One of the ways we’ve saved a lot of money on groceries over the years is by buying store brands (or whatever brand is the best price when combining coupons and sales).
Yes, for some people, just buying whatever brand is the lowest price might feel crazy — especially if you’re one of those people who hates new things and change. However, for us, we’ve found that it not only saves us a lot of money but it keeps things interesting. You never know what fun brands and types of food you’re going to get to try! There’s always variety because the stores are constantly putting different types of foods and different brands on great sales.
If you consider yourself a “brand snob” and always prefer to buy the same brand of everything, I want to give you three reasons to consider buying store brand instead of name brand:
1. Store Brands Are Usually Less Expensive
We save so much money by using store brands versus name brands. For instance, if you only buy name brand shampoo, the cheapest you may be able to buy it is for is usually around $3, when it's on sale. If, however, you're willing to look for the lowest price on any brand of shampoo, you can often find shampoo priced at $1 per bottle on sale.
While the savings of $2 per bottle of shampoo might not seem too significant, think about how the savings could add up if you saved $2 on 15 different items each week at the grocery store because you choose price over brand. That would be a savings of $60 per month — or $720 per year. And in many cases, the savings would likely be much more than that.
2. Store Brands Are Often the Same Quality
As I’ve told you before, when our family first started shopping at Aldi (a discount store chain), I was really leery of buying their products. I figured they'd taste cheap since they were from a discount store.
At that time, we were newly married, my husband was in law school and we were living on a beans-and-rice budget. We needed to save as much as we could on groceries, so I was willing to get brave and try new things if it meant that we spent less at the grocery store.
With this in mind, we hesitantly started trying different items from Aldi. And guess what? We were pleasantly surprised! Not only was most of it not cheap-tasting, we actually liked some of the food better than the brands we were used to buying.
3. Store Brands Are Usually the Same Low Price
One of my favorite things about buying store brands is that they are usually the same low price. They sometimes will go on sale, but they are usually already less expensive than name brands.
For instance, just this week, we were shopping at Kroger and needed to buy cocoa. While none of the brands of cocoa were on sale at Kroger, by buying the Kroger brand instead of the Hershey’s brand, we saved $1.50.
Taking just a few seconds to look at prices and check the price of store brand items versus name brand items when you’re shopping could end up saving you hundreds or even thousands of dollars per year. AND, you might not even be able to tell a difference — or you might end up liking the less expensive item even better! Now that’s my kind of savings!
Have you found any difference between store brand and name brand of any items you buy? I’d love to hear your thoughts!
