I have a problem spending too much money on groceries. At least, I think I spend too much on groceries. So far I haven’t been able to figure out how much is reasonable to spend each week for food but I always feel like I should spend less. According to the USDA’s Cost of Food at Home for a “Family of 2” aged 20-50 we’re slightly over the “Low-Cost Plan”. However, I have no idea how useful this data is. For instance, it doesn’t seem to have any way to adjust based on what area of the country you live in. Also, this is compiled based on a normal American diet, not a vegetarian diet. I don’t know whether I should adjust the amount up or down for being a vegetarian. Up until a couple of weeks ago, I always assumed it was cheaper to be vegetarian. However, at my last conference a girl sitting next to me told someone else “I’d like to be a total vegetarian but I just can’t afford it.” This conversation left me wondering why she thought a vegetarian diet would be more expensive. Maybe because those inclined to be vegetarian also might be inclined to buy more gourmet type items found in health food stores or might be more likely to buy organic products?

Today while I was looking for more information on what the average person spends per week on food I ran across this blog. It asked the question: “What is the weekly average cost per person for food in your household, including groceries, snacks, and dining out?” The responses were fascinating.

A couple months back I subscribed to About’s Frugal Living column. Most of the advice in this column is way beyond what I’d feel comfortable doing. For instance, the writer suggested asking permission of farmers to “glean” their already harvested fields (here). I know that some of you would be comfortable with that but I’m way too shy to consider it. Plus, as much as I hate this argument when Jaeger throws it at me, I’m really not convinced I’d get enough useful food to make it worth my time. I assume that each field would only have one crop and there are only so many carrots one can eat each week (though I suppose if I canned it might make it more money efficient). Anyway, one of the writer’s tips that I did like involved knowing when a sale is good enough to be worth buying more of the product than you originally intended (here). Her rule of thumb is if the item is 25% off buy twice as much, if it’s 50% off buy 10 X as much, if it’s more than 50% off buy as much as you can reasonably use (with just the 2 of us I suspect that 10 X as much is still more than Jaeger and I can use but you get the concept).

Another thing the Frugal writer suggested was to create a Price Book where you jot down in a notebook how much you bought each item on what day and at which store. While I thought the idea was sound it seemed like keeping track of prices in a notebook would be a bit confusing. Either you’d have to scan row after row of food items looking for when you bought the item for the lowest price or your notepad would get messy with you continually crossing out prices in order to put the cheapest price in. So, obviously the answer is to enter the information on the computer instead of in a notebook.

I looked around for some software that would work similar to how she described the Price Book. However, I wanted software that could work on both Linux and Windows and also needed to be fairly portable so I could access it from multiple computers. Nothing I found seemed to completely meet my requirements (though let me know if you find something). If I had been truly ambitious I might have written a fairly simple web interface with a database that would probably meet my needs. However, I’m lazy and didn’t want to spend too much time on the project. After a bit of consideration it seemed like a spreadsheet would meet all my needs and would be fairly easy to set up.

I set up the spreadsheet and entered as many previous grocery receipts as I could find without looking too hard. I included a vlookup on another sheet so I could enter in my shopping list and it would auto-magically fill various prices for each product (such as min, max, avg etc). I also entered a column that would calculate 30% above the normal price (I currently don’t buy organic products unless they are less than 30% more than the normal price). The main problem with my spreadsheet is I required the vlookup to find an exact match which means I have to remember exactly how I entered it previously (when I tried the fuzzy match it would sometimes come up with a bad price based off a completely wrong item). My spreadsheet seemed to be working relatively well but it was a bit of a pain to remember to transfer the most up-to-date file to whichever computer I was using (I suppose I could have put it on a web share of some sort but didn’t think about it at the time).

When Google merged Writely and spreadsheets into Google Docs and Spreadsheets I decided it was finally time to test out Google Spreadsheet. I was a little dubious because I love Excel (it’s one MS product that they got almost perfect). However, I decided that my grocery spreadsheet would make an excellent test. Somewhat to my surprise Google Spreadsheet managed to import the Excel doc almost perfectly (exporting with formulas doesn’t work as well). I’ve been having a bit of trouble figuring out how to do things with Google instead of Excel but over all most basic things seem to be functional. Also, Google spreadsheet allows me to add “collaborators” so Jaeger can easily add items to the shopping list that I routinely forget

Until another product comes along that works better I think I’ll keep my grocery list with Google Spreadsheet. If you have a Google account and are truly bored and/or curious you can take a look at my spreadsheet here (link updated 12/10/2006).