How To Save Money on Groceries

Man shall not live by bread alone (Matthew 4:4), but we still all need to eat to live.  How can a family or an individual save money on groceries?  Price matching is a valuable tool that, in a few minutes, can save a large amount of money.

Walmart has a price-match guarantee on advertisements from local competitors as well as matching prices with online competitors.  Purchases at Walmart.com can also be shipped to a local store for free, so, essentially, lower prices both at local and at online competitors will be matched by Walmart in the store.  Furthermore, by signing up for Ebates and Big Crumbs, you can receive cash back for all purchases made at Walmart.com, so that it is possible, not to price match alone, but to actually match the prices of competitors and receive cash back on top of the matched price.  Other stores, such as Target, have price-match and ship-to-store policies similar to that of Walmart; utilizing Ebates and Big Crumbs can enable you to both match prices and receive cash back on any store that has such price-match policies.

In our area, stores with grocery advertisements that Walmart (or other stores with comparable policies) will price-match  include Aldi, Cermak, El Rey, Dollar Tree, Dollar General, Walgreens, Pick n’ Save, Trader Joe’s, Woodman’s, Piggly Wiggly, Sendik’s, Sentry, Target, Kmart, and Costco.  Many of these merchants also advertise with Ebates or Big Crumbs; therefore, one can also get a discount on gift cards at these stores by purchasing them through Ebates or Big Crumbs, or by purchasing discounted gift cards directly, to reduce the grocery bill.  One who lives in another part of the United States, or even in a number of other countries, can follow a similar model to reduce his family’s budget for groceries.

If you have a tight food budget, utilizing the tips above can help you to have the funds to eat healthfully.  You should be a good steward of your life and the lives of those in your family by eating a balanced and nutritious diet.  Furthermore, God designed the human race so that a balanced diet provides the nutrients most people need.  Consequently, it is not surprising that many large-scale scientific trials, involving hundreds of thousands of people, indicate that taking vitamin and mineral supplements does not improve the health or extend the life of the general population.  These facts explain why non-profit consumer protection organizations recognize that many supplements are a waste of money and some are even harmful.  Thus, unless you have a clear medical need or have been told by your doctor to do otherwise, you should spend your grocery money on healthful food instead of wasting it buying vitamin or mineral pills that you do not need or that might even be bad for you.  If you feel, without a doctor’s recommendation and in the absence of a scientific basis, that you should take vitamin or mineral supplements anyway, you can do so for less than $1 a month instead of buying expensive, unnecessary, but well-advertised alternatives, and you should obtain reliable scientific information about vitamins or minerals instead of listening to the propaganda and myths created by the multi-billion dollar vitamin industry.  Indeed, you can save a great deal of money by avoiding unconventional and quack “medicine” in general, as it is often associated with the ungodly New Age movement and it rejects the Biblically-based scientific method (Genesis 1:26-28).  Be a good steward of the finances God has given you by saving on groceries and using your grocery budget for nutritious food instead of worthless or possibly harmful pills.

More Resources on Biblical Financial Stewardship

TDR

This entire study can be accessed here.