Smart Shopping

Every August the same articles appear. Pack your child’s lunch, save money, here are forty ideas. Almost none of them start with the question that actually decides the answer: what does school lunch cost you right now? For a large and growing number of American families, the honest answer is nothing, and packing a lunch…

Most cheap meal plans do not tell you what they cost. They tell you they are cheap, list seven dinners, and leave the arithmetic to you. This one is costed. Six dinners, twenty-six servings, $32.07 in ingredients, which works out to about $1.23 a plate. Every recipe is one I have published and priced individually,…

Learning how to stock a pantry on a budget is the single highest-return thing you can do about your grocery bill, and almost nobody explains it properly. Most guides hand you a list of forty items, half of which are condiments you will use twice, and never tell you what any of it costs. This…

If you have ever wondered which fruits should not be stored together, the short answer is that the ones that ripen fast should be kept away from everything that ripens slowly. The reason is a gas called ethylene, and once you know which side each item is on, the fruit bowl stops being a mystery….

Here is something I knew from working in stock control long before I knew it as a shopper: a “sell by” date is an instruction to the store, not to you. It exists so a stock clerk knows which case to pull forward and which to pull off. It is a rotation marker. In every…

You’ve heard it a thousand times: buy in bulk and you’ll save money. The per-unit price is lower, the packaging is more efficient, and you don’t have to run to the store every week. On paper, it’s airtight. In the reality of your kitchen, it’s often a different story — and the numbers behind those…

Every inventory system I have ever worked in stored the price the same way: as a field attached to the product. Article number, description, unit of measure, price. If two customers bought the same article on the same day, the system pulled the same number, because there was only one number to pull. That is…

“Free” is my least favorite word in retail. Every time a cashier asks if I want to sign up for the rewards card, or an app promises cash back for scanning a receipt, my old inventory-audit brain does the same thing: it asks what the company is actually getting out of this, because nobody hands…

I spent a few years auditing inventory. Counting stock, reconciling what the system said was on the shelf against what was actually on the shelf, and writing up the gap. It is not a glamorous job. But it does permanently change how you look at a refrigerator. Because here’s the thing. I wrote a piece…