Price Book Blunder

I don't consider myself a financial guru. In fact, I have been known to make dumb mistakes about very basic stuff. Take today. I have been touting the benefits of saving at the supermarket with the "price book," which is a little notebook in which you record the absolute lowest rock-bottom price at which you can get your groceries, unit cost/size, and whatever store or source you found it at.

Now, what I didn't tell you is that I've cheated a little bit and carried my price book around in my head. I pretty much buy the same stuff from the same 3 stores, so I didn't think it was worth the exercise. However, I always have my calculator to cut through any unit cost mumbo jumbo I run across on store shelves.

But I got burned today.

Trawling through the local Safeway looking for decent prices on stuff (and not finding squat except $2 a pound coupon cheese), I saw a special on buy-one-get-one-free 18 ct eggs. This is usually a no-brainer, so I start to check them and put them in the cart. Then I see the price is 5.19. Whoa! I think that sounds high, but I'm not really sure. You see, egg price displays surely have to be one of the seven wonders of the world when it comes to confusing people. I'd have to have the price book in front of me to tell me how much to pay per egg.

But since I don't, I whip out my trusty calculator, which tells me the sale eggs are 14 cents apiece. Knowing that sometimes sales can be misleading in that they don't actually give you the lowest unit price for the item, I start calculating the cost per egg on some of the other myriad size/price cartons. Finally I come up with one at 13 cents per egg. Oh well, I thought, this is the best I can get. Prices are going up. So I grab the 18 ct version of this size egg and head for the register. Whoops! Once I'm through I'm checking to see I got my coupon deal for the cheese and I see that I've paid $4.29 for 18 eggs!!

That's 23 cents per egg!!!!

How did this happen? I calculated 13 cents per egg for this size based on a sale price for a dozen egg carton--not the 18 egg carton. By buying the wrong size carton, I accidentally ended up paying full price for the eggs, when even the old buy-one-get-one-free deal would have been better. Of course I didn't realize this until after I'd gotten home and cracked two eggs into a batch of TVP-laced meatloaf. I don't even know if they let you take back something like eggs (I usually can't anyway, since it's impossible to run right back to the store when you've got two tired kiddos...and I hate making a spectacle of my tightwaddery to mystified store personnel--"No, there's nothing wrong with the eggs...I just paid too much for them...")

Of course, if I was a true tightwad (a la Amy Dacyzyn) I would have used two heaping tablespoons of soy flour + two tablespoons water in place of the eggs. So I have a long way to go. Upshot is, I learned an expensive lesson that cost me my savings on the coupon cheese and betrayed the limits of the "price book in my head" idea. The only comfort I get out of all this is the hope that some housewife somewhere will learn from my blunder.