Tips to cutting your grocery bill

When I used to work at the campus bookstore back in college, I always wondered why the little blue books that every student had to buy for finals were at the back of the store. Since everyone needed at least a few, why not put them up near the front of the store so they could quickly grab them and buy them?

Boy, was I naive. The answer, my manager told me, was the same reason why grocery stores put milk and other staples at the back of the store: To get customers to walk through the length of the store to get the basics, and hopefully pick up an impulse buy on their way back up to the cash register.

So instead of just returning from the Spartan Bookstore with just a blue book that cost a quarter and maybe a 10-cent pencil, the students walked out with a book, shirt or soda that they hadn't planned on buying when they arrived, I learned.

The same goes for grocery stores, and knowing where to shop while once inside can help you save a lot of money. For example, as Jennifer Openshaw reports in her MarketWatch column, the outside aisles are where the unprocessed staples are -- meat, eggs, milk and produce -- while the expensive packaged foods are on the inside aisles. I like to shop fast and get in and out of a store with what I want, so wandering the aisles doesn't help accomplish that.