Why shifting from impulsive buying habits?
Shopping is in our DNA. Regular visits to local grocery stores are an inevitable must have parts of our life, and household essentials are playing a key role in planning the monthly budget. Whether our favorite supermarket is Whole Foods Market, Target or Walmart — it is important to plan our shopping ahead and try to grab the best deals — shopping what we need in advance when it has a better price.
But why it’s important to plan ahead?
Planning our grocery visit to the local supermarkets can be useful for several reasons. First of all, when we enter into a supermarket — our navigation, path we follow and how we browse the shelfs is well planned ahead carefully by marketing experts of supermarket chains. Not a single shelf or ad placed in front of us is accidental or random. Everything is placed in a way to convince the subconscious part of our minds to spend $ and time there.
Super sales promotions, sales ads in the stores are teasing our mind that if something on sale — that must be a good deal and we must buy it immediately — similar how candies and small products are placed around cashiers and exists.
This can result in spending significant amount on products we don’t need — or on product’s we could buy elsewhere on way better price. And this comes in bundle. If we find for e.g. a well-priced exotic food — probably we will purchase all other ingredients we need to turn this food into a delicious meal, and we will end up buying even more items — probably overpriced.
When we plan our shopping ahead using a shopping list — we can make sure we buy only those products what we really need.
What if a shopping list could be smart?
The app called Grate Grocery Price Comparison allows us not only to create a regular shopping list — but it also has equipped with price comparison tailored to grocery products. With Grate — we can plan our shopping in advance and for e.g. take stopes at multiple groceries — to buy the same product we used to buy, but for a better price. With Grate we can achieve on average $40 — $50//mo. savings by purchasing the very same products we used to — but at those supermarkets which offer better price.
Let’s take for e.g. Oley’s Eyes Deep Hydrating Eye Gel. We can purchase this at $19 from Walmart, but if we would be walking inside Walgreens and we would just grab it from the shelf from for $30.99 — we would had no idea that we could save nearly $11 if we would wait with this decision till we are around a Walmart. Same product — but $11 cheaper.
If we move forward this example towards CVS — it would draw a slightly different picture: sometimes we can buy it for $24.99 and sometimes they sell it for $34.99 — at even higher prices than Walgreens.
On the fly comparison?
But what if we don’t have a shopping list and we are already in the store? To avoid spending more money on something that worth less — we can use Grate to scan the barcode of the product to get immediate prices which could help deciding whether it is a good idea buying now — or waiting till our next visit to a store which offers a better deal.
Where it works?
Currently Grate works in the U.S. and supports mayor supermarket chains like Target, Walmart, Whole Foods Market, Amazon Fresh, CVS, Walgreens, Home Depot, BevMo!, Total Wine, Macy’s and some smaller stores.
And comes with handy features like collecting reviews from multiple sources. Trusting in products we never trialed before can be very hard. By using Grate, we can get reviews about the products we are planning to pilot and learn from other’s mistakes. It collects reviews from multiple sources to ensure the negative or positive reviews are actually related to the product rather than tied to a supermarket brand or shipping courier.
Grate also provides insights on the potential health impact of products by highlighting potentially dangerous ingredients of the products. Some of us might have sensitive skin and some of the skin care products might be labeled “sensitive”. Grate can accurately verify statements of manufacturers and labels matching with the actual impacts of the ingredients they use and can help better understanding what we put on our skin, hair, etc.
