A survey conducted by Save the Student revealed a staggering 76% of students were worried about making ends meet.
While it’s no surprise rent made the biggest dent in a student’s monthly budget, groceries snuck into second place with an average of £101 a month being spent on food other than takeaways and eating out.
With this in mind, below you’ll find some supermarket money-saving tips for students.
Don’t go to the supermarket when you’re hungry
The number one tip for saving money at the supermarket is to not go to the supermarket when you’re hungry.
All your good intentions fly out the window when you’ve got a rumbling stomach. You’ll end up back at your student accommodation with a bag for life crammed with crisps, cookies and chocolate (and possibly other unhealthy things that don’t begin with a ‘c’) because no one ever filled up their trolley with leafy veg when they hungrily roamed the aisles looking for food.
Download a cashback app
Before you even step into a supermarket, download a cashback app such as Shopmium.
Shopmium will reimburse you up to 100% on a wide variety of products from all the major supermarkets.
Even if you don’t use the app, you’ll get a free welcome gift (previous gifts have included bars of Cadbury chocolate and tubs of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream) when you sign up.
And if that wasn’t generous enough, Shopmium is the gift that keeps on giving with further bonuses available for referring a friend which, being a student, you won’t have any trouble finding.
Visit the supermarket at the best times
All supermarkets reduce goods at certain times of the day. The good news is this isn’t usually first thing in the morning, so you won’t have to get up early to bag a bargain.
Supermarket staff usually wield their yellow sticker guns in the evening to reduce the food that will be out of date the next day.
Supermarkets keep quiet about their specific yellow-stickering times and they can also vary from store to store, but keep visiting your local supermarket at various times of the day and you should soon see a pattern of when the reduced items appear.
Don’t ignore the world food aisle
If you tend to walk past the world food aisle without taking much notice of it, stop! The world food aisle is chock-a-block with everything you need to make student-budget-friendly curries, pasta sauces and stews, amongst other culinary delights.
You can get all your tinned tomatoes, coconut milk and spices, along with beans and pulses such as chickpeas and kidney beans for a much lower price than they are in the regular aisles. As an added bonus, they’ll be more authentic, too.
Don’t get sucked in by supermarket tricks
Supermarkets pay big salaries to experts in making you part with your money. Everything in a supermarket has been carefully placed, not for your convenience, but for theirs.
This is why the air vents waft delicious bakery aromas to tempt your tastebuds, it’s why the fruit and veg is at the front to make you feel better about less healthy purchases later on in your shop and let’s not even talk about the treats at the till for those impulse buys.
So, what we’re saying is – keep your cynical head on when you shop and only buy what you went out to get in the first place and don’t let clever layouts and marketing tricks make you spend more than you’d planned to.
How to save money at the supermarket
These money-saving tips aren’t just for students, of course. Anyone can use the above advice to save some money each time they go shopping.