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If you are just starting out with couponing the biggest frustration can be trying to figure out what a good sale price really is. You have to learn the prices and really can’t trust sale tags or weekly ads to help you figure out the real deals. As you get started using a buy price list is the most helpful.
This is a list of the main things we purchase and the price to look for after coupons. I’ve had one for years, but now thanks to a new way that I prepare all the lists on Southern Savers I can now make one based off actual historical prices rather than my memory.
Using all the data from ads on Southern Savers for the past quarter, I made a new version of the Buy Price List.
The prices are after coupons and sales, and are for my area. You may find that milk is much cheaper in your city or other items are more expensive. You will also find that sometimes a deal comes and makes these prices seem like retail prices. While free deals are great, you should not plan your price list off the occasional incredible deal or else you won’t buy anything for long periods of time, waiting for only the crazy deals…
Specific Items & Historical Prices
If you are looking for a brand specific buy price, or for a random product, you can use the item search feature on Southern Savers and put in a date in the past. It will then pull all the sales for that product over that period of time. I would recommend not going farther back than maybe 3 months the data will be to large for you to sort through.
A tip: check the “Show store name” box to make the results easier to sort through too for a long list.
I also use this to quickly see when something will come on sale again. Since we know most items follow a six week sale cycle, I can search back for the last 2 months and see when Pop Tarts were on sale in my area to know when to expect the next sale!
