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Comment by runako | Hacker News Reader

One thing I have noted during this inflationary period is that individual stores/chains are gaming pricing much more than I remember before.

For example, your store might be competing for business using the headline price of eggs and making it up on milk and bread. In our city, Whole Foods was the cheapest non-warehouse place to buy eggs for a while. Anecdotally, it looks like one could save a relatively large % on various goods simply by going to a different store, which was not the case a few short years ago.

Relative pricing stability appears to have collapsed, shopping is more intellectually-intensive now.

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You are right and we did shop around for a while to optimize for the best value for the price we were paying. We ended up on a store (Aldi, in this case) which overall had the cheapest basic groceries.

The problem with shopping at 5 stores to save money on groceries is that with gas prices you're probably not saving money, and if you're not moving around to various stores using any type of energy but kinetic, it is a large opportunity cost that could be spent doing other things, if you even have the time at all.

There is no way I could go shop at 5, or even 3 stores a week for food, I simply do not have the time. (Spouse and I both work full-time, 3 kids at 3 different ages going to 3 different schools every day, etc)

What I do is rotate through 4-5 stores but only go to one per week. I stock up on paper towels or whatever when I'm at the store that has the best prices on them, and so on for other goods.

I actually do know someone who regularly hits up multiple grocery stores every week chasing deals and that does seem crazy to me. The cost in gas and time doesn't at all seem worth it.

That’s a pretty good idea. At the moment my wife and I have the e same login to the Walmart app, we both add things to the same list over the week, and smash “deliver” between various weekend commitment time slots where one of us will be home.

The time saved is enormous, and the amount of money we might be saving by being more scrupulous is probably on the order of 5-10 bucks/week, which granted does add up over the course of a year. I like to think it’s a wash with the gas/car maintenance we would be spending, but who knows how accurate that is.

Works well enough for us, at this stage in life. Walmart is on the very cheap/low quality end of the spectrum, and we cook all our meals/pack lunches.

Always open to new ideas as it relates to saving money and being more efficient with time. These kiddos won’t be kiddos before we know it and we try to optimize our time with them as much as we can.

living in the US is more and more resembling 3rd World countries, quite fascinating to see the degradation of what is “normal” lifestyle and complete normalization that now, on HN, we are sharing algorithms of how to effectively use 8935 stores to save a few bucks

What? You could very obviously budget you or your wife's time to stop at a variety of stores in a maximum of 3 hours a week, you're just obstinately choosing not to. Why are you pretending your experience is reflective of a normal person?

I see your outrage and raise you your own mistaken assumptions.

You have no idea, at all, how much my wife or I travel for work, among many other things about my life. You don't know about any of the myriad of health problems I would have, or my spouse, or my kids. You don't even know if I have a variety of stores at which I could "stop by for 3 hours a week." You don't know my work schedule, or my wifes.

Take a deep breath. I wasn't assuming anything about anyone. You however, are doing that.

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