How to save money at the grocery store

My grocery shopping strategy is fairly complex: I buy cereal and ice cream if they're on sale. The rest is serendipity.

To get the sale price you have to have one of those cards. Nobody knows why. If the supermarket chain uses the data to make my life better I don't know about it. I don't actually carry a card. I just tell the clerk something. Like, the dog ate my card. Or, a terrorist stole my card. They run one through for me.

I doubt you'll need any better advice than that, but if you do, here's some from SmartMoney:

Shop ahead
Most brands are discounted just once during a 12-week sales cycle, says Teri Gault, the founder of shopping site The Grocery Game. The prices of seasonal items, like BBQ sauce in the summer, and competitive categories, such as cereal and soda, are cut more frequently. If you’re brand loyal, check the sales circular against what’s currently in the pantry. It’s better to buy a jar of Skippy peanut butter on sale this week than at full price two weeks from now when you’ve run out, Gault says.

Do some cooking prep
Stephanie Nelson, the founder of The Coupon Mom, has a five-minute rule for buying precut foods such as bagged lettuce and sliced carrots: If she can do the work herself within that time, buying the cheaper raw produce is a better deal. “You’ll pay three times the price for bagged lettuce as for a head of lettuce,” she says.

Explore the store
Check all the locations within the store for where a particular item on your list might be found. For example, cheese can be purchased from the cheese counter, the deli and the dairy case, Lempert says. “Wisconsin cheddar is Wisconsin cheddar no matter where you buy it, but it’s cheaper in the dairy case,” he says. Compare prices at the seafood counter against those in the freezer case. Most items at the counter are “freshly frozen,” meaning they were frozen and have been defrosted, he says. Out-of-season produce is also likely to be cheaper -- and tastier -- in the freezer section.

Watch for store sale tricks
“Don’t assume anything [about store sales],” Lempert says. Stores have twice as many unadvertised sale items as they place in the weekly circular, so it can pay to pay attention while wandering the aisles. However, shoppers should stay keen. Aisle displays are less likely to point to items on sale than they are to pinpoint items the store wants sold, he says. Also, check the fine print: A four-for-$3 deal on cans of tuna fish may or may not require you to buy four to get the sale price.

Check unit prices
“Don’t assume that the bigger package is always the better deal,” Nelson says. The Federal Trade Commission found that larger size packages of tuna fish, peanut butter, ketchup, coffee and frozen orange juice were often more expensive per unit than smaller counterparts. Crunch the numbers before you buy, especially if you have a coupon.

One thing SmartMoney isn't smart enough to think of: if you hit the sample tables enough times, you can skip buying dinner.