Click your way to lower food bills

By Liz Pulliam Weston

You've read about the coupon queens: avid couponers who feed a family of teenage boys on something like $10 a week.

These folks are truly the black belts of couponing. They scrutinize the Sunday newspaper circulars and zip from store to store to leap on the best deals -- which they can identify because they maintain detailed "price books" tracking the historical sale prices of hundreds of items.

Their dedication clearly pays off. But what if you don't have hours to spend following their example?

Fortunately, the Web provides plenty of easy shortcuts to substantially cut your food bill. I rounded up some of the best ideas and tools from Web sites, bloggers and posters on the Your Money message board. Such as:

Stalk the sales . . . from your couch

You can always check the grocery store ads you can find in your local paper, typically on Wednesday or Sunday, or both. The best deals are usually -- although not always -- featured on the front page of the circular. Plan your weekly meals around those, and stock up on nonperishables and stuff for your freezer.

Or use the Penny Pincher Gazette to get an overview of all the advertised sales, as Your Money message board poster "gardeninggrandma" does.

"I can input my zipcode and it will bring up the sale flyers for the stores in my area," she wrote. "That tells me whether it's worth driving an extra 5 miles to the Albertsons."

The Penny Pincher Gazette organizes the sales by category: baby products, beer and wine, produce and so on. This makes it easy to see when a rival store offers a better deal.

But the site's most helpful feature is a rating system that allows users to point out the best deals. If a sale price rates just one or two stars, for example, the so-called sale might not be much of a discount. But if it rates five stars, it's time to run out and stock up.

This feature does for us grocery amateurs what price books do for the coupon pros by letting us know when a sale is really a sale.

Use the coupon sites, even if you don't coupon

The Web site The Coupon Mom, for example, tracks advertised and unadvertised sales at grocery stores, noting when there's a coupon that can help you get an even better deal.

You don't even have to clip in advance. If you get a Sunday paper, you can put aside the national ad circulars from Procter & Gamble, SmartSource and RedPlum, writing the date they came out on the front. The Coupon Mom will direct you to the relevant week's circular.

Of course, if you don't want to mess with coupons at all, you don't have to. You'll still be able to see when the stuff you buy regularly goes on sale, although distinguishing between so-so sales and great ones is a little tricky.

The Coupon Mom notes how big a discount you're getting (with a coupon, if one's available), but that doesn't necessarily tell you if that's a good deal or not. For example: Some products, such as soda, are regularly discounted 50% off or more, so a half-off sale might not be reason to stock up.

If you need a little more guidance, there are forum sites where users track the sales at their local stores and flag each other when deals pop up. Poster "montemonster" likes Hot Coupon World.

"You can go to the forum for your favorite store," montemonster wrote. "Read the posts on the great deals that others have found and repeat what they do."

The forum sites depend on volunteer participation, which can be uneven. One region's stores might have plenty of deal watchers ready to point out the great savings, while another's may have only occasional postings or none at all.

Buy a little help

If you want more help separating the good deals from the great ones, check out The Grocery Game. Unlike the other sites mentioned, this one charges a subscription fee. You get a four-week introductory trial period for free, and thereafter the cost depends on how many grocery stores you want to track. Tracking one store for eight weeks costs $10; two stores, $15; three stores, $20, etc.

Continued: Bargains

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