The Steven System
As Ontarians brace for the upcoming financial impact of the new harmonized sales tax, a new web site promises to save Ontarians at least $1000 on their current annual grocery bill, by providing access to both local flyer and regular grocery store prices in one central, easy to use system.
Like most great ideas, The Steven System really got started more by accident than by necessity. It began in November 2008, where as part of the global economic recession, one Ontario family turned out to be a casualty with job losses and the financial pinch that followed.
“We went through a stretch where we had no income for several months and we started living strictly on cash to make sure that we could afford to live,” says Steven Brooks, creator of The Steven System.
“At the same time, we were looking everywhere to see where we could save money. Anything that was not a necessity was cancelled. Anything that we could not do without was cut back.”
But they found this hard to do with groceries, especially with two teenagers in the house, who were eating them out of house and home.
“Cutting back on the groceries that we bought only resulted in us being out of food before the next grocery shop came along.”
Their family had a budget for groceries and they tried to stick to it as best as they could. They scanned the flyers every week and tried to buy most of the items that were on sale during the week, and used coupons when they could, but by the end of the day, their grocery budget was just not big enough.
“We really could not afford to increase the budget so we had to look at different ways we could still work within the budget and not have to eat KD five nights a week.”
When they looked at their grocery spending, they noticed that they were only buying about 100 products each week, and that for the most part, the products were mostly the same every week.
“Which kind of makes sense, because you keep buying the items that you run out of every week, and those are the items you generally like to eat. When we looked at the items that we were purchasing every week, we noticed that only about 20-30% of them were ever on a flyer sale every week.”
Steven found that interesting, because it meant that they were doing everything they could to save money on only about 30 items out of 100 that they were buying.
“The other 70 products were never on a flyer sale when we needed to buy them, so we just purchased them at the regular price at the stores we would shop at.”
At the time they figured that the regular prices for these 70 items were probably the same at all the stores - after all they were supposed to be competitive, and they thought that they would probably pay more in gas driving to each of the stores than if they just kept shopping as they were. That led them to investigate the regular store prices for 100 products at each of the stores near where they lived, to see if there really was a significant difference in the price of their overall groceries.
“Our initial feeling was that the difference may only be 4 or 5 bucks, which would probably be the cost of gas to the individual stores, and if the difference was this small, then it was KD again for dinner.”
So for a number of weeks they visited half a dozen grocery stores and priced out 100 items.
“It was a good thing we were unemployed at the time, because it's surprising how long it takes to locate these products in the store when you're looking for them instead of just picking them up off the shelf when you go down the aisles.”
Luckily they were smart enough to order the products in each store as they found them, so it made subsequent price hunts easier, but still it was no easy task. After a couple of surveys they were ready to put the numbers into a spreadsheet and see what the outcome was.
“Wow! To say we were surprised was an understatement. When the numbers were put together there was about a 20% difference in the regular store prices for the items that we were buying.”
Their grocery budget was $200 a week. That meant that they were spending $40 a week more than they had to. That was $2,080 a year! Almost two and a half months of their grocery budget, and quite a lot of gas money.
“We were stunned by the difference,”
That's where The Steven System was born.
They found, that by tracking grocery store items on a weekly basis (and they got some help with this), they were able to establish with relative accuracy the regular price of products at each of the grocery stores.
“Once we had this tracking system in place, it was simply a matter of combining the regular store price data with the flyer price data, and bingo - we had a system that would tell us each week where to shop to get the best bang for our buck, and we have never looked back since.”
Using the system they are saving about $30 to $40 dollars a week on their grocery bill.
“At that point we decided to make The Steven System available online, for free, so that everyone could take advantage of the savings.”
And as they say, the rest is history.
If you are interested in seeing how The Steven System can work for you, the site offers a live price demo, which randomly selects 10-20 products each time you try it, so you can see how much money you could be saving each week. Membership to The Steven System is free. There is also a couple of videos available that demonstrates how the site works.
The Steven System also offers a premium subscription service that includes some additional time and money saving tools for a small monthly fee.
“Our auto shopping list feature is awesome,” claims Steven. “Like us, you probably spend an hour or two each week going through the flyers to get the best deals. Well imagine if you could just push a button and in a matter of seconds you can get all that information in a single report. That’s what our auto shopping list feature does.”
The site offers a free 14 day trial for these premium services.
The Steven System web site is located at http://www.thestevensystem.com
Photo:
http://www.prlog.org/
