Just another Day on the Farm

While they stopped delivering flyers in our mail years ago, the odd flyer on a few things still comes, mostly Canadian Tire an the local feeder stores or hardware stores. However a friend of mine has a small but awesome group that is for Ontario and she shares the best “loss leaders” stock up deals from across the basic selection of stores here. I am sure that someone is running something close to it in your neck of the woods as well if you look forward it

Also if you don’t mind signing up, you can find apps now that show you all the flyers in one place and so on. Food Basics had some pretty good loss leaders this week and so we made the longer driving trip to the town that has this store. I had a list with room for three unknowns.. I came out of the store with just shy of $340 dollars worth of groceries (true Groceries, no household or farm or pet related items included in that total)

Now when i say sale prices, that is for our local area, i know that in many parts of Canada the prices would be much higher and i expect that in some stores in very big city’s they could be lower and same for my readership, some will be higher and lower.

So here the average price of butter is between 8 to 10 dollars Canadian for a pound of butter, Using the average of 9 dollars, that would be 6,45 US or 5.95 Euros, they were on sale for 4.50 limit of six and we picked up to the full limit.

Ps, on a side note, we have had a rash of butter thefts in our province, someone has got a good grey market they are working on this!

In the past year there have been so far (and we have more time yet) 9 heists, Thousands of dollars in stolen product. Thieves have stolen upwards of $1,000 worth of butter nine times over the past year.

Butter has no codes and can be stored long term in freezers and with the rising costs of business and butter, they clearly have a market they are moving it onwards to.

So i went for the loss leader sales coming home with good oil sales for different kinds, bulk rice, oatmeal, butter and more.. and my three unknown slots where filled as well. I stuck to my sale lists and my watch for this or add this if you see it and its below X

It is amazing to me that things that used to be loss leaders for 99 cents are now loss leaders at 2.99 or are they? I paid full price on a some things i wanted, including cream to make fancy coffee creamers, i might be able to go buy a fancy fall coffee but i have no plans on missing out on some of my favorites either, i just will need to make a copy cat version of them.

Seven of my items where processed foods and the rest where all whole, a great thing overall but i will be sighing when i need to grab something quick. Its amazing to me that i only seem to know how to cook in two ways, two person portioned meals and or huge guests and or put up soups/stews or chilis etc.

I am re-learning how to cook a four to six portion planned meals, I need up to a four person planned meal if the awesome Miss R is joining us because sometimes that teen can eat like two grown men LOL and other times not.. but you need a left over lunch portion not just for Dear Hubby but also for Miss R as well.

It will be ordering in my beef packaging a bit different, normally i do two steaks per but this year i will order them in three per package instead etc. I have been trying to figure out how many meals that amount will make but its tricky because each meal still tends to have a portion from the garden, or from put up from the garden or from last years meat orders or from our farm eggs and so on.

What i can say is that everything is going into the freezers or the canning pantry so that there is no loss that way. I did buy one other loss leader, 3 big packages of it, but you will have to wait for a future coming post on what it was, why i made the choice and how its going to get used.

How are the loss leaders in your area? Still good or just there? Will you make a “trip” to a bigger town to get to store that is hosting a ton of good loss leaders and if so, how do you find you do on not giving them more of your hard earned cash.

I will fully admit that if i was NOT on a no spend November! i expect i would have easily walked out with a $400 bill because i might have been tempted to add in this and that and oh, that to the cart, i tried hard to keep track of the things i reached for and looked at, and i would say i saved at least $60 on things not on my list that tempted me at the store, and i will point out that most were processed food but not all, they had a whole new line from a company with very strange flavors and some regular for kippers, i love smoked golden kippers in sunflower oil on good toasted rye bread as a breakfast in winter.

I know that my brand will go on sale in the dec cycle at the same time the smoked oysters will two or three weeks before christmas! I decided to stay with the tried and true instead of trying new maybes and plus they were not on my shopping list, nor where they on sale.

30 Day Mini Challenge -Day 10 of 30 days of regular writing and blogging!