I was talking to a friend recently about how hard it is to be sure that buying a giant thing of salsa at Costco is actually cheaper than buying a regular size thing of salsa at Safeway. Also: I’ll often see something on sale, and I’ll wonder, Is that really a good price? What do I usually pay for that? And most of the time I’m not sure, so I can’t really know if a sale price is a good deal or not.
What’s needed here is more precision, certainty that a given sale price or large container of something is actually a good value. Such precision would require not only the ability to use math to calculate and compare prices, but the kind of steel-trap memory that recalls how much a pound of mozzarella costs at Safeway, Trader Joe’s, Costco, and anywhere else one might shop.
These musings brought to mind The Price Book.
In the 1990s, a woman named Amy Dacyczyn (apparently pronounced “decision”) published a newsletter called The Tightwad Gazette. My mother was a subscriber. After Dacyczyn stopped publishing in 1996, all her newsletters were compiled into book form in The Complete Tightwad Gazette: Promoting Thrift As A Viable Alternative Lifestyle. My mother gave me that book. I have it right next to me now, all 950 pages of it.
Anyway, a cornerstone of Dacyczyn’s tightwaddery was the use of what she called The Price Book. Dacyczyn’s Price Book was a little loose-leaf binder. Each page was dedicated to one item, say toilet paper, and would include the following information: initials to represent the store; brand name; size of the item and price; and, for all entries, a standardized unit price, which allowed easy comparison between products. Because it was loose-leaf, she could painlessly alphabetize the pages.
This is the example of a Price Book page that Dacyczyn used in her book, so it reflects prices from more than 20 years ago:
Peanut Butter
SNS Generic 18 oz/99¢ 88¢/lb
CM Generic 4 lb/3.38 85¢/lb
CW Peter Pan 2 lb 8 oz/3.67 1.44/lb
IGA Store Brand 18 oz/99¢ 88¢/lb
MS All Natural 1 lb/1.49 1.49/lb
Nowadays there are downloadable Price Book pages and Price Book spreadsheet templates available online. There are also Price Book apps for your phone that, after you input the info, will calculate the unit price for you. So in 2019, you no longer need to lug a Price Book binder around with you on grocery shopping trips. Thank you, Digital Technology!
In her book, Dacyczyn recommends creating a Price Book for someone else as a Christmas gift. That’s what I wish Santa would bring me this year. I’m after the power that would come from confidently knowing a sale price represents real savings, so I could stockpile with conviction and bravado.