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Thursday, September 9, 2010

5 Tips for Shopping a Case lot Sale


Its Smith's Case Lot sale time. The case lot sale began Wednesday and is running through the next two sales weeks.  Here are some tips for shopping a case lot sale:

1) Don't forget to be PICKY ABOUT PRICE! Just because a product is part of a case lot sale does not mean its a great price. My price point for canned items such as vegetables, fruits, and beans is $.50 or less. Decide your price point and use the star ratings in Smith's list to help you decide which deals are worth it to you.

2) ONLY BUY WHAT YOU WILL USE! If you don't normally buy or eat canned kidney beans I don't care how cheap they are unless they are free, don't buy them!! Also there is not point in buying a 2 year supply of a product if its all going to expire in 4 months. Buy in quantities that you will USE BY THE EXPIRATION date printed on the can.

3) Contrary to some rumors, items are not, I repeat NOT, put in the case lot sale for the store to get rid of products that are about to expire. The case lot sale is not a clearance sale! (Trust me a clearance sale would have better prices!)

4) YOU DON'T HAVE TO BUY A WHOLE CASE! While it is called the case lot sale and whole cases are placed at the front of the store if you go back to where the items are normally shelved you can buy them in singles for the same price per item as the case. The benefit to buying in singles is that if you have coupons for the items you can use more of them. You can also better control your quantities.

5) DON'T FORGET YOUR MONTHLY BUDGET! Yes the case lot sale only comes around twice a year but that's still no excuse to completely forget your families budget.

2 comments:

Julie said...

I'm so glad I read this post the other day because I didn't know you could buy singles and I knew I couldn't use all that peanut butter that was in that case!

Sheri said...

Good points. I have to add though, when I went to Smith's on Wednesday and bought three of the peanut butters that were on the caselot sale (individually) they rang up for 3.18, not the case price. I didn't notice, but the cashier stopped me and said that for some reason the peanut butter couldn't be bought singly, it had to be bought by the case this time around. I know I could buy the same peanut butter singly at the last case lot sale, so it was pretty weird this time around that it wouldn't work.

Everything else that I bought singly rang up just fine.