Cheap Grocery Shopping

Looking for cheap grocery shopping options? To be a frugal grocery shopper, sometimes it pays to think outside the box. Forget typical discount grocery stores. Cook fantastic meals on a budget while discovering true grocery shopping on a budget.

A typical grocery shopping experience for most American families is to jump in the car, drive to a supermarket, possibly use a few coupons, and leave wondering how you spent so much.

This leads to conversations with friends, family, and husbands about the rising cost of groceries and how you cannot afford the same things you bought a year ago.

And then more wondering about how you will afford the cost of groceries next year.

Perhaps you have been looking for discount grocery stores in your area for grocery shopping on a budget. Chances are, you are looking in the wrong places. Cheap grocery shopping sources are nearly everywhere, and can be a simple as trading your time.

No, I’m not asking you to accept charity! Most American families are feeling the burn at the grocery store lately, no matter their income levels. In fact, middle class families are the ones who are most interested in meals on a budget.

In that spirit, there are great options to provide frugal grocery shoppers with excellent, cheap grocery shopping.

SHARE Program

One place to do some cheap grocery shopping as a frugal grocery shopper is through your local SHARE organization.

Though I’ve heard a lot of great things about the SHARE program, I have yet to personally participate.

SHARE provides grocery shopping on a budget, and a savings of approximately 50% on items that rarely have coupons. Things like staples, fresh foods, and meats.

There are no income qualifications for SHARE.

SHARE asks that you donate your time to community service efforts in order to receive your food for meals on a budget. This is a good thing, and something that I think every family should be doing.

The only difficult part about SHARE is that there is not one main organization, but multiple similar ones throughout the country. Each state, and in some cases each county in a state, has its own organization and its own site. In order to find your location, you will need to do a Google Search for the terms “share food YOUR STATE”.

This is definitely a program that a frugal grocery shopper should look into!

Angel Food Ministries

Many people have heard about Angel Food Ministries. I wanted to take a few moments to tell you that Angel Food Ministries no longer exists. It was a faith-based organization that ran out of churches nationwide. Angel Food Ministries claimed committment to helping the regular American family with cheap grocery shopping.

It worked like this: each month, they offered a box of fresh foods, meats, and shelf stables worth $50-75 for $30. In addition, they offered add-on items like steaks, chicken, fresh fruits, and other items at heavily discounted rates.

In the beginning, this program was phenominal! I would drive 45 minutes one way and pick up several boxes for our family and our neighbors. But somewhere along the way, the quality started to suffer. We feel out of the Angel Food Ministries loop for quite some time, and then came to find out that they shut their doors completely in September, 2011, due to federal charges of fraud, conspiracy and money laundering. WOW!

You can Google the case information. Basically, in a nutshell, it seems they were making a killing off their non-profit organization. All the top executives were family members, taking in more than a half-million dollars EACH annually. How very very sad. This was such a great concept, and helped so many families. But greed got in the way.