Mike Portal uses a fee-free credit card that gives him 6% back on grocery purchases. He pays it every month.
The chicken thighs in Chris Lovelace’s freezer are 99 cents a pound, much cheaper than the red meat he used to buy.
Night owl Margi Thornburgh checks ads and clips coupons every Wednesday at midnight and searches store shelves for more discounts.
“I love finding a bargain,” she said after seeing $1.99 smoothies at Vons recently, marked down from $3.99. Since they were half price, he bought 12 instead of six. “I came bouncing out of the store with a big smile.”
These are some of San Diego’s most astute shoppers, who have been preparing for decades for this time of rapidly rising food prices.
Some have the resources to turn frugal shopping into a kind of sport: a car that allows them to buy in bulk, time to look for deals, storage space and several supermarkets close to home. For others, with little space or time, eating adequately without spending more is more difficult.
Food prices have risen for a variety of reasons, including supply chain blockages during the pandemic and tariffs on imports that are passed on to consumers.
In San Diego County, food consumed outside of restaurants cost 4.4% more this July than a year ago. This is the most recent figure from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, whose releases were halted due to the federal government shutdown.
More recent data — the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis’ national FRED numbers for September — show milk prices are up 10 cents per gallon from last year and 68 cents from five years ago, an increase of nearly 20%. White bread was down 11 cents from last year, but up 38 cents compared to five years ago, representing an increase of about 25%. Ground beef was $6.32 a pound, compared to $5.67 a year ago and $4.08 in 2020.
In the San Diego metropolitan area, meat was up 41% last month compared to October 2019, dairy was up 27% and fruits and vegetables were up 18%, according to a grocery price index from Datasembly, a market analysis company that monitors the prices of 1,000 products weekly in the United States. Local prices for meat and non-alcoholic beverages continued to rise over the past six months, those for fruits and vegetables remained broadly stable, and those for dairy and bakery products fell slightly, according to Datasembly.
Faced with these higher prices, San Diego residents have changed their eating and shopping planning habits.
They are stopping buying certain foods and replacing the stores where they have shopped for decades with others that offer deals and coupons. They stick with some of their favorite products: Diet Coke, Snapple Light, eggs and bourbon were mentioned. But they are giving up some control, choosing to eat what’s on sale and not what they crave.
They do the math: if I spend so much on gas to get around or buy a freezer, but save so much on food, is it worth it?
Exchange time for money
As a teenager, Thornburgh learned to make shopping lists and take advantage of weekly sales. Some 50 years later, he is still using those methods. But as local food prices have risen, outpacing national inflation, Thornburgh has gone further, combining every possible strategy to avoid spending more than necessary.
“I review all the ads, either in the emails I receive or directly in the apps. I make a list by store of the items I want to buy… I can shop at several stores in one trip. I always carry a cooler to store cold and frozen products,” he explained in an email to the San Diego Union-Tribune.
As you browse the aisles, you’re constantly looking for deals.
“I can be in a store, see an item on the shelf, and I open the Target app, the Walmart app, the Food 4 Less app,” he said. “Any store app I’m not in. I look up the price… and I’m like, ‘Do I buy this here or go to another store?’”
Her weekly shopping trip is time-consuming: anywhere from 90 minutes to two hours, and covers up to seven miles. Their stops include Walmart, Food 4 Less, Trader Joe’s and Vons. Recently, she started shopping at Aldi, drawn by an ad for 55 cent avocados. She bought avocados, raspberries and asparagus, all on sale.
Thornburgh, 70, receives income from contract sewing work and Social Security. He is not among the 53% of adults who, according to an AP-NORC Public Affairs Research Center survey, consider grocery expenses a “major source of stress.” (Grocery expenses trump housing, healthcare, and lack of savings or sufficient income as the top financial concern.)
“I feel like I have enough skills and I take advantage of all the tools available,” he said. “I don’t feel stressed. But I’m very responsible.” She reminds her husband, “If it’s not on sale, I don’t buy it. So he was very happy this week when he saw that Ding Dongs were on sale.”
Thanks to these efforts, she spends about $100 a week, compared to the $60 she spent before the pandemic, and saves an average of 50% at Vons and 40% at Food 4 Less.
“With the money I save, it is worth the time invested,” he said.
Thornburgh offered one more piece of advice: Don’t just shop online. Go to physical stores. He acknowledged that shopping online and picking up groceries is convenient for some people, including parents with young children, but “they will miss out on in-store deals, which are sometimes considerable.”
More salad, less red meat
Jeff Lonsdale, Ken Sobel and Chris Lovelace are reducing their red meat consumption.
“I don’t buy steaks anymore,” said Lonsdale, 68, who lives in a retirement community in Oceanside. He has a half-pack of Costco sirloin burgers in the freezer because he now has “better, cheaper options.”
He used to buy whatever he wanted, but as his income as a contract circuit designer dwindled and food prices hit all-time highs—especially for the hamburgers, steaks, and pork chops he once enjoyed—he changed his habits.
“Before I thought, ‘I want it, I’m going to buy it.’ Now I ask myself, ‘Do I need it? If so, maybe I’ll buy it,'” he said. “I don’t need donuts or cakes or desserts or anything like that, so I don’t even bother.”
Currently, he commented, “my income does not cover my monthly expenses. My savings keep me afloat.”
Worried about his cash flow, Lonsdale began recording all of his food spending this year, both in stores and on his occasional visits to Taco Bell. In total, his monthly spending on food is around $65 this year, he said.
A food rescue program he visits three times a week helps him control expenses by bringing surplus from local supermarkets to his community. He estimated that about 40 people visit him each time.
On a recent morning, she bought seafood salad with crackers, a 12-ounce serving of watermelon, two mesquite-seasoned pork chops weighing 12 ounces total, an Earthbound Farms branded vegetable tray with ranch dressing, baby carrots, broccoli and celery, a Nathan’s hot dog, and a 6-ounce Caesar salad. Based on the prices he saw, he estimated the total would be around $20.
“I mean, would you pay $3.99 for a small tray of cut watermelon?” he said. “They give it to me for free and I love it. And it’s not just the quantity. It’s the variety. Things that I never thought of trying, that I didn’t even know existed, that I wouldn’t have looked for.”
Another pleasant surprise: goat cheese with herbs. “Wow, I’ll try it! It’s free. It was good.”
Sobel, 71, who lives in La Jolla, sharply reduced his consumption of meat and other expensive supermarket products.
“The impact of prices was enormous: they rose constantly and the quality fell almost proportionally,” he said. “That made me focus on buying only healthy foods, only what I’m going to eat, and being careful with our choices.”
After a hospitalization, Sobel decided to lose weight. He changed his diet in June and stopped buying “a lot of those expensive, mass-produced snacks… whose prices have skyrocketed.”
Another change: “I no longer throw food away.” Prepare a salad with sliced turkey breast or ham and eat it for several days in a row, “until it runs out.”
“I’m lucky to be able to reduce my food budget by 40% and be able to eat well,” added Sobel, who reduced her average monthly household grocery spending from about $550 (not counting occasional delivery orders) before June to about $400 now. But what about the children, seniors and low-income families who are losing their SNAP benefits?
Nearly 400,000 San Diego County residents saw their CalFresh benefits — the state’s version of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) — cut off on Nov. 1, amid the six-week federal government shutdown. Federal judges later ordered the resumption of the funds.
Between workers whose wages were frozen by the federal shutdown and people whose food benefits were postponed or reduced, demand has skyrocketed at food banks and food rescue nonprofits, both in small communities like Lonsdale and at large distribution centers.
Trading space for savings
In Encinitas, Lovelace rarely buys red meat at the grocery store anymore. Instead, he prefers to go out to eat quality burgers. “It has great meat,” he said of Versailles Cafe’s $18 cheeseburger and fries. “It’s a real half-pound, not seven ounces.”
The solar system on the roof of the house he and his wife, Dana, bought nearly 50 years ago powers the two chest freezers he keeps in his garage.
“I still don’t have any chicken breasts in my freezer that I paid more than $2 a pound for,” he said. He bought the bacon for $4 a pound, about half of what it costs now at full price. He’s still finishing the dozen packs of breakfast sausage he bought at 50% off a while ago.
When you go shopping, you buy enough meat to last you until the next big sale.
Lovelace, who is 75 and retired, stopped shopping at stores that don’t send weekly ads. Like Thornburgh, it lives in a neighborhood with a lot of supermarkets, with all the big chains, so it’s very easy to go anywhere.
It focuses on private labels rather than more expensive brands. Seasonal foods are also cheaper, he added. And he knows the market well.
«You have to know where the prices are. “Sometimes what seems like a good deal isn’t,” he said.
Thanks to these efforts, the couple’s food spending remains practically the same as last year: $560 per month in 2023 and 2024, and $577 this year, on average.
“Expenses will no doubt start to rise this holiday season as we clear out our older stock, but we’ll still spend a lot less on food than any of my friends or neighbors when we compare prices,” Lovelace wrote in an email. He also credited his wife, who shares his savings philosophy.
At Mt. Helix, Portal is back to shopping like he did when he was a newlywed in the early ’90s; only now you have a cash back credit card.
“I was at the beginning of my career,” he said of his frugal youth. “We decided to have my wife stay at home taking care of the kids. So, yes, we saved every penny and did the minimum to save money.”
Now his children have children and Portal, 65, has a home in Mt. Helix and a mortgage consulting business. But with the “tremendous increase in food prices” she has seen this year, she buys food on sale and stopped shopping at Whole Foods. “It’s too expensive.”
Her small freezer stores berries bought on sale, which her young grandchildren devour. He also buys discount meat and uses a vacuum sealer to prevent freezer burn. The ribeye on sale went from $6 a pound to $9 or more, but even that’s a bargain compared to the regular price, he said.
The average price for raw beef steaks was $10.88 a pound last September and $12.26 this September, up from $8.13 five years ago, according to FRED data from the St. Louis Federal Reserve.
To keep grocery expenses about the same as last year, including buying steaks (and the chicken he cooks for RiRi, his 13-year-old Labrador-pit bull mix), Portal and his wife stock up before major holidays, when the deals are the best.
He spoke enthusiastically about his credit card, an American Express Blue Cash Everyday Card. Never having an outstanding balance is essential, he stated.
Portal recommended those looking for a good deal to the GTM Discount General Store, a surplus seller that recently offered weekly discounts of 50% on Eddie Bauer sweatshirts, 40% on floodlight bulbs and 40% on spring wreaths. It has great deals on food, Portal added.
Lovelace said he is lucky to have two freezers and the shelves he built himself in the garage. “We have somewhere to store things, and others don’t. Many of our practices are not applicable to everyone equally.”
But his strategy of stocking up when prices drop has worked throughout his life.
“In any era, the same rule applies: Food prices have not dropped significantly during any real period of time so far in my life. Small drops and big increases,” he said.
Original Story
‘Do I need it?’ Groceries cost 20% to 40% more than before the pandemic. How San Diegans are making do
