Grocery shopping savings tips provided by this Florida shopper

A Naples shopper shares tips for saving money on groceries in Southwest Florida.
He suggests comparing prices on future purchases and buying private label brands.
The shopper finds lower prices on similar items at Walmart and Aldi compared to Publix.
A new poll asks readers if it is acceptable to sample produce before buying it.

Welcome back to the Grocery Shopping Chronicles, a sounding board for our audience about food shopping.

Our mission is to chronicle your grocery shopping experiences and share them here. To be more specific, we’d love it if you’d share your tips, tricks, habits, best practices and hard-earned lessons from shopping for your food in Southwest Florida.

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This week’s Chronicle: Douglas Voss

Doug lives in Naples. He said he likes to “shop” when he goes to buy groceries. In his words, “Whatever store I’m in, I look at prices of other items I may be buying in the future.”

Great tip!

Here are some other thoughts about Doug’s grocery shopping experiences:

I also buy private label. Publix has BOGO (buy one, get one free), but most of the rest of the prices are way out of line. It amazes me how many people go into their stores.
Walmart has many similar items yet prices are lower there. They also have their great value line and many of those items are as good as the national brands.
It’s the same at Aldi. They don’t carry national brands, but what they carry is as good as anything else out there and way less expensive. I don’t care if it’s produce, cereals, butter, cottage cheese, yogurt, eggs, milk, nuts, salad dressings. Aldi is just as good as Kraft, Newman, Cheerios, Libby’s, Scott tissue, bread etc.
Aldi has six or eight self-checkout stations and they close at 8 p.m. so both of those options save you money.

Thanks for participating, Doug! These are excellent insights and we are sure you will be helping other people in our audience with your grocery shopping report.

What’s Grocery Shopping Chronicle? How you can participate

It’s simple. Just send an email to mbickel@gannett.com with your thoughts (good and bad) about your grocery shopping experience. Try to keep it to about 250 words and if you are inclined, please include a photo (head shot).

Please put: Grocery Shopping in the subject line of your email

A short video is also an option, and actually preferred. The video can also be emailed to mbickel@gannett.com and we can help you get the video delivered if needed.

This week’s grocery shopping poll: 10 items or fewer line

This week’s grocery shopping poll question is online here at news-press.com and naplesnews.com where we have an interactive voting tool to cast your vote.

This week a member of our grocery shopping audience, Bonnie Brown, submitted a question and it is a good one. Bonnie is a retired nurse and health communications specialist. She lives full time in Estero.

Question: Is it acceptable for shoppers to sample produce (like a grape or a cherry tomato or anything) before purchasing it?

On this produce issue, Bonnie said: “I hate watching people sample grapes for two reasons: (1) They are actually stealing and it teaches young kids that’s acceptable and (2) most of these grapes come from countries that don’t have solid pesticide laws and all fruit should be carefully washed before ingesting.”

Thanks, Bonnie! We appreciate it. And we encourage others to send in their grocery shopping poll questions so we can share with the audience.

In case you can’t access the online poll, you can email your thoughts and opinion to mbickel@gannett.com.

Last week’s poll results

In case you missed it, we asked you about the 10 items or fewer checkout line. Most people respect the process of what is supposed to be an “express” lane so you can get in and out of the story quickly. Of course, with modern technology, now self-checkout is an option at many grocery stores.

We asked: What do you think about the violators of the 10 items or fewer checkout line?

Here are the results: