Grocery stores are masterfully engineered to separate you from your money. While most shoppers focus on sales flyers or loyalty points, the real drain on your wallet comes from what industry insiders call the “laziness tax.”
It’s the premium you pay for convenience. In some cases, you are paying a markup of 300% or more for labor that would take you less than 60 seconds to do yourself.
By simply looking past the convenience packaging and doing a tiny bit of prep work, you can keep a significant amount of cash in your pocket.
(For more on avoiding bad buys, check out things you should never buy at the grocery store.)
Here are items you should put back on the shelf immediately.
1. Pre-cut fruits and vegetables
There is perhaps no greater markup in the produce section than on pre-cut items. Whether it’s cubed cantaloupe, sliced pineapple or diced onions, you’re paying an astronomical premium for someone else to wield a knife.
Beyond the price per pound — which is often triple that of the whole produce — you’re paying for an inferior product. For example, once fruit is cut, oxidation begins immediately. The surface area is exposed to air, drying it out and depleting nutrients much faster than when it’s whole.
Buy the whole melon or the bag of onions. It takes minutes to chop them, and the product will taste fresher and last longer in your fridge.
2. Pre-shredded cheese
That bag of shredded cheddar or mozzarella is a staple in millions of American fridges, but it’s a bad deal for two reasons: economics and chemistry.
First, check the unit price. A block of cheese almost always costs less per ounce than its shredded counterpart.
Second, look at the ingredients list on the bag. You’ll likely see cellulose, potato starch or other additives. Manufacturers coat shredded cheese in anti-caking agents to keep the strands from clumping together in the bag. But these additives prevent the cheese from melting smoothly, leading to gritty queso and rubbery pizza toppings.
Buy a block and grate it yourself. The texture is better, it melts perfectly and you aren’t paying for wood pulp.
3. Single-use spice packets
The taco seasoning packet is one of the most brilliant marketing tricks in the grocery industry.
If you turn that packet over, you’ll usually find the primary ingredients are salt, cumin, chili powder and cornstarch. When you calculate the price per ounce, that single-use packet is exorbitantly expensive compared to buying jars of the individual spices.
Keep a stocked spice rack. You can mix your own seasoning blends in seconds, control the sodium levels and avoid the preservatives often found in the packets.
4. Individual bottled water
Unless you live in an area with unsafe drinking water, bottled water is the ultimate markup. You are often paying thousands of times more for bottled water than you would for the same volume from your tap.
Marketing campaigns have convinced many that bottled water is safer or cleaner, but it’s frequently just filtered municipal tap water — the same stuff coming out of your kitchen sink but wrapped in plastic.
Invest in a high-quality pitcher filter or an under-sink filtration system. It pays for itself in a matter of months and saves you from lugging heavy cases of water home every week.
5. Service counter deli meat
There’s a psychological trick at play at the deli counter. We assume that because we’re waiting in line for service, we’re getting a premium product. However, you can often find the exact same brand of meat — pre-sliced and packaged — in the grab-and-go deli cooler nearby for a lower price per pound.
Supermarkets charge a premium for the service of slicing it to order. Before you take a number, walk over to the pre-packaged deli section and compare the unit price on the same brand of turkey or ham. If the expiration date is good, grab the package and skip the line.
The math of convenience
It might feel like you’re only saving pennies by ignoring these convenience traps, but the math tells a different story.
If swapping these items for their whole or bulk counterparts saves the average shopper $40 per trip, and you shop once a week, that’s more than $2,000 a year staying in your bank account. (See more simple ways to save money on groceries.)
That isn’t just loose change. That is a vacation, a significant contribution to an emergency fund or a major appliance upgrade. The “laziness tax” is optional. Stop paying it.
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