What is a "pantry price"? It keeps you from overpaying

What a pantry price is

Watch the price of peanut butter at your store for a couple of months and you'll notice something: it doesn't have one price. It has a high price and a low price, and it flips between them. The low one — the range it keeps returning to — is your pantry price. It's not the lowest price you've ever seen once. It's the low range that has shown up again and again.

People have kept these numbers in little notebooks (“price books”) for decades. It works. It's just a lot of writing.

What a sale tag doesn't tell you

A sale tag tells you that today's price is below some comparison price. It does not tell you whether today's price is unusually good—or merely the discount the item receives every few weeks. Your price history does.

Olive oil at $11.99, “was $14.99” — good deal? If it drops to $9.99 every few weeks, no: that red tag is asking you to pay two dollars more than the price this item regularly reaches.

The problem is that few of us can remember the unit prices of dozens of products across several stores. The pantry price is how you remember.

How to find yours

Three ways:

• Memory. Free, but it fails right when you need it — in the aisle, looking at the tag.
• Write it down. A note on your phone: item, price, size, store, every trip. After several purchase and promotion cycles, a recurring low-price range often begins to emerge. Works great; takes discipline.
• Use your receipts. Every price you ever paid is already printed on them. That's the price book you've been keeping without knowing it — and importing older receipts can surface the range sooner.

One tip whichever way you go: compare by the ounce or by the count, not by the package — packages shrink, and that hides a price hike.

Buy when it's cheap, not when you're out

Here's where the name comes from. Most of us buy things when we run out — so the store decides what we pay. Flip it: when a staple hits your pantry price, buy two or three and put them in the pantry. When it's well above that range and you already have enough at home, waiting often pays — Pantry Deals shows how often the lower price has returned in the past. You keep buying the exact same things. You just stop buying them on the expensive weeks.

Where it doesn't work

This works for things that keep — canned goods, pasta, paper towels, things you can freeze. It doesn't help with the berries you need today. And don't try to track forty items. Your top ten or fifteen regulars are where the money is.

Once you know the pantry price for a handful of things you buy all the time, sale signs stop bossing you around. Some sale prices are exceptional. Others are routine discounts that return regularly. Price history tells you the difference.