Warehouse Stores

Warehouse stores such as Costco and Sam’s Club can be a wonderful place to shop, but you first must do your homework. These stores charge a membership fee in order to buy items in bulk, and normally at a discounted price from a regular retail store.

Warehouse stores carry grocery items, clothing, tools, generators, computers, outdoor furniture, electronics, and more. If you can think of it, there is a good chance they carry it.

For most items you will end up paying less for each item than you would in a retail store. When you go shopping at a warehouse store, you must compare the price between the warehouse store and a retail store. You need to check out what the price per ounce, price per pound, or price per item is. This is normally displayed on the tag with the price, but you might have to do the math yourself sometimes. If you determine that the price is cheaper at the warehouse store than it is at the retail store, you can compare apples to apples and oranges to oranges (or any other item that you may want to compare). Your work is still not done as you still have a couple more things to take into account.

The first thing that you still have to take into account is sales. I rarely ever see a sale at a warehouse store, so you don’t have to worry about that, but retail stores very often have sales. These sales can sometimes beat the price of the wholesale stores. The sale that will normally beat the price of the warehouse store is a BOGO, especially if you have a coupon (or two). Below I have listed some examples of products that you may find at a warehouse store and at a retail store and compared the pricing.

Examples:

• Smucker’s Jam:
  • Sam’s Club: 8 cent per ounce for 2 jars of 34 oz
    • Pros: You don’t need to buy as many.
  • Publix: 7 cent per ounce BOGO with 2 coupons.
    • Cons: You need to purchase more to equal the same amount as a warehouse store.
  • Conclusion: There is a savings of 1 cent per ounce at the retail store.
• Idaho Mashed Potato Flakes:
  • Sam’s Club: 6.25 cent per ounce for a 5 pound bag
  • Publix: 16.6 cent per oz for 24 oz bag
  • Conclusion: Sam’s Club offers the same product saving for a dollar more at Sam’s you get 3.5 lbs – excellent deal
• Pampers Diapers:
  • Sam’s Club: 28-30 cents per diaper (depending on diaper size)
  • Publix: On sale with store and manufacturer coupon 17 cent per diaper
  • Conclusion: Remember that an infant can go through 8-12 diapers a day, and toddlers between 5-7 per day. So if you can buy the diapers from Publix while they are on sale with a coupon you can save about $40 a month for an infant and $20 a month for a toddler. Figure this out over a year and it is $480 for the first year with an infant, and then $240 a year each year after, so in the first three years of your little ones life, you have saved $960 on a product that you had to buy anyway.

We have determined in this article that if you are willing to do a little research before you go shopping, you can end up saving a large amount of money very easily. And the best part is that after you have done this for a while, you will have the hang of it, and know when to buy what where to get the best deal, and it won’t take you anymore time at all.

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