you need more yet: I usually note down which things these are as I'm going through the meta-list, and do all the inventorying at the end.
Finally, look over your list as a whole. For items that are on sale in multiple places, did you list only the best sale? If you have a coupon for something, did you mark that down to remind you to use it?
Because the list goes through multiple rounds of edits, I don't recommend making it *directly* on paper. Digital-only might work if you're already accustomed to using checklists on a smartphone, but personally I draft up my list in a text document on my laptop and then print out a copy to take to the store. As a bonus, you can put your printed-out list on a clipboard, and everyone takes you more seriously when you have a clipboard (try it during your next home repair or doctor appointment!).
(The clipboard is also where I keep my stack of not-yet-used Ensure coupons.)
I like to format my list in two columns, with the left column being non-price-matched items and the right column for price-matched ones.
Let's look at an example to see how this works in practice:
Some things of note:
Things that are on sale at No Frills have their prices marked, while things at full price are unmarked.
The items on the left column are arranged roughly in order of where we will encounter them in the store (this is pretty helpful, even when it's not perfect); the items on the right column are arranged alphabetically by what store we're price-matching with, which is the order Flipp will display them in.
10lb is a lot of onions, but because of the $2.77 sale, it actually costs less than buying a 3lb bag!
Naproxen is cheaper at No Frills than Walmart (so it's on the No Frills list), but dimenhydrinate and Liquid Plumr are cheaper at Walmart (so we will *only* buy them here if it makes the difference in whether we hit the $200 threshold for the total-store offer; otherwise we'll wait until we're at Walmart, since we aren't that desperate for them).
Butter freezes extremely well and the gap between the full price and the sale price tends to be very large (especially if you like the flavour of Gay Lea better than No Name), so it's an excellent candidate for stockpiling.
Notice how two things on the Walmart price-matching list are not actually price-matched? This is because they are part of the same loyalty offer as things that *are* price-matched, so they need to be in the same order. If you are buying everything in the same transaction, you don't need to worry about this: I do it this way because I buy my family's food one cartload at a time, packing each cartload into my dad's trunk before heading back in for the next portion. (This also lets me do the non-price-matched items at the self-checkout, where there is less time pressure.)
Notice also that there are 5 Wonder bread listed, even though the price-match limit is 4. We will buy the 5th at full price in order to hit the $12 threshold on the loyalty offer.
Can you tell that this example is adapted from a pre-Thanksgiving grocery list? We're getting apple cider, dinner rolls, celery for stuffing, and bacon for cheesy cauliflower casserole. We are *not* getting turkey or cranberry jelly, because we already bought those during the Canadian Thanksgiving sales in October (this list is for American Thanksgiving).
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Before your shop: Payment methods
It's time to talk cashback!
I generally get 7% cashback at Loblaws. Yes, *seven*. Even if you can't swing 7% in your particular situation, 3 - 4% is eminently doable, and 3% off everything adds up fast.
BMO CashBack Mastercard
This is often the simplest way to 80/20 things. BMO CashBack Mastercard gives 3% cashback at grocery stores, up to a maximum spend of $500/month (this cap may pose an issue if you are shopping for 3+ people, but a single person and perhaps even a couple should be fine). The card is pretty easy to qualify for, and you can redeem your cashback monthly with a minimum of $1.
(Tip: Mastercard considers Walmart to be a type of grocery store, while Visa treats it as miscellaneous. A grocery-cashback Mastercard is more useful than a grocery-cashback Visa, all else equal!)
As always with credit cards, know yourself and know if you can handle having access to credit. *Always* pay your bill on or ahead of schedule, and consider setting up autopay (many Canadian credit cards make autopay setup difficult, but this is not one of them).
Rogers Red Mastercard
If you have a Rogers or Fido plan (mobile or home), the Rogers Red Mastercard gives 3% cashback on *everything*, up to the (post-tax) price of your plan each month. (If you earn more cashback than that in a given month, the excess will sit there and you can claim it against a later month's plan.)
Everything.
If, as my family did, you ate the fairy food of an ISP email address and ended up swearing eternal loyalty to Rogers...well, I *do* recommend digging yourself out of that hole, it *is* more or less possible if you chip away at it over the course of a couple years (I did, though my parents did not follow me out), but if you *are* going to have a Rogers plan anyway this credit card is incredible
Again, always pay your bill on or ahead of schedule. I actually pay this card off manually every 1 - 2 weeks, because they were concerned about Dad's low income and gave him a pretty low credit limit that we often cycle through more than once in a month. We do have autopay set up as a backup: Rogers is also one of the easier Canadian credit cards to do that on, though not quite as easy as BMO.
MyGiftCardsPlus
MyGiftCardsPlus is a site that gives you kickbacks for buying gift cards through them. It's run by Swagbucks, and pays in Swagbucks points: you will need a Swagbucks account. (Ask me for a referral link if you're cleared to know my legal name.)
It will say things like "1% back", but the cards are CAD-denominated and the kickbacks are paid in USD *at parity*, so a 1%-back card is actually more like 1.4% or at worst 1.33.
Two weeks a month, during Swago promotions, there will be an extra sale on gift cards: buy your cards then. Usually, this is a flat extra USD$1 if you buy a gift card of CAD$50+, for a total of USD$1.50 back or 4.2% (give or take exchange rate) on a $50 card. (The percentage works out lower on cards above $50, making $50 cards the best deal.) The promotion will be "limited" to "one card per merchant", but *every Loblaws subsidiary counts as a separate merchant*, so you can easily circumvent this limit by buying one Loblaws, one No Frills, one Real Canadian Superstore, one Zehrs...
(Check out their other gift cards too: while most of them are expensive bullshit, there are some other ones that are often useful, such as Walmart, Esso, and Home Depot.)
(Tip: most Loblaws stores use the same gift-card system, but Shoppers Drug Mart is still separate. If you're looking to get those non-price-matchable Shoppers Drug Mart deals, consider buying a Shoppers Drug Mart and/or Pharmaprix card to use there.)
There are significant downsides to using MyGiftCardsPlus, and I don't think it's for everyone. Loblaws gift cards are a pain to use, especially at self-checkout (a cashier has to come put in the PIN for it). The security on electronic Loblaws cards is shit (anyone with the URL can use it!), and the $50 cards are only available in electronic format (though you can accept a lower percentage discount and buy larger physical cards). If you *do* use $50 cards, you can easily go through 3 - 4 of them in a single transaction when buying groceries for a household, and you and the cashier will have to jump through the PIN hoop (which doesn't even make the security less shit) every time. ~2 CAD per card adds up pretty fast, though.
(Tip: if using electronic gift cards of any kind, try storing them on Catima for (relatively) easy access. Catima has a note field where you can put the PIN, and a balance field for noting when a card has been partially used.)
(Other tip: if you do choose to use Loblaws gift cards and you're getting prescriptions from a Loblaws-based pharmacy, you can sometimes pay your deductible with gift cards. Not all pharmacists know how to do this: I suspect you're more likely to get one that does if you go during white-collar business hours.)
CardSwap
CardSwap also gives you kickbacks for buying gift cards through them. Their rates are not as good as MyGiftCardsPlus and I have never used them, but--unlike MGCP--they do offer Food Basics, which seems like it might come in handy.
Prizeout
Exploiting casino promotions is beyond the scope of this course. It's where I get my Walmart cards, though.
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During your shop: Clearance
This is not a very large part of optimal grocery-shopping, but it occasionally comes in handy.
When things are about to expire, stores will sometimes put 30% or 50% off stickers on them. Sometimes these items will be moved to a specific part of the store where you can browse them all at once; sometimes they will be left where they are.
In order of where you will encounter them in the store:
* As a rule, I never buy clearance produce: the quality on produce is always awful by the time it reaches the point of being clearanced.
* Clearance bakery items are the most likely to be useful: the hit rate is higher, and most baked goods freeze well (at least for a couple months) so the short remaining shelf life is less of a concern. It's especially useful if you like whole-wheat, which is less popular and therefore less likely to be bought before it reaches clearance age. Sometimes you can also find non-whole-wheat items, even garlic naan!
* Clearance meat is often still too expensive even after the large discount, but if you like to keep a couple steaks in your freezer for the occasional treat, clearance steak is a good opportunity to pick one up.
* It's been a long time since I found anything in the shelf-stable clearance section I wanted, and I don't think you should bother with it if you find it a chore, but it can be neat to take a look at the assortment of oddities and see if there's anything appealing.
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During your shop: Error-catching
Grocery stores sell many thousands of different items, with prices that change frequently, and they're not going to have a 100% accuracy rate when programming their cash registers. Keep an eye on the items as they come up on the screen (much easier with self-checkout), and point it out to a cashier if anything doesn't match what was on the shelf tag. (Or, well, point it out if the discrepancy is *against* you. Sometimes it's in your favour!)
When you're new at this and don't yet have an internal sense of how much to expect something to cost, it can help to write prices down on your grocery list.
If you're not at self-checkout, it's often not feasible to check the items as they come up, but you should still go through the receipt before you leave the store. It's harder to correct problems after you've paid (because it goes through the "refund" mechanism rather than the "price override" mechanism), so you should have a higher mental threshold for how big a discrepancy has to be before you complain about it, but if they overcharged you $0.30 each on 20 cans of tuna you'll probably want to bug them for that $6 refund.
Some stores adhere to the Scanning Code of Practice, which means that if you catch them overcharging you, they give you the item for free (or for $10 off if it costs more than $10). (This applies only to the first instance of the item: if you're buying, say, three of them, the other two just get the real, lower price.) Other stores don't, but even they will generally at least lower the charge down to what it said on the shelf tag.
Occasionally, the loyalty system will glitch out and not award you points you should have qualified for: sometimes it will fail to give any points for an entire transaction, while other times only a single offer will fail to trigger. Keep an eye out for this, and file a points inquiry if it happens. (This will *not* work if the problem is that you forgot to scan your card, but if you scanned the card and didn't receive the promised points, they will usually award them to you.)
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And there you have it! Good luck, good skill, and remember that every bit helps.
