Here are the rules of the game:
I will purchase everything from Aldi Supermarket.
Meredith will be doing a freestyle menu with no coupons and only using the grocery sales current from that week. She will not be using any items from her stockpile, only items purchased that week.
A daily breakdown will be given each day. The breakdown will include the menu, recipe, and cost breakdown.
The menu will serve four people. In larger recipes, we will be adjusting the cost to estimate a four person meal, or split the cost if one meal actually will be used in two different ways.
The menu will include a main dish and sides. Desserts and drinks will not be included in this challenge.
Staple ingredients under a ½ cup are “negligible,” for example in the case of flour, sugar, salt or pepper. Otherwise, these will be figured in as price per ounce and multiplied by the number of ounces used.
There will be a wrap-up at the end of the week and you, as readers, can feel free to critique our strategies, or offer up some of your own strategies.
Just for the record, I do want to say that this is just a fun and friendly competition. The idea behind it is not to see who will do better than the other, but more to share techniques for two different ways to shop. Both of these options do not require any coupon cutting and will show you ways that you can plan affordable meals for your family using two other types of techniques.
We are both very excited to be doing this contest and our families are excited to be eating so well this week.
Thanks to Meredith for posing such a great challenge! I hope that it will be as much fun for you as it is for us!
Hysterical! You are the two women I look to most for frugal shopping techniques, and now you’re going to pool your savvy tips together! I tend to shop Aldis & loss leaders, so it will be fun to see the difference!
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I can’t wait to see the outcome. I am a loss-leader shopper for the same reason- Aldi is much further. I do shop quite a bit at a store called Save-A-Lot. It’s very similar to Aldi and I get some great deals.
I’m going to post about this and link back to both of you.
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AWESOME!!! I can’t wait to see who WINS!!!!
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This is going to be great! I need to get my grocery down to $50 a week. We don’t have Aldi in town, and I think Publix, Winn Dixie and SweetBay have horrible sales. I’m left with Walmart. yuk. And hubby doesn’t eat much meat. So I’m most curious to study both your methods and learn!!
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What fun!
I love Aldis and I love your menu plans from there. I’ve used several of your recipes that have been BIG hits with my family.
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I shop Save-A-Lot too, and sales at Food Lion. Sadly, no Aldi’s nearby to sample. I’ll be following the fun. I’ve linked the competition to my blog.
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I’m definately excited to see this! Meijer is closer than Aldi (a good 10 minutes closer) so sometimes I just don’t want to go that far! This should be fun!
Tracy
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Ok, heather pointed me here… what is Aldi???
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Aldi is just a discount supermarket, much like Save-A-Lot. They do not carry brand name products, just generic products. The pricing is much lower than the regular prices at the supermarket. If you would like the full scoop, I wrote an article about the store here:
http://tinyurl.com/322gu3
By the way, WELCOME
Please take a look around!!
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This sounds great! Go Amy! I can’t wait to see the all the great recipes and amazing savings.
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What fun! I’m excited to see the results!
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Hey Amy! This sounds like fun and I can’t wait to see the outcome. Either way, we’ll all learn a lot from your experiences and recipes. I have a few thoughts:
This contest is skewed. Aldi doesn’t accept coupons anyway (not here at least) so all this rule is doing is preventing Meredith from using coupons.
It doesn’t matter, though. You can still win because Aldi’s everyday prices are much lower than a store’s everyday prices and usually lower than – or comparable to – a sale price.
It depends on what you buy and what you make. If you rely heavily on the frozen and prepared foods (admittedly, much cheaper to buy at Aldi than elsewhere) your cost will be much higher than if you make stuff from scratch. And the scratch stuff is simply the cheapest at Aldi.
There are occasional super buys with loss leaders but Meredith cannot be guaranteed that anything worthwhile will come up during the time specified. It’s a gamble.
Okay, I’m putting way too much thought into this. Maybe I just wish I had thought of it first! =) Have fun!
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