The key to getting a good deal on any product is knowing the best “regular” price on any item.  With groceries this has become easier with Wal-Mart and Aldi being the low cost leaders on pretty much every item out there.  In fact, if you do not want to play the coupon game you can  save about 20%-30% off the regular prices at the grocery stores just by shopping for groceries at either of these two stores.

If you are looking for the absolute best prices on groceries coupons are the way to go as long as you know that you aren’t paying more just to use a coupon and get a name brand item.  Now I tend to know what a good deal is on any product due to my diligence in understanding prices across the markets, but  I am coming across many items that I have no real basis for how much they cost as my wife and I prepare for the birth of our first child.  In short, I have no clue how much baby supplies should cost.

I saw this as a great opportunity to share how I create a pricing strategy for any item.  So for this example we will be using diapers, but the method can be used for any item that you purchase at retail stores.

Diapers turned out to be a little more complicated than I originally expected because there are so many different sizes (which makes sense when you think about it but I never had).  So I headed down to my low cost leaders (Wal-Mart/Aldi) and priced out diapers.  Now if this were electronics I would have spent more time online than in the stores.

Next I take the prices and put them into a chart that looks something like this:

Now as I was looking for the best prices I noticed that none of the companies had the same quantity of diapers in their packaging.  So instead of being able to rely on the data above we have to take another step and add a per unit column.  This makes the chart look like this:

Very simple concept, just divide the number of diapers into the total price to get the cost per diaper.  Using this number I can easily whip out the calculator on my cell phone and determine if this weeks special really is, all that special.