My Supermaket fetures

Frugal in Essex is always recommending using this on her blog so I have made an effort to re enter the site and have another go at playing with its features.

Firstly, I made a list of all my regular buys. I shop on line and its delivered once a fortnight for £1. I put in items on the last 3 receipts.
For the regular 70 or so items  S**insbury's was cheaper for the things I buy by £2 or £3.
I extended the list into things brought less regularly.
I could save £5 or so by splitting the order between two supermarkets (S's and T*sco) - but then would have two delivery costs and two minimum orders to cope with.
I carried on the list and put in rare treats and stuff I might buy for visitors and then probably only get if on offer and stuff I buy once every 6 months. Now it got interesting.  Apparently with that kind of shopping in the mix it was now cheaper to go to A*da by more than £3. Other supermarkets seemed a lot more expensive for the kind of shopping I like to do - which is very little processed foods and very few luxury buys so I am probably not in their target market!

Regular readers may remember that I am trying to reduce my salt intake and my trans fats to tackle high blood pressure and cholesterol. So the extra panel that counts your fat/sugar/   was interesting. Our diet is apparently pretty low and it had one or two suggestions. I am going to try the rapeseed oil frying spray instead of dollops of veg or olive oil.  However, when I went back in to this site a few days later the Change4Life panel had disappeared. I can't find it anywhere, what a shame as it could have been an interesting tool to monitor shopping with.

I was not so impressed with the "swap" feature.  Most of the suggestions were pointing to inferior standard products (in my opinion) which does not always save money in the long run - the basic kitchen towels for example just lately have been pretty useless. The next level up are proving better and I use half the amount so i am unlikely to follow that kind of swap suggestion.   I was amused by the suggestions on  rice products. I use risotto or paella rice for those dishes but the site suggested using basmati instead of these products. I have used basmati and cheaper rice but you don't get such good results. More amusing macaroni alternative was penne pasta!  Not sure my milky macaroni puddings will be the same with penne; though for macaroni cheese type dishes it probably would not matter.

I can also see on another comparison button is that I would get twice as many Sainsbury/Nectar points as I would get Tesco points on my total shopping list. One of the reasons I was looking at Tesco was because they owe me 3500 points anyway. My husband had three years worth of energy supplier bonus points to collect and he put in to have these back as Tesco club card points. That was 5 weeks ago and Tesco are still processing the request!

Ah well, that willed away another foggy afternoon!  I could have finished my Michael Connelly (Bosch) novel instead but husband has refused to light the fire till the sun goes down (if we could actually see any sun today).