Butter Me Up!

My frugal tip today isn’t so much a tip as it is just plain old boring common sense. My advice to you is to simply look around you while you are shopping at all of the options available to you. You never know what good deals you will find. My fabulous example of this is the butter I bought this past week while grocery shopping that is now neatly lined up in the door of my freezer, like little baby ducks. Cute. As I perused the dairy section of the grocer’s, I spotted a gynormous display of store-brand butter, all marked down to $1.00 a container. This was a savings of $2.10 per container!) The butter had a “sell by date” that was slated for sometime this week. This is simply the final date the inventory can be sold in the store, not the date that the product will spoil by. Plus if you freeze butter it lasts for months. I grabbed five packages supermarket-sweeps style and kicked myself all the way home for not getting more. However freezer space is a precious commodity and we already had 5 packages of butter in the freezer. Now, before you go and think we are huge porkers, I should mention that I love to cook and I have found that braised veggies, sauces, and roux's just don't come out the same with margarine. Have you ever had a margarine sage sauce? Um, let's not go there as it is just not the same. Plus I love baking cookies and in baking, nothing beats butter. So there is the explanation to the year's supply of butter.

So anyway, back to my point, take some time and look around you before you dart out of the store to run your next errand. I know if I had had my blinders on in the grocery store and had just picked up the shredded cheese I was after I would have missed my amazing deal. Take just a couple of moments to soak in you surroundings and see what deals there are. In our grocery store there is always a section of clearance items that often times harbors amazing deals. Things that are seasonal and therefore marked down, that you can still use coupons on. So stop and smell the bargains!