I like to do as much of my incidental shopping on auto pilot. Who has time to research the best price on toilet paper every couple of weeks? Factoring in all the various discounts and reward points?

Apparently I should be keeping better track. I logged on to Subscribe and Save today and realized for the Gerbers’ Lil Crunchies (a kid favorite around these parts) the 15% off discounted price on a bulk purchase was more than twice as expensive as buying the same number of cans, individually, from Target before applying a red card discount. Twice! And here I am thinking Amazon is the cheapest. I went over all my subscriptions and I noticed that some were nearly three times as expensive. I know Amazon likes to raise the price on incidentals to help cover the cost of shipping but geeze.

There has to be a better way!

I’m dreaming of a new kind of product price monitoring service. I’d enter my monthly grocery list, and where I have loyalty cards. The service would then compute the optimal way of breaking up my purchase to maximize my total savings. No more manually checking each individual item at each individual store. No more busting out my calculator to figure out what the final price would be.

The service would be even more useful if I could indicate which products I’m willing to make substitutions on. The girls have a favorite Lil Crunches flavor (Garden Vegetable) but I don’t have a brand preference for paper towels.

So what say you, internet. Any interest in such a service?

Posted in Shopping | Tags: Bargain Hunting