Grocery Guru shares tips for saving money on groceries, including Thanksgiving fixings

Thanksgiving for $10? It’s not impossible, according to Ken Roesbery, aka the Grocery Guru.

Maybe it was the idea of a night out with the girls, or maybe it was an opportunity to go to the high school. Maybe it was the offer of tasty treats before the meeting began, or maybe it was loyalty to the Mountain West Medical Center’s Healthy Woman program, which hosted it, that brought the crowd out to listen to the Grocery Guru on Nov. 12.

More likely, however, it was to see if he could make good on his promise to teach them how to cut grocery costs and even provide a Thanksgiving dinner for an entire family for $10. With the current economic situation, the promise of saving money on something as fundamental as groceries is enticing.

Whatever the reason, they came and the Grocery Guru gave his pitch to an enthusiastic, standing-room-only crowd composed almost entirely of women in the Tooele High lunchroom.

He wasted no time delivering on his promise. When he started his fast-paced, rapid-fire presentation with the promise that the ladies could do their week’s grocery shopping in 30 minutes and get the food needed for 15 family meals spending less than $35, he had their attention.

With Thanksgiving waiting in the wings, the season is all about food. Roesbery’s claim to purchase ingredients for an entire traditional Thanksgiving feast for under $10 is appealing. But just how does one go about shopping for this dinner?

His plan is simple, Roesbery insists, but it means using a plan. And by understanding the plan, the $10 meal is a possibility.

“Most people are what I call ‘Hip Shooter Shoppers.’ They have absolutely no plan when they go to the grocery store. On their trek, they wander aimlessly up and down aisles for an hour to an hour and a half, spend too much money, and get home without everything they need. You see them all the time with sort of a glazed look in their eyes walking up and down the aisles picking out items and circling back again to get something else they thought of.”

Hip Shooter Shopping at its worst is a cycle of shopping without a plan.

“People start by looking in the fridge and seeing that they are out of milk so they grab the keys and go to the store. After they spend an hour or so in the store, they come home, put all the groceries away and when they open the fridge to put away the milk, they realize they forgot to get eggs,” he said.

According to Roesbery, the average grocery shoppers go to the store 2.5 times per week. That means they are spending at least 40 hours per year at the grocery store and spending $4,000 to $5,000 more than necessary to feed the family. Cutting back the time spent shopping is the first step toward reducing the grocery bill and saving that few thousand dollars. The more time you spend in the grocery store, the more money you will spend, he pointed out.

He said that looking in the fridge and realizing you are out of milk is not a problem if you use a different approach to do the shopping.

He added that as a shopper grabs the keys, she should also grab the ads for the favorite store. Take 10 minutes to leaf through the flier and plan on meals for the family based on the sales for the week, looking at fresh, frozen, canned and other products. By doing just that much, basing purchases on what’s on sale at one store, shoppers can cut the grocery bill 40 percent without clipping one single coupon.

“You need a plan. You don’t go to the store to do Hip Shooter Shopping. However, you can cut the grocery bill even further with what I am about to tell you,” he said.

By then the crowd was all ears, and became even more excited as he handed out samples of products that could be purchased, saving as much as 75 percent by combining manufacturer’s coupons with grocery ads to maximize savings.

Roesbery is famous as the Grocery Guru for his method of using coupons to their best advantage without spending any time clipping and filing them. Actually, clipping, sorting and filing coupons are out. Instead, he recommends taking two sets of weekly Smart Source, Red Plum, Proctor and Gamble and Walgreens ads from two newspapers, punching holes in them and putting them into a 1-inch three-ring binder until they are needed.

As the weekly ads arrive, they are added to the binder until it holds four weeks’ copies. After the first month, as new circulars are added, the oldest ones are tossed. These ads are ready and easy to access and shoppers need never waste time looking for and printing off Internet coupons, he says. Coupons are never clipped from the booklets until the shopper is ready to go to the grocery store.

He simplifies the process of grocery sale decisions by offering a weekly shopping list based on weekly sales at one of several grocery stores on his Web site, www.gurusdeals.com. Visit the site to find deals, location of the coupons in the newspaper circulars, possible menus and recipes for the week, and ways to save money dining out by using restaurant coupons. Because Tooele grocery stores run their sales from Wednesday to Tuesday, some minor adjustments in timing are needed to make use of his grocery store suggestions.

Roesbery works with Media One, the advertising arm of The Deseret News and The Salt Lake Tribune, and he pointed out that these papers carry the above-mentioned ads. He mentioned the Transcript-Bulletin also carries these circulars in its Tuesday edition. Roesbery maintains that the savings on one trip to the grocery store will more than pay for the newspaper subscriptions.

In fact, those savings can add up rapidly.

“I took my family on a Disney cruise last year on the money we saved on groceries and we have another scheduled,” he said, adding he’s able to do that with the money saved in just 10 weeks on groceries.

The Grocery Guru shared an example of how the coupons save money.

“Cereal is now about $4 per box — to offset the use of coupons... those who don’t use coupons are paying that much, anyway.”

He added that frequently ads will offer sales on lots of three boxes marked down without the coupon. However, by adding the value of a manufacturer’s coupon, those three boxes can go home for $1 per box — a savings of 70 percent. The key is to purchase the small sizes, on sale in lots of three using coupons to pay for them.

In fact, he adds, purchasing the smallest size of sale items allowed on a coupon provides the biggest savings. Multiply that savings by collecting two copies of the ads using two coupons to make your purchases.

Many stores print coupons toward future shopping as you go through the checkout line to further the savings.

Using these techniques and some shopping strategies, that elusive $10 Thanksgiving feast becomes easier to pin down. Grocers target holidays and put sale prices on the foods most popular for the occasion. Thanksgiving is an easy target. The basic meal — if a Thanksgiving meal can be called basic — includes turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, cranberries, rolls and pumpkin pie. All these items are on sale at grocery stores this week.

What Roesbery terms the “turkey wars” are underway in time for Thanksgiving again. The turkey would be the highest ticket item on the menu but these “wars” ease the stress. Using the turkey vouchers that Macey’s has been distributing with grocery purchases for the past few weeks, shoppers might get the bird for free. The $1 off coupon in this week’s Macey’s ad sweetens the deal.

He explained grocery stores are happy to accept coupons because manufacturers reimburse them the difference between the face value of the coupon and the retail price of the product, plus a few cents for their time and postage.

Making use of other ads can offer similar savings on clothing and other items by perusing newspaper advertising to find good discounts and coupons that the stores often have printed in their ads.

The concept of Guru Deals is simple, really, he said. “You choose the store, buy it on sale and use the coupons.”

If you follow those steps, you can cut your grocery bills by up to 70 percent and have the money to use for other things.

As an enthusiastic crowd of women left the high school that night, some carrying grocery samples and binders, and chatting about the Grocery Guru’s ideas, they seemed to agree that that is a pretty inviting promise in a down economy.