How heavy are your bulk purchases that you need a handcart? And how much do you save compared to just buying a kilogram of everything you ran out of this week?
For dry goods I don't even look at total price, I look at price per weight (wet goods, same but volume). It's almost always lower the more I buy. I'll buy the largest quantity I can consume before it spoils.
Off the cuff I'd say I save about 20%, and buy a few hundred pounds per trip. Probably saves us amongst a family in the vicinity of $1000/yr. This same concept extended to all other non-food consumables.
The argument about buying “small amounts at higher prices” is really interesting to me.
I recently downsized places for a much more walkable environment. Keeping less stuff in my house is a feature. One I was worried was going to cost me.
But my budget has largely not changed. Any increase in costs associated with bulk buying are at least offset by lowered transport costs. It’s really hard to exactly account though.
My instinct is that it is much more efficient for stores to warehouse things & me do JIT buying. I’d love to see research on it.
It highlights how much profit is made on repackaging things into smaller quantities for consumers. Mind you, in the US you have Target which a lot of people go to, because bulk buying is cheaper. We do the same, 5 kilo bags of rice instead of pound bags because we go through enough of it, it's less than half the price of buying pound bags individually.
But if you ever have a larger landscaping job to do, go to a wholesaler, they can deliver tons of materials at your doorstep for relatively cheap.
Case in point: In the UK I can buy 20kg bags of sand from Amazon for ~10-20GBP, or a 1000kg for ~50 GBP. Both including delivery. I still ended up buying a bunch of 20kg bags last summer, exactly for the reasons you point out - 1 ton was too much and impossible for me to move other than by bagging it up myself...
I remember learning that you can't rely on listed price for grocery items, but must check the per kilogram or per liter price. Because bigger containers are usually cheaper. But not always.
I still buy tuna that's 0.1 euro per kilogram cheaper ... I really don't know whether the savings are ever going to add up to anything and I'm almost certain it's not worth the 30 seconds it takes to check. But I can't not do it.
Yup, and often those tempting bulk discounts, if calculated, only end up saving a few cents or a dollar or something, so the trade off becomes -- Do you want to be payed 50 cents to store extra supplies at your house? Sometimes that's a good trade-off, but often it isn't.
Bulk-buying mentality is so prevalent in the US, it can sometimes be hard to avoid, and I think US urban planning has a lot to do with it as well - e.g. in many cities I've lived in the US, it would take longer to walk to my car than to walk to a grocery store when I was living outside the US, so you get trained to focus on economizing trips.
In Australian supermarkets the cost per unit weight net (typically 100 grams) has to be printed on shelf under / next to the price.
I've proposed the idea that the price of everything in the supermarket be averaged per unit weight, checking out then becomes just a matter of weighing the trolley / basket.
I see complications / gaming the system, fun idea though.
Maybe just knowing how much you spend per average kg of food, or per unit of energy, could be a useful metric for optimizing food expenses.
"I'd be surprised if a suitcase-sized quantity of things didn't reach the $950 threshold" how would that surprise you? A whole cart full of things is under 300.
Buying the right BOGOF items saves money. For instance, after spending a lot of time trying different options, I now know exactly what face soap I want and I also know the price it sales for. From time to time, it'll be sold as a BOGOF, so providing the price makes sense (i.e. it is the normal price or less than 200% of the normal price) then it is a good buy (it has long shelf life, and will always be used).
I use up about 1.5 loaves of bread per week, so some weeks I buy one loaf, some weeks I buy 2. If it is a week where I only need one, but it is BOGOF I just buy 2 and put on in the freezer (and then take it out the following week). It is a similar story for cheese (although that doesn't need to be frozen, staying in the fridge, sealed, lasts for long enough).
One of the bigger savings we have got from a food perspective is to move towards making a 'menu' of food we are going to eat that week. Then buying the ingredients needed for each dish. This means little or no wastage (good on so many levels), being able to buy at a good price (rather than not getting something required then picking it up at somewhere convenient buy more expensive halfway through the week) and knowing the quantities up front makes it easier to either buy in bulk, or knowing when a deal that involves extra quantity will be suitable.
The above approach has also meant eating much healthier food, not finding ourselves in a position where we order take away because we don't have anything in. Ensuring we have not only meals planned, but healthy snacks (fruit etc) factored in too. It isn't a binary choice of by doing this we get everything 100% perfect, but it has been a hugely noticeable improvement.
I have read several times that some of these approaches and typically favoured by those who have more disposable income, which isn't ideal, as we really want those with less income to be getting all the good savings to try to ease/stop the wealth gap.
Depends on what you need. You can buy olives at a supermarket olive bar for $9 a pound (wet weight), or you can buy 5 lbs for $4/lb dry weight (8 lbs wet/shipping weight, so $2.48 per lb measured equivalently) on Amazon and have them there in 2 days. There's also many goods you just can't buy in suburban/rural locations - my wife makes fabulous miso, but good luck finding 2 different kinds of seaweed and bonito flakes at your Walmart. If you don't have an Asian market in proximity Amazon is literally your only choice (and they're actually not cheap there). For pet supplies they drastically beat the selection of a Wal-Mart and drastically beat the prices of a real pet store (eg stuff like Feliway or Nature's Miracle).
Yes, for certain commonly-consumed heavy or bulky goods, i.e. anything that's either mostly air (like toilet paper) or mostly liquid (like detergent) they aren't your best choice. That's not all goods by any means.
Also you're comparing the mileage of a bus (the UPS truck) to a passenger vehicle. The UPS truck is delivering goods for a hundred other people on his run today, the gas spent transporting your package is an absolutely insignificant fraction of that. If you're really worried about ~my carbon emissions~ then you should really be thinking about ditching that car and getting yourself to work on one of those 5 mpg busses.
same in the UK, some items priced per kg and others per 100g - not insurmountable but just another slight hump in the road to easy comparison when you're stood there.
Maybe supermarkets and their suppliers could stop selling bulk quantities at a huge discount? You can sometimes be paying double the price per kilo for the smallest packet, so you end up picking up the bigger packet thinking you're saving money, but how much will end up spoiling before you get around to using it? Supermarkets also often have specials where if you buy multiple packets you save a few dollars.
My grocery budget is $100/week, which I break into two $50 shopping trips. I will swap to cheaper brands than I am accustomed to in order to or remove unnecessary items all together in order to fit my budget.
Probably not the weight so much as the need to have items shipped quickly to maintain freshness. Even so, when you pay almost as much in shipping as the food item the value add drops off rather quickly for me.
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