I spend a lot of time reading frugality blogs and Googling for money-saving hints, and I see a whole lot of rather crappy advice. It's thought to be cheaper to shop at dollar stores and Walmarts than other places. I can say, however, that I've tried doing this, and it's flat-out wrong. Now, I know dollar stores and Walmarts are just a fact of life in America, and although they're evil as hell, there are plenty of things you can do that are more immoral than shopping there when you're broke. You won't get any judgment from me, I promise. But it simply isn't cheaper.
I know this isn't the case in every town, but if you want to go to the Walmart in mine, you have to have a car, otherwise you wouldn't be able to get there. It's a way out of town in a non-residential area, and if you walked there from any residential area, it might take an hour. I suspect most of us don't have an hour. The public bus doesn't, as far as I know, run there, so it really isn't accessible for people on low incomes. Strike one. (The Dollar Tree in our town is in a residential area, so assuming you lived nearby, you could walk there.)
Next issue: their stuff really isn't cheaper. Yes, you could buy some cheap clothes at Walmart that may or may not fall apart very quickly, but assuming you're in my town and you have transport, there's a good Goodwill next door where you could buy much better clothes, albeit second-hand, for half the price of Walmart clothes. And don't even talk to me about the dollar store. I went in there a few weeks ago for party supplies (we had an afternoon tea party for Baby B's birthday) and it was awful. There were shelves and shelves of canned food for a dollar each, which seems like a bargain until you realize that products of an equivalent quality can be bought for 75% or 50% of that at the budget grocery chain I shop at. I looked around at other products, such as paper plates, napkins, and the like, and realized that they were actually more expensive than equivalent qualities and quantities from other stores.
Now, I realize that no one has the time to go shopping in five different places in search of bargains, so I'm not going to recommend that. But I do think you can almost always do better than getting your groceries at Walmart. Even in the enormous megastores, they have less variety and lesser quality of goods than just about anywhere else, and it simply isn't cheaper. It just isn't. I've never heard of a Walmart having a bulk section, either, which is really about the best thing you can have when you're trying to be frugal.
I do think a number of chain stores deserve praise, however. I don't do most of my shopping at Safeway, because it's generally very expensive, but they have store-brand baby supplies that are about half the price of anything anywhere else. When Baby B was born, we started using Pampers diapers because that was what they'd used at the hospital. (I briefly considered using cloth diapers, but a two-month bout of postpartum depression quickly nixed that plan.) And because my desperate attempts to breastfeed failed (and trust me, I spent eight weeks of misery trying everything in the world to breastfeed that baby), we had to use formula, and because at that time she was lactose intolerant (though she isn't any more), we had to get the soy kind, which costs far more. It was seriously expensive until we discovered that Safeway's store-brand diapers cost half what Pampers and Huggies do, and that they--may the angels in heaven smile upon them--do a store-brand soy formula that costs less than half of what Enfamil does. I share this information with all my friends who have babies, because it really does save you money. At one point, we were spending $90 a week on Enfamil soy formula for our hungry little bug. Safeway saved us from total penury, I can tell you.
No comments:
Post a Comment