One roundup a week. Written on Sunday night, posted Monday.
08/24/2026 · Renata
Store brand, 28oz, whole peeled. My logged low for this item over three years is 74¢, and the ordinary shelf price this year has been $1.19. So this is close to the floor and worth stacking. I bought twelve, which is roughly what we get through between now and the new year.
One caution: the whole peeled and the diced were the same price, and the diced were firmer than I wanted for sauce. If you are buying for sauce, the whole ones break down better and you are not paying for the dicing.
I hold at $1.49 and buy hard under $1.40, so this cleared. The freezer maths that makes it worth the trouble: a family pack at $1.39 came to $11.12 for eight pounds, which is five dinners for us. Boneless at $3.99/lb would have been $18.20 for the same amount of meat off the bone, and I would have had no bones for stock.
Portion them the day you buy them. Every time I have put a family pack in the freezer whole, I have thawed the whole thing and cooked more than we needed, which quietly cancels the saving.
Lowest since March. Onions keep three months in a paper bag somewhere cool and dark, so this is one of the few produce buys I will stock up on. Not in a plastic bag and not next to potatoes.
The ten for ten. Pasta sauce, 24oz, at $1.00 in a ten-item promotion. It reads as a discount because of the format. Looking at my own log, the same jar sat at $1.00 as an ordinary shelf price in February and again in June. Paying the same money for a jar you were not going to buy is not saving anything, and the promotion did not require ten — a single jar rang up at a dollar.
I said the 3lb bag of apples was a better unit price than loose. It was not, once I weighed the bag: the bag was tagged at 3lb and the four I checked ran between 2.8 and 3.1. Loose was the safer buy and I have corrected the price book entry.
Renata. I shop for two adults and a teenager, mostly at one regional chain and a discount grocer four miles apart.
I have kept a price book since 2019. That is the only reason any of this is useful.
If I would not have bought it at full price within the month, a discount on it is not a saving. Most of what I skip each week fails that one test.