The Decibel - Fighting inflation, one grocery bill at a time

Episode Date: September 13, 2022

While Canada’s overall inflation is ticking down, the cost of food continues to rise. Inflation for groceries rose in July to 9.9 per cent.Lisa Noonan and Filomena Bilotta are both administrators of the Canadian Savings group on Facebook, where they teach the 100,000+ members how to fight back against inflation in the grocery store. They explain how you can push back against your ever-rising grocery bill.

Hi, I'm Mainika Raman-Wilms, and you're listening to The Decibel, from The Globe and Mail. The latest inflation numbers looked like they were good news on the surface. In July, overall inflation ticked down to 7.6%, compared to the 8.1% in June. But look closer at food prices. Inflation for groceries actually rose in July to 9.9%. That means compared to July 2021, food is costing you almost 10% more. We're at Loblaws in Toronto, downtown Toronto, and we're going shopping. Do you have the grocery list handy? I don't.

I can get it out, though. Producer Madeline White and I took to the grocery store after work one evening in August to figure out which products are really hurting Canadian wallets. Okay, what's on the list? Grocery list. 10-pound bag of potatoes. Medium ground beef. Pasta. Chicken. Ice cream.

Ooh. Egg and waffles. Grapes. Tomatoes. Butter. Cheddar cheese. Milk. Bread.

And toilet paper. We got this list as an assignment from today's guests. Lisa Noonan and Philomena Belota. It's fair to say that Lisa and Philomena are super savers. They regularly save $30 to $50 a week on their family grocery bill. And they're both administrators of the Canadian Savings Group on Facebook, where they teach the 100,000 plus members how to fight back against inflation in the grocery store. We are looking for red seedless grapes.

So here we are. What's the price on these bad boys? Looks like $3.99 a pound. Is that normal? I don't know. How much is this? A pound? We're going to find out. Put that in there.

Great. Ultimately, tomatoes. The idea is that we'd go shopping, and then Lisa and Philomena would look at our bill and share how they would have shopped to maximize savings. Four tomatoes. There we go. So those are $1.99 a pound.

Oh, we need one whole fresh chicken. Well, here's a whole chicken. So this is really stuff you would buy if you are feeding a family. Like a whole chicken, that much ground beef, this many potatoes. This is stuff that you would need to feed a lot of people or a podcast team or a podcast team that's true works for that as well okay what's our total so those groceries came to 89.. Thank you for using self-checkout. Finding ways to save these days requires a game plan, which Lisa and Philomena are going to help us draft.

And you might be surprised to learn how much less you can pay for groceries. But as Lisa says, You can save a lot of money, but it's not going to come without the effort. This is The Decibel. Lisa, Philomena, thank you both so much for being here. It's great to have you. Yeah, thanks so much for having us. We're excited. Yes, thank you for having us. So we got 13 items for $89.32.

So when you look at my receipt, what's the first thing that jumps out at you? It seems like a lot of money for so few items. Yeah, I have to agree. And the first thing I noticed were like some of the prices that you paid for some of the items. I was like, oh, wow. Really? The grapes, for example. Yes. And the chicken. The grapes were expensive some of the prices that you paid for some of the items I was like oh wow really the grapes for example grapes were yeah and the chicken grapes were expensive and the chicken okay so so where could I have saved some money here um well Philomena and I kind of went over the receipt and we kind of did a comparison as to if we did the shop versus the shop that you guys did. And it's quite surprising actually

how much we could have saved by just shopping sales and price matching and using some of the coupons that we have right now. We were talking about the grapes, for example, they're currently on sale right now at a store in Ontario called Freshco for $3.28 a kilo. So we could have gotten the same grapes that you paid over $11 for for about $4.15 if we had done a price match there for those grapes. Okay, good to know. Yeah. So I also want to talk about the butter that Maddie and I bought. Oh, here we are. Margarine butter. Let's talk about the butter that that maddie and i bought oh here we are margarine butter

let's talk about some of these prices so lactancia is 8.49 basic down there or those ones are in sticks we paid 8.49 for just a regular size pack of butter and and that seemed like a lot to me is did i did I yeah spend too much money on that yes yeah yeah like when we did the comparison we like we could we could have bought butter this week for $3.99 at Sobeys but yeah lately the price of butter has kind of skyrocketed too so it's even more expensive than it normally would be um and $3.99 is actually not the best price that we used to be able to get, but nowadays $3.99 is a good price for butter. Yes. And so you mentioned that the price of butter has skyrocketed.

So, Philomena, can I ask you, is that something that you've noticed has gotten more expensive over the last few months or the last year? Yes. I'm still not used to these new prices. I refuse to accept them. Well, it sounds like you're not accepting them, though. You're finding ways to actually get better deals than most of us here.

So I have to ask a little bit about the strategy. Is this like shopping around to different stores, or how does this work? Well, for me, I go to either one or two stores. If I can't find everything at one, I'll go to a second store, but I try to price match everything at one store. And when you say price match, what exactly does that mean? So you take the ad from the flyer and you just show it at the store. So like, let's say the butter that was on sale at Sobeys, I would have taken that ad and shown it at Real Canadian Superstore and they would have given me the butter for that price. Oh, I see. And do all stores do that?

Not all of them. No. It'd be like Freshco, No Frills, Superstore. I think Giant Tiger still does. And Giant Tiger. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So you've got to really know which store you're hitting and what their policy is on that then too, that you can actually price match within a certain store. Okay, so now let's talk about this toilet paper for a minute.

What are our options? Charmin Ultra Soft. Eight triple rolls. I don't know if that counts. It's $14.99. What? $14.99? It seems kind of steep.

I didn't realize I'm just buying cheap toilet paper, apparently. Everything's a triple roll. Yeah, I know. They said single or double. These are all doubles here. Eight triple rolls. Can you even buy single roll toilet paper? I don't know.

What about at the end? We spent $10.99 on eight double rolls of toilet paper. Was that a good deal? Not at all. Phil and I actually, we both said, oh my goodness, who pays $11 for toilet paper? Okay, how much would you pay for toilet paper? We could have gone to Giant Tiger and gotten the same package. It's actually the identical package of toilet paper. It was on sale for $3.47. And we actually have $1 coupon. So we could have gotten it for $2.47. Wow. Okay. So the way that this works is you find the lowest price, and then you can apply, you find the coupons to apply against that lowest price. Yeah,

that's kind of the strategy is to when it goes on sale is when you kind of attack and you use your coupons and you hit the sale price at the same time to get the lowest price. So how do you know when toilet paper is overpriced? Yeah, well, we only do what we call toilet paper math. It's not an exact science, but we normally go to compare packages because obviously manufacturers try and make it a little bit harder for you to kind of compare because they make double rolls and triple rolls and all different sizes. Some have eight, some have 12, some have all different sizes. So what we use to compare them is one regular roll. You know, even if it's eight double rolls, it's still equivalent to

16 regular rolls. So we'll take the full price that you paid. So say you paid $11 and you divide it by the total number of regular rolls, and then you'll get the price per regular roll. So for $11, I think it came to like 68 cents a roll, which to someone like Phil and I is really expensive for toilet paper. We can a lot of time get it for like 10 cents or less a roll. This is an interesting calculation you're doing here. So one of our other producers, Cheryl, she has something she calls her cherry index. And actually, we have a clip, we can just let her explain what this is. I realized when I would walk around different markets in Toronto, you'd see the price be drastically different compared to like different

stores that you go to early on in the season, they come out and it's like, oh, it's 1099 back, not time to buy cherries. And as the price slowly goes down, I can tell that it's, you know, about $4.99, pretty good. $3.99, an excellent deal. $1.99, then the cherries are probably disgusting. We'll be right back. Okay, so if we had applied all of the coupons that you both had found related to these items on our grocery list, how much would that bill have actually been? Philomena, can I ask you that? I think it was like $30-something. Yeah, I think it came to just about $35 what we would have paid.

$35. We paid $89. Yeah, so it's like 60% savings, I think we've calculated 60%. So you two have been using cost saving techniques for years now. Lisa, can I just kind of get you to outline what are the key techniques that you use to save on your shopping bills? Well, Phil and I both like we are members of Canadian Savings Group on Facebook, and we're administrators there. So the key things that we've learned about our price matching, like we mentioned earlier, coupons, obviously we learned to collect coupons, what stores to get the coupons at and always be on the lookout for them. And obviously searching

for sales, like, you know, everybody hopefully knows that you, you know, check the flyers for the best sales. And so you use the sale prices, the price matching and the coupons, along with things like cashback apps as well. And I think of things like loyalty points, is that kind of rolled into any of those? Yes, yes, yes, yes. Okay. This seems like a lot of effort, I think, to a lot of us who don't know about this world. I would imagine it takes a lot of prep time I think, to a lot of us who don't know about this world. I would imagine it takes a lot of prep time before you can actually hit the grocery store. So how much time would you say you invest every week getting ready for a shop in order to make sure that you're saving the most money that you can? If you're going to do like a big shop, like you're going to do your big weekly

shop, it probably takes a good hour and a half or so. You make your grocery list, you find the best deal for those items that you need, if it's available, you gather your coupons and get them all organized. So you're not like shuffling through the store trying to find your coupons and all that kind of stuff. You try and organize yourself before you head to the store and have all your price match screenshots already on your phone for when you're going to go. You can save a lot of money, but it's not going to come without the effort. Have you refined that process? Like, did it take you longer at first to do that? Yeah, for sure. Yeah. It's a learning curve.

When I first started, I had one lady standing behind me who said to me, oh, why are you doing this? Just to save like a dollar or two. And being you at it, I was so nervous, but the cashier actually spoke up and she was like, but a dollar here, a dollar there, it adds up and it does add up. Just lastly here, I think hearing about how you two do this, I think it might inspire some people to try to save some money themselves. So what would be your kind of top one or two tips for how someone else can get started here? Join the Facebook group, Canadian Savings Group. You'll learn everything in there.

Make sure you shop the sales. Like, don't blindly walk into the grocery store and just buy everything that you need. Like, if you really want to try and save money, just take a few minutes, use the flip app and check out where the best prices are. Find out what stores near you that actually do price match and try and shop at those stores and get those best prices without having to go to multiple stores. And when you're walking around the store, make sure you look out for coupons because a lot of people say, oh, well, I never see coupons in my grocery store, but they're there. You just have to really be actively looking for them. So grab a couple of coupons, use one today and then keep a couple for when the item goes on

sale next and you buy a few when it's on sale and you'll be saving quite a bit of money that way. Lisa, Philomena, thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me today. This was really fun. Thank you. It was great. Thank you for having us. That's it for today. I'm Mainika Raman-Wilms. Our producers are Madeline White, Cheryl Sutherland, and Rachel Levy-McLaughlin. David Crosby edits the show. Kasia Mihailovic is our senior producer, and Angela Pichenza is our executive editor. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you tomorrow.