Grocery Deals this Week

Skimming through the weekly ads is always helpful to save money on groceries, and since I have to do it for my family anyway, I thought I would share a few “don’t miss” deals I’m finding at Wichita grocery stores this week.

Grocery deals will help you save a lot of money on meals if you buy judiciously and try to get the most nutritious foods for your dollar. If you have some freezer space, you’ll be able to preserve many items and keep on saving in the months to come. At the bottom of this article I’ve shared some ways my family and I save money – there’s nothing extreme (I don’t have time for that) and I tried to share tips that would apply for most families. 

One of the ways we keep the grocery budget low is by shopping the sales and stocking up (not apocalypse-level, just buying a few extras) when food is cheap. We store in the freezer or pantry if we aren’t going to use something right away. Rule of thumb: use common sense and if you’re not sure whether you’ll use it, do not stock up. 

Best Grocery Deals this Week

Note: This is not a coupon matchup! We don’t have time for that, nor can we write every single sale in every single weekly circular. It’s just the short list of items that caught our eye as being a good deal, and we would likely pick up if we happen to be out shopping this week!

If you see a good deal I missed, please mention it in the comments so everyone can see and benefit.

Tips for Saving on Meat

I’m seeing fewer and fewer deals on meat these days but there ARE some still available, if you’re willing to work a little bit. On a recent week, I got two amazing deals. Your mileage may vary because these deals could go away at any time. 

Sam’s Club had pork loin roast for $1.98/lb. If you can stop by while the butchers are still working, they will cut it for you (for free). I chose to get a small roast and several one-inch center-cut chops for mine. My husband put all the chops on the smoker and we had a really inexpensive feast for a couple of days. (We’ll use the roast at another time.)

Walmart had a 10-lb bag of chicken leg quarters for .59/lb. Yes, $5.90 for ten pounds of dark meat chicken. (Ope! Price went up to .78/lb but it’s still cheaper than anything else.) Don’t tell all the neighbors or else the chicken will all be gone. This is a huge bag but you can cook them all at once like we do, then prep meals with the cooked chicken meat and make stock with the bones, or you can separate the leg quarters into freezer bags and freeze them until you’re ready to use them. This is about half the price of bone-in legs or thighs these days, so it’s an awesome deal. Again, don’t tell everyone or it will probably go away. 

Leekers Weekly Sale 

Leekers had to come back to the list with prices like it’s 2019 this week. It’s like a tornado-shelter stockup sale! Here are the good ones I saw:

Leeker’s weekly ad for May 11-17, 2022

• Skippy peanut butter, 16.3 oz .99 ea, limit 3
• Hormel chili .99 ea
• Hormel tamales .99 ea
• Dinty Moore beef stew, 20 oz 2/$4
• chunk chicken (canned), 5 oz .99 ea (about the same price per ounce as Sam’s)
• Original SPAM, 12 oz 2/$5
• Hormel Compleats (shelf stable microwave meals) 2/$3
• Best Choice pasta, 32 oz bag $1.99 ea
• 80% lean, 10-lb chub, $2.99/lb
• beef eye of round roast $3.99/lb
• pork sirloin chops, boneless, family pack $1.99/lb
• pork sirloin roast $1.99/lb
• top sirloin steak $5.99/lb
• still looking…

Aldi’s Deals this Week

Aldi ad for May 11-17, 2022

• tri-tip beef roast, seasoned, $5.99/lb
• nothing else stands out for me yet; I’ll peruse a little more closely later in case I missed something
• Even though they aren’t on the ad, I would still go to Aldi for these items:
  • canned vegetables (like tomatoes, green beans, etc.)
  • whole wheat bread (if it’s still $1)
  • some cheeses, lunchmeats
  • bulk pork sausage (around $2/lb)
  • and miscellaneous other things; Walmart may be just as good maybe

See the Aldi’s ad

Dillon’s Deals

wyb = “when you buy” | All prices are with Dillons card | some deals require a digital coupon – be sure to load them to your card

Dillon’s weekly ad May 11-17, 2022:

• beef chuck roast (the Sterling Silver grade) $4.77/lb (cheaper at Sam’s if you want to buy 25 pounds of it 😀 )
• ground beef, 80% lean, 3-lb, $3.99/lb (Walmart’s 3-lb chub is slightly cheaper)
• ‘When You Buy’ deals:
  • Kellogg’s cereals $1.79 ea wyb5 or more
• Dillons digital coupon deals
  • 2x fuel points Thurs-Sun through May 29
  • St. Louis style pork ribs $2.97/lb w/coupon
  • Tillamook butter, 16 oz $2.47 ea w/coupon (I like the Kroger butter deal when it’s $1.99 ea better, but this is pretty good.)
  • Tide 154 fl oz $18.47 ea w/coupon

Notes

1. All prices are with Dillons card.
2. FUEL POINTS: You must load the digital coupon onto your shopper’s card for any extra fuel points (like 2x or 4x deals) to be applied. 
3. wyb = When you buy a certain number of participating items; you can mix and match! (In other words, you don’t have to buy 5 of the same item.)

View Dillons weekly ad

Sam’s Club Grocery Deals

Sam’s doesn’t always put out a circular but they do almost always have great deals! 

Here are a few Sam’s Club deals we usually get. They do change from time to time, but not usually by much. These are prices I’ve seen previously: 

• large seedless oranges, 8 lb bag, about $8.12
• Hearts of Romaine lettuce, 6 ct, about $3.98
• garden salad, 2-lb bag, often .89/lb
• lemons, 3 lb bag, $1.22/lb
• Olive Garden Signature Italian Dressing, 2-pack of 24 oz. bottles, about $6.68 (my current favorite Italian dressing!)
• Member’s Mark boneless, skinless chicken breasts, $1.98/lb ish
• Member’s Mark assorted pork chops, $1.42/lb ish
• Member’s Mark bone-in pork Boston butt, $1.68/lb ish
• Member’s Mark whole boneless pork loin, $2/lb ish
• Member’s Mark extra lean premium ham lunch meat, 40 oz. for $6.98 
• Oscar Mayer shaved extra lean smoked turkey breast lunch meat $3.19/lb
• Members Mark bath tissue, 48 large2-ply rolls, $18.98 ($19.98 now, according to reader Sally.)
• Members Mark paper towels, 15 mega rolls (select-a-sheet) $16.98
• Member’s Mark 80% ground beef about a 12 lb chub $3.64/lb Not my favorite price, but a little bit cheaper than others today. This could change.

We also check the prices at Sam’s for things like soda, water, and other beverages. Produce at Sam’s Club is sometimes priced really well – for example, we’ve been buying 3-pound bags of oranges there for around a dollar (ish) a pound, and the oranges are really good. Their bagged salad is a steal at $1.68 for 2 pounds. 

If you don’t have a Sam’s Club membership, you can get one with a gift card of equal value – making it essentially free. You can also sometimes get one for a good price through Groupon. The deals are for new members only. Even if you can’t get a deal you will still save money. We love our Sam’s Club membership and take full advantage of it. 

Leeker’s Grocery Store Deals

Hey, so here’s the deal. You know how a lot of grocery stores have self-checkout lanes? I’m switching to self-service with finding Leekers deals. The store manager told me he loses money on a lot of these deals. (He didn’t ask me to stop sharing them; he doesn’t know that I do that. But I decided to stop anyway.)

Leekers has an app with digital coupons. If you shop at any store regularly, it’s probably a good idea to get the app. 

Here’s the Leeker’s Weekly Ad

How We Save Money on Groceries -Our Methods

The key to saving money on groceries, – at least for me – is simplicity. Whenever I have a complicated plan it always seems to blow up in my face. 

This means making really basic meal plans (nothing complicated!), keeping a stocked pantry, having goal prices for staples, perusing the weekly ads, and maybe taking advantage of a few coupons or app deals. And just so you know – occasionally I flunk (bad) frugal dining 101. Everyone probably does at some time or another. We just deal with it, and the consequences aren’t as bad as if you weren’t even trying to get your meals in under budget. So give yourself a pass and start again tomorrow. 

(By the way, it’s smart to plan a restaurant or takeout night in your meal plan! Because you thought about it ahead of time, you can probably save money by using a coupon, taking advantage of a deal, or going during the early-bird special time.)

Coupons

We don’t use extreme coupon methods here because I’ve never been able to make it work on a consistent basis. However, I am not above using a coupon if it’s for an item I am going to buy anyway, especially with the ease of digital coupons.

What I don’t try to do anymore is clip and match and stack and go for rebates and register rewards. It always got to be too much for me! Your mileage may vary; I know people save a lot of money that way and they love it. I usually get frustrated and spend more time than I have trying to figure it all out. 

Store Apps

If you shop frequently at one particular store, it’s probably going to be worth downloading the store’s app so you can use all of its features. I find this to be particularly true of the Dillons app, where I can make my shopping list, find coupons for items on my list, view the ad, and even let the app help me navigate around the store. 

Other apps you may consider include shopping apps that give you cash back for items you’ve already purchased. Most apps like this have you scan your receipt and choose applicable offers. When you’ve reached a certain dollar amount – say, $20 or $50 – the company will either mail you a check or you get a digital gift card of some kind. The particulars vary depending on which app you’re using. 

The most popular of these shopping apps right now seems to be Ibotta. Dillons recently added cash-back offers on its app too; they are more like coupons, but the money is added to your shopper’s card. 

You may be able to stack coupons with cashback offers to increase your savings. It’s a great bonus when it works, but this is also where couponing starts to get complicated and crazy-making. 

Weekly Ads

It’s worth spending a few minutes every week skimming the grocery ads for good sale prices. You’ll find that certain items are always on sale around the same time every year. As an example, I get the best deals on baking items in the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving, so that’s when I always restock my supplies. You’ll also begin to see sale cycles, so you can start to make educated guesses about how much you’ll need to buy so it will last you until the next sale. 

Shop Multiple Stores

We have a few favorite stores that we shop regularly. All are within a few miles of our home, so there isn’t a lot of extra time or gas involved in buying things from different stores. (If I lived in a rural area with one grocery store, I would definitely adjust my strategy.) Shopping at different stores helps us save on particular items; for example, at the time of this writing, milk is much less expensive at Dillons than it is at Sam’s, but Sam’s is where I buy almost all my paper goods, trash bags, tortillas, frozen fruit, and cheese (among other things). Other things I’ll try to get at Aldi, which we visit a little less frequently. 

If you can develop a routine for shopping multiple stores, you can shave some dollars off your grocery budget each week. 

“Buy Prices”

In addition to all the methods above, one of the easiest and most fool-proof ways I save money at the grocery store is to have what I think of as my “buy price” for different categories. The reason this is so easy is that when I find myself at the store without a list or a plan (it happens), I’ll know whether the prices I’m seeing are good or way too expensive. 

How this works is you set yourself a goal price for, say, meats. My goal price for boneless is $2 per pound. Some people think I’m crazy to have a goal price that low, and I’ll admit it’s getting harder and harder to find. But it still helps me make some decisions when I’m standing there in the grocery store. My goal price for bone-in meat, by the way, is 99 cents per pound. 

If you’re strictly into organic, or free-range, or grass-fed, then obviously your “buy price” is going to have to be a lot more than mine, and that’s okay! You just decide what it is, and then when you go shopping or look at the weekly sales, you’ll know a good price when you see one. 

Compare Prices

Similar to having a “buy price” or goal price, comparing prices is another essential tool for saving money on groceries. But you need to know how to compare accurately. If you already understand how to find the unit price, you can skip this section. If you’re like me and need a reminder from time to time, read on. 

For most food, I think in terms of price per pound (lb.). I mentioned above that $2 per pound is my goal price for meat, and that’s easy because fresh meat is usually priced and sold by the pound. But so many other foods aren’t! Think of chips, dairy items, bread, frozen vegetables, condiments like ketchup, mustard, peanut butter, etc. The package sizes of these items vary so much that it’s pretty much impossible to compare prices unless you are a human calculator. 

Enter the electronic calculator. It’s perfect if you, like me, do not have a calculator in your head. Here’s how to find the unit price of any item:

price divided by units equals unit price

So let’s say I see a 30 oz. jar of brand-name mayo for $3.99. Is this a good price? Or should I choose the 12 oz. generic squeeze bottle for $1.99. At first glance I think the generic one is probably cheaper but I don’t really know until I calculate the cost of one ounce of mayo in each container. 

$3.99 / 30 = .133

$1.99 / 12 = .16583

That’s quite a difference, actually. The larger name-brand mayo is 13 cents per ounce and the smaller generic squeeze bottle is almost 17 cents per ounce. If you need a squeeze bottle, it’s not enough of a difference to wreck your grocery budget but if all you were looking for is the cheapest mayo, it isn’t the generic squeeze bottle! 

(Of course, on that same shelf is a 30 oz. generic mayo for $2.29 so you really don’t need to “math” here if you don’t want to. Where this skill of calculating the unit price really comes in handy is when you’re comparing one store’s price with another store’s price.)

Stock Up

Stocking up is another technique for saving money when you shop, and it’s also something I personally do not do in the extreme. My family has an extra freezer in the garage, but most of the time it isn’t full. (I should probably do a better job of stocking up, to tell you the truth.) But I do have several pounds of butter in there that we paid $1.99 for when it was on sale with a digital coupon. We also have a favorite brand of toilet paper and we buy it in a gigantic pack from the warehouse club. What we don’t try to do is have our own warehouse of supplies. I don’t have the space for that, and I’m also just not interested in that level of preparation. When we stock up, it’s usually to carry us through to the next sale cycle, so we’re only talking about several weeks worth, and just enough for our family – not for the whole neighborhood for twenty lifetimes.

Meal Plan

I’m awful at meal planning so please don’t picture a cute internet printable with breakfasts, lunches, dinners, and snacks all pre-prepped and outlined for each day. I start (and sometimes end) with a few basic meals that I know our family will eat and that I will actually cook. No pan-seared halibut with focaccia-crusted roasted artichoke hearts and fresh mango salsa. 🙂 Or whatever. I’m talking spaghetti, grilled cheese, nachos, fish sticks, lol! It’s not that simple all of the time, but I want to emphasize that a meal plan is something that is supposed to work, and it won’t work if you’re challenging yourself with difficult recipes and long grocery lists of ingredients at 5 p.m. every single weekday evening when the kids are needy, you and your spouse are tired, and everyone’s hangry. 

You don’t have to Instagram every night’s meal. No one will know if you fall back on prepared spaghetti sauce or breakfast for dinner for the third time this week. And yes, they are doing it too. 

Related: How to Save at Sprouts Farmers Market