The Casino You Visit Every Week

Casinos are master classes in the art of getting consumers to spend. Their labyrinthine designs force non-gamblers to walk the farthest distances through them in order to find their way out, all to maximize the likelihood you become a gambler. The things you’re most likely to need sit deep inside the centermost areas lest you simply skim past the slot machines and card tables to grab something easily on your way to the hotel. The things you walk by are designed to entice with lights, sounds, and a sense of wonderment to get your purse strings loosened. There isn’t a clock to be found to indicate whether you’ve reached the time you said you would leave, and oxygen is pumped inside to help you remain refreshed and energized for longer so you never get too tired to stop gambling.

For those of us pursuing the path of financial fortitude casinos are not a place we’re likely to spend much time. But there is a place we go to nearly every week that is designed much the same as a casino to keep you in it as long as possible, to maximize the amount you spend, and to overwhelm you with billions in psychological research to ensure they get the most of your bucks. That “casino”? Your local grocery store.

Making you a sucker

Each year millions are spent investigating the means by which a grocery store can get just a little bit more money out of each of its customers. After all, if you have 50,000 customers a week and you can get each of them to spend $1 more per visit that’s an extra $50,000/week or $200,000/month, millions of new revenue in a year! For that much money you can absolutely believe a company like Safeway is going to invest some coin to figure out how to unlock your spending.

How does that materialize in the real world? Have you ever noticed that when you walk into a grocery store you’re often dropped first into the bakery, floral shop, or the produce? That’s entirely by design to numb your mind into associating good smells and wholesome healthy food with the general atmosphere of the store itself. When you smell tulips and sourdough your brain thinks, “Mmmm, delicious,” and it holds that thought as you walk throughout the store.

Why is it that milk is always at the back of a grocery store? It’s because almost everyone buys milk each week meaning it’s a highly purchased item and by putting it in the back the grocery store increases the chances that you’ll impulse buy something by making you walk through as much of their store as possible. It’s exactly the same trick that casinos use to ensure you walk as much of their floor as possible; the longer you’re in the store/casino, the likelier you are to increase your spending (and even an increase in $1 is big bucks for the “house”!).

At the front of the store near the checkstands you have last minute impulse buys like candy bars and sodas. They’re perfectly situated to take advantage of the growing hunger you have in your stomach after walking around the grocery store looking at all that delicious food for an hour. Convenient that so many of those items are priced at almost exactly $1, a cheap price point to you that is very valuable to the store (50,000 users spending $1 more per trip is millions in yearly revenue!).

It’s not just the grocery stores themselves working to procure extra revenue straight out of your wallet. Manufacturers of the products you buy are in on the game too. The next time you’re in the cereal aisle look at the placement of the eyes on the cartoon characters used to sell children’s cereals. Captain Crunch is always looking down. Why? Because marketers know that kids’ eyes are at a lower level and they’ll perceive the Captain as looking directly at them. That increases the likelihood they’ll beg dad to buy them the cereal, a trick worth millions in increased sales every year.

What about the incredible case of the vanishing package? That’s when the people who make what we buy decrease the quantity of a good in a package but conveniently leave the price the same. Can’t get people to pay more for your product? Just sell them less at a time and voila! You’ve done it!

There is an entire industry around making sure consumers spend the highest amount possible at each grocery store trip they make. It’s a sliver of the $2.1 trillion spent on marketing every year. When you take the politically radical act of living frugally you’re fighting back against the house and putting more money in your pocket.

The Rise of the Super Couponer

In a different life I made my living solely as a writer and was once working on a freelance article about people known as “super couponers.” The concept, made famous by the TLC show “Extreme Couponing,” took “beating the house” to an extreme for grocery shoppers. These folks would store up huge swaths of newspaper inserts and other deals and use them to not only save thousands on groceries but to actually make money from the grocery store! Professional card counters eat your hearts out; these folks knew how to get it done in the grocery casino.

Part of my assignment was understanding how the system worked and experiencing it myself. As a former professional gamer I was excited to learn a new system and then break it down to my advantage. It was essentially a live action game, even if the 20-something male part of me faced some gender bias about being comfortable shopping with a ton of coupons (I got over it). The gist of the philosophy was this: the grocery store is a casino trying to extort from you the maximum amount of money possible. Most shoppers are rubes totally unaware of what’s going on and how they can prevent themselves from being taken advantage of. Super couponers count cards, knowing all the best deals and finding ways to match coupons to sales and specials in such a way that they pay the least amount possible at the grocery store. In rare instances? They’d come across the holy grail of couponing: a “moneymaker” in which the deal was so good the retailer would actually hand them money for shopping there.

After a few weeks of research I headed off to detail my first experience with super couponing. I was headed to a local Albertson’s where they had a deal on spaghetti that allowed you to purchase a box while paying $0 due to a promotion and a coupon. I had 30-some copies of the coupon but didn’t really believe things could possibly be that easy. When I got to the store I found a manager, explained the situation, and asked him how many boxes of free pasta I could walk out of the store with. Perplexed he looked at the coupon, back at the price, and shrugged saying, “There’s no limit. If that thing rings up free you can walk out with as many as you have coupons for.”

I was totally floored that he was just going to allow me to clear out his shelves, but the writer (and gamer) in me couldn’t pass up the opportunity. So I scooped 30 boxes of pasta into my cart, paid $0 to the cashier for them, and walked out. I’ll admit: it was kind of a rush. It felt like I had just gotten away with a scam somehow. And lest you be upset that Albertson’s took a loss, they were reimbursed by the manufacturer for each coupon. As for the 30 boxes, my wife and I ate a few but the rest were all donated to the local food bank.

My dabble with super couponing was fun but ultimately too time-consuming. Tracking all the deals every single week was more work than I wanted to do but learning the principles of the mindset behind super couponing was very valuable. While I don’t save up 30 copies of the Red Plum advertisement insert each week anymore I do approach grocery shopping with the mindset I learned from my research into the phenomenon: the grocery store is a casino, or “the house,” and you’re a savvy card counter trying to leave with as much value as you can while spending as little as possible.

(As for super couponing, grocery stores caught on and used big data to fight back. Now it’s almost impossible to pull the shenanigans you used to be able to get away with, but if you’re interested in learning more check out The Krazy Coupon Lady).

Beating the House

So we know grocery stores are gunning for our dollars, and we know we can fight back. But how can we make sure we’re getting the most value from our trips to buy food each week? Here’s a list of simple steps you can take to maximize your value and minimize your spending at the store (and no it doesn’t involve cutting out hundreds of coupons every week).

Eat before you go

It sounds trite but it really makes such a huge difference. When your blood sugar is low you’re much more likely to make irrational, spur-of-the-moment decisions. At a grocery store? That translates to buying more Snickers at checkout, bigger proportions of the foods you normally get, and simply adding more items overall to your cart before you get to the checkout line. You can simply and efficiently beat this by just shopping on a full stomach. With your brain not convinced it’s going to starve any second you’ll be much less likely to throw junk into your cart you have no actual need for. This can add up to big savings long-term.

Never shop without a plan

This is the big one. Going into a grocery store without a plan for what you’re going to eat that week is like blood in shark-infested waters for the grocer. You’re at the maximum level of risk to fall victim to the marketing efforts they pay millions to use to ensnare you. Don’t let it happen to you! Instead work out a meal plan each week for your family that plots out what you’ll be eating and build out your grocery list from that. It will save you far more than going into the store and hoping to just buy whatever looks good from the grocer. They make the most expensive items look the tastiest so you’re more likely to spend on buying them.

Take advantage of savings programs and apps

If your grocery store offers a savings program or “club card” use it. Not doing so is simply leaving money on the table. If you’re a stranger visiting a grocery store for a single time you can always consider using Jenny’s Number (867-5309) to try to get a discount even if you don’t have a card. The odds are someone has signed up with that number.

Club card type offerings are a big way in which grocery stores cut down on the phenomenon of super couponing and also how they build up huge amounts of information about your shopping habits. The tradeoff is that they generally come with big savings over the “regular” price of items in the store. If your store offers an online account with your grocery club card set it up and utilize it. The Safeway account I use each week provides me custom offers tailored to my spending habits which saves me on the things I buy regularly. I also use the Safeway app to build out my grocery list so I can find things in the store and add digital coupons directly to my shopping cart before I check out. It’s also a nice way for my wife and me to keep a custom-built grocery list growing each week. We both use the app with the same account login so when she adds “Get milk” to the list on her phone it pops up on mine when I’m actually at the store. Saving money and divorce proofing your marriage? Sign me up.

Use the circular to build your meal plan

It’s one thing to build a meal plan each week, but by using your local grocer’s weekly circular (or logging into your online club card account) you can see what’s on sale and build your meal plan from that. I love asparagus because we used to pick it wild from the ditches near my home in Iowa growing up. But out in Seattle it’s an expensive vegetable at $5.99/pound. So I watch the weekly deals and pull the trigger whenever it gets to $2.99 or cheaper. Over time I’ve learned the going rates for most of the foods my family eats most often which ensures I buy when prices are low. If you like filet mignon and grilled chicken, building your meal plan to feature the filet on the week it’s on sale for $2/pound less than usual and the chicken when it’s on sale for buy 1 get 3 free you can save your family a lot of dough and still buy the foods you love. Doing it the other way around can cost you; by building your meal plan to the specials in your stores each week you can save hundreds of dollars each year.

Stock Up

I didn’t realize growing up on a farm that it was out of the ordinary for most folks to have a refrigerator/freezer combo in their kitchen and a separate stand-alone freezer unit in their basement or garage. It was common on the farm because we used that freezer to stock up on meat when you had one of your animals processed or after a good deer hunting season. While a separate freezer might not be the right fit for your family, you can absolutely take advantage of good times to stock up on things. You’re buying low to save yourself from buying high.

Here’s an example: a few weeks ago at my local Safeway chicken breasts went on sale at buy one get three free (yes, four for the price of one). My family eats a lot of chicken so I knew we would use the meat. Instead of just buying what we needed that week for our meals I bought as much as I felt we could reasonably eat from our freezer over six months. That meant my weekly bill for groceries that week was a little high, but over the long term we’ll pay 25% of the normal cost for our protein. That’s a huge savings.

We had enough storage in our freezer/refrigerator to handle the amount I purchased and now at least once a week I pull a few breasts out to thaw overnight for a delicious chicken-based dinner. The savings is amplified by the fact meat protein is often one of the more expensive costs on the menu.

Enjoying the spoils

Remember, millions of dollars go into figuring out how the house can beat you at the grocery game every year. Fight back by being an informed consumer and going into your local grocery store with a plan to walk out with as much value for as little dollar as possible. Use the steps outlined here to make sure you’re getting the most bang for your buck so you can put your grocery store savings towards achieving your goals from the 10 Steps.

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