pricebooks

03/04/2002 -- one of the books about frugality that i've been reading is the excellent the complete tightwad gazette. the most famous idea from the book is probably the use of a pricebook. it works this way:

1. you take a small notebook with loose sheets of paper in a ringed binder.
2. on each page, you write down an item that you regularly buy.
3. you go to all the stores in your area and write down their price for that item, along with notes about the quantity, brand name, etc.
4. you take out the sheets and rearrange them alphabetically so you can quickly find what you want.
5. instead of shopping at one store, you go to all the stores and only buy whatever is cheapest at each one.

you might raise a few objections to this.

isn't that an awful lot of work?

it takes some initial elbow grease, but it only has to be done once, and it's well worth it for the insights it can bring.

who wants to shop at four or five stores? it's much more convenient to go to the closest one.

i used to live in the "inner city", and watched people pay over $3.00 for a two liter bottle of coke at the liquor store on the corner instead of walking down to safeway, where it was $0.89. where i live now, i was paying $4.39 for a box of fabric softener sheets at safeway without realizing that the same box is $2.00 at the dollar general store a half mile away. convenience is costly, as any trip to a "convenience store" will show.

i'm already at safeway getting lettuce, so i may as well get dental floss while i'm here; it's not worth my time to bother with a trip somewhere else.

you can anticipate your needs. don't wait until you're down to your last sheet of toilet paper and have to rush to whichever store is open latest. as soon as you're getting low on something, put it on your shopping list. when enough items are needed from a particular store, buy them there, in bulk. if you do this, you won't need anything but what you came into safeway to get.

it would waste so much time, gas, and wear-and-tear on my car to go to all these stores.

there are a number of ways your could approach shopping. instead of shopping several times a week, cut back to once a week or even once a month. on that one trip, hit all the stores. you'll get in and out of each store very quickly, since you're only buying a few items and can probably breeze through the express lane (and your arms will thank you for making them carry so little weight). or you could pick a different store each week and just go to it, so that you hit all the stores in the course of a month. or you could just hit particular stores when another errand takes you in that direction. if you're keeping a good shopping list, you'll know what you need from that particular store when you get there. also, if your location is good, you may not need to drive at all. i can walk to safeway, metro, and dollar general in 15 minutes. i can either take the car and get everything from them all at once or walk to them and get everything from my list bit by bit over the course of several days.

in the end, the savings will be the answer to all objections. the variance in price on identical items is amazing, the store that you might think would be the cheapest isn't always cheapest, and no one store is the cheapest on everything. saving 80 cents here, a dollar there, and five dollars there will quickly outweigh any amount of time and inconvenience.

and if you haven't done your research, how will you know a bargain when you see one? a price may look good to you, but if you can pull out your pricebook and compare it to what you already know, you can tell whether it's really a good deal or if you could already buy it cheaper somewhere else.

my pricebook setup

i started with a small notebook, which i planned to keep in the car. as i was sticking it into one of the pockets on the driver's side door, i stopped to think about what would happen if i opened the door sometime and it fell out. i'd have to start from scratch, and do all that work again. and what if i was somewhere and didn't have my car? how could i check the price on something if i didn't have access to my pricebook?

well, there's one thing i always keep with me, whether on foot, car, plane, or train -- my visor. i looked around for a palmos solution to the problem.

some searching brought me to... pricebook.prc! someone had written a little app just for this purpose. it was quite nice. not only did it let me set up stores and relate them to items, it would compute per-unit prices, so i wouldn't have to puzzle over how $7.49 for 21 pounds of cat litter compared to $9.99 for 28 pounds. unfortunately, it had too many disadvantages. it was shareware, and the (buggy) source was unavailable. the author had disappeared, and a couple of different version were scattered around the web. most importantly, there was no way to get data out of the app, and i have a deep-seated dread of data lock-in.

a little more searching brought me to just what i wanted -- "list". list is a small database app which comes with a utility that can convert its database files to and from comma separated values (csv) files. this means that i can write a file like this:

pricebook,item,bestdeal,Unfiled
Unfiled,apple juice,dg,sw 2.59/64oz,g 2.19/64oz,dg 1.00/64oz,m 1.39/64oz
Unfiled,apples,m,sw 1.19/lbs,g 1.49/lbs,m 0.98/lbs

and convert it to a palm database that list can use. on the palm, i get a list of items and their best buy locations. when i click on a particular item, i get the details of what it costs at all the stores. now i have a pricebook that is always with me and doesn't require carrying anything extra. even if i lose my visor, i have the data backed up here, in a plain text file. i can also manipulate that file and create an html version with a table, as i've done here. (you can see what i'm doing in the makefile.)

so now i have my pricebook, and there's just one more step -- the shopping list. for this, i use the amazingly rocking "handyshop". handyshop lets me set a number of parameters for each item on my shopping list. i associate each with the store or stores at which it's the cheapest. if i have a coupon for it, i mark that to remind me. i could set prices and quantities and have it calculate how much i'll be spending, though i haven't bothered with that yet. i can even record the number of the aisle the item is in. you'd be amazed at how quickly you can get in and out of a store if you know exactly what you want and exactly where it is.

after that initial set up, all i have to do is click the checkboxes next to items that i need. then i change from the complete list of items to the list of just those i need, then i limit the view to the list of those items associated with a particular store, and i have my list of just what to buy there. as i pick up each item, i click the checkbox next to it, and it disappears from the "needed" list.

conclusions

there's a bit of grunt work involved in setting up the system, but it will pay a thousandfold in the end. if you really love your hours spent in grocery stores, this may not be for you, but if you have other things you'd rather be doing, imagine what it would be like to pay as little as possible in the least amount of time you can instead of wandering up and down the aisles thinking "what do i need?", "where is it?", and, most importantly, "i wonder if i'm paying too much for it?".

and you don't have to limit this to grocery shopping. i'm thinking about setting up a wireless network. i'm not in any rush, and whenever my travels take me past staples, best buy, compusa, circuit city, etc., i stop and jot down prices, makes, and model numbers. i'm already seeing that a wireless pci card is $100 at best buy and $50 at circuit city, while a pcmcia card is $70 at best buy and $100 at circuit city. i could use two stores to get $70 + $50 = $120. if i'd just walked into best buy and picked up whatever was there, i would have paid $50 more. by checking a few more stores and the web, i may bring the price down more and more.

i've put the csv, html, and pdb (palm database) versions of my pricebook in this directory so you can see what it's all about. if you happen to live near route 40 in catonsville, maryland, usa, you can use it right away. :) no matter where you are, you can use the files here as the basis of your own research. you can find the visor/palm applications i use in my palmos section.

happy shopping!

documents in this directory

• pricebook table