One of my strategies for getting meat (and a few other products) cheap for our Once A Month Meals menus, is to find manager’s special’s. For many of you this is not a new concept. For some of you it is. No matter which category you fall into there is a bit of a strategy for locating these deals.
First of all, I look most diligently for them the weeks that a given meat are on sale. For example, chicken is on sale for $1.68/lb at Kroger this week. And last week, ground beef was on sale for $1.49/lb. I have found that in my local store, meat that is about to reach its “sell by date” gets marked down in the early evening hours. What this means is that if I go to the grocery store at 6:30 pm or later, I am more likely to acquire manager special meats. The “sell by date” means that the meat is still good as long as I freeze or cook it that evening or the next day (if the sell by date is the next day). 
Given that the meat is already on sale, when they put it on manager special to move it out of the store before it goes bad, it is an extra stockpile price. And because it is on sale, they are carrying more of it in hopes that it will be a high demand item. If they overestimate and have extra, the better opportunity for me because I will find more on manager’s special. For this reason, I find going later in the sales cycle week brings me greater success. For example, Kroger had ground beef on sale for $1.49/lb last week. We have 15 lbs on our February 2010 Once A Month Meals Menu. So on Sunday evening I went to the grocery store at 8:00 pm especially to see if they had any ground beef on manager’s special. (This is a little later than I normally like to go so that I don’t get beaten out by other buyers). However, I was NOT disappointed. I ended up getting all of the ground beef that I needed for $.89/lb or $13.07! How is that for a good deal?
Buying meats on manager special works for me. What do you do to find deals on your Once A Month Meals Shopping List items?
This post is linked up at Works For Me Wednesday at We are THAT Family!
8 Comments
Join the discussionI’m glad you’re able to do so well with the manager’s specials 🙂 Our lowest ground beef markdowns are nowhere near that low!! The lowest ours ever goes is about 1.87/lb for 75/25, and that’s if it REALLY needs used up NOW.
I agree – Manager’s specials at my Kroger store have resulted in some serious steals. Once when one of my kids was an infant, I came across a whole shopping cart full of jarred organic baby food marked down to 25 cents per jar. I was tempted to just push the display cart up to the register.
🙂 I might have done the same thing.
GREAT tip!! Thank you so much for sharing :o)
Great trip about timing your shopping. I’ll have to try that! I always keep my eyes open for Manager Specials when I’m shopping at Kroger, but I don’t usually shop that late in the day.
LOL…..i just brought some marked down stew meat today….guess what its in the crockpot now…..beef stew…great tip 🙂
What works in one case does not always work in another case. A grocery that has display cases a degree or two cooler will have much better preserved meat by the sell by date. At one grocer, I always by managers marked down meat at the sell by date, yet my local store (same chain) I’ve gotten bad meat and almost never buy the marked down stuff.
Beef I’ll buy, but the chicken starts to smell bad, and I couldn’t stomach it.