Spend Less: 6 Simple Tricks for the Grocery Store

How poverty taught me to manage my shopping

Heads for sale at a Mexican market. Photo by author

I spent 2019 digging in couch cushions, taking any job that came my way, and seriously considering asking my parents for a loan. My partner and I watched our earnings dip from modest to poor.

Like, how-did-this-happen poor.

One good thing comes out of abject poverty — you learn how to budget. As money moves to the forefront of your mind, you check prices, look for cheap brands, and keep tabs on any upcoming deals.

To help us save, we stopped eating out and put all our attention on groceries. We found recipes we liked and planned our meals in advance. But grocery shopping in our usual way, (I was hooked on home delivery, she stood by an assortment of cereals and cheeses), were no longer options. We needed a plan of attack for our groceries if we wanted to manage our money.

Here’s what we did to get our spending down.

Choose a Better Market

Our city has a great at-cost market called Abastos. It’s massive; all the restaurant suppliers shop there and lots of fruit and vegetable sellers start there first thing in the morning. It’s packed with mountains of shiny apples, every kind of mango, and piles of cucumbers, and that’s…