Grocery Shopping in the 50th State

Earlier this month, our family traveled to Hawaii and stayed with friends. You can read about all of the trip-planning here. Grocery shopping on the island was a pretty interesting experience…

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A big part of staying on budget for our recent trip to Kauai was our plan to cook most of our meals versus eating out. Of the 23 meals we ate during the eight-day trip, we only ate out four times — twice for lunch and twice for dinner. That meant hitting the grocery stores in Hawaii for nearly all of our food… and experiencing some eye-opening prices!

Once we arrived on the island and got settled into the house, a trip to the supermarket was in order. Shopping options in Kauai are vastly different than what we’ve got at home. One supermarket is Foodland, which is a Hawaiian chain that has two locations on Kauai. Another local chain, Big Save, has five locations on the island. And, there’s one Safeway store in Kapaa.

As much as I wanted to check out the Safeway and compare it to shopping at Dominick’s locally, our main shopping trip that covered the brunt of our meal-planning took place at the Foodland in Princeville. It was only about five minutes from the house we were staying at, versus the 40-minute drive to Safeway, so it was chosen primarily for its close proximity.

Foodland

I could not wait to get to the store though and start price-hunting. (The other families were already rolling their eyes and teasing that they needed to keep me away from the supermarket, or I wouldn’t let them buy anything! They’re not couponers, and they knew I’d be in for some sticker-shock.) And, while I did bring some coupons along for the trip, shopping on vacation is a lot different than shopping ahead of your needs at home. If you need juice, hamburger patties, or milk, you’re going to need to buy those things now… whether the price is super-cheap or not.

And the prices were not super-cheap. After a stroll through the juice aisle…

$7.19? On sale for $5.29? Ouch.

I opted to buy some frozen juice concentrates. The store brand concentrates were $2 each, less than half the price of the bottled juices.

One would have thought that pineapple syrup would have been cheaper in the islands, but… no.

Despite being locally-grown, cucumbers were still $2.19-$2.79/lb.

The Swiss tea was a bargain here at .89, down from $3.69. That was a buy! We bought out the store’s five cartons. But the Simply Orange juice for $7.59? Pass…

And, there were certainly no “free after coupon” deals to be found in the trial and travel-size aisle at Foodland!

Other prices weren’t too much different from back home, like this Dean’s ice cream.

And, shopping in Hawaii did have a few advantages. Locally-grown pineapples were .99 and had an incredibly different, sweeter flavor than the pineapples we buy back home.

One of our friends really spearheaded the meal-planning for the trip, and she planned a good variety of things to eat, both semi-inexpensive (hot dogs and hamburgers on the grill, pasta and meatballs, cereal) and a few nicer meals at home too (grilled shrimp and vegetable kebobs.) She did a great job of figuring out what we needed, and it’s probably better that I wasn’t the meal-planner. I would not have bought Dole bagged salads for $3.99 each. (Then again, there were no salad mixes priced lower than that. And after visiting another store where they were priced even higher, I think she did just fine. For a moment, the couponer in me thought… well, what if we just didn’t eat salad this week… but again, the other 12 people on the trip did not share that mindset.)

Here are some highlights from our initial shopping trip. In each case, the least expensive item was purchased, whether it was a name brand or a store brand:

• Boxes of Malt-O-Meal cereal were $2.99
• 16oz. packages of Bar-S turkey franks were $2.69
• A 5-pound bag of store-brand 1/4 pound hamburger patties was $25.78
• A 16oz. jar of store-brand mayonnaise was $5.69
• 2lb. bags of store-brand shrimp were $16.99
• 26oz. jars of store-brand pasta sauce were $2.50
• 16oz boxes of store-brand pasta were $2.49
• 1lb. bags of store-brand frozen snow peas were $3.49
• 1lb. bags of store-brand edamame were $3.69
• 2lb. bags of store-brand turkey meatballs were $10.99.
• Family-size frozen pizzas were $4.99
• A gallon of milk was $4.99. (Later we realized this was cheap for Hawaii. You’ll see.)
• Loaves of store-brand bread were $2.41. A loaf of 100% whole grain bread was $4.79. We bought one of each.
• A pound of sliced deli ham was $7.49 (Ditto sliced deli Swiss cheese.)
• 8ct. bags of deli-style sandwich rolls were $3
• A 36-can case of Mountain Dew was $9.99, with a $2.16 beverage deposit on top of that price..!

In Hawaii, any bottled or canned beverage is subject to a .065 deposit (per can) on top of the price. You can get .05 of the deposit back by returning the empty cans to a recycling center. Our homeowner stressed that we should not throw any beverage cans or bottles away, and he had special recycling containers in the pantry to sort cans and bottles into. He’s enjoying our $2.16 beverage deposit from this case of Dew too now, as we did not take the time to gather up the kids’ crushed pop cans and haul them over to the redemption center. (It was a vacation, after all…)

And after all of that, the total for a week of food for 13 people was a mind-numbing:

$725.48. It pains me to even type that out.

However, we had agreed to split the bill 13 ways. Per person, that worked out to about $55.81 each for eight days, or about $6.98 per person per day. And looking at that made the numbers much easier to take. There’s nowhere else we could have eaten on the island for $6.98 per person per day.

(And really, for a vacation food budget, that’s not bad at all. For comparison’s sake, if we had done a theme-park trip instead of this, Walt Disney World’s least-expensive, “discount” dining plan is $37.58 per person per day, and $14.32 per day for kids under 9. This was much better.)

Could we have saved more? Absolutely. We could have left that expensive Mountain Dew at the store! (Ha ha.) But with four teenagers in the house, it would have been hard to convince them not to buy it. And that’s part of the compromise of agreeing to split the bills equally the way we did. Anything that anyone else wants, you’re paying for too. Like the $9.89 2lb. canister of macadamia nut pancake mix that made its way into our cart..! (Crazy expensive. But it was delicious.)

To save even more, we could also have separated groceries by family, then only eaten the things we bought for our own family. But again, our friends are good friends, and I can’t imagine a trip in which we’d have to chastise our friends’ children for drinking some of our juice, or stop our kids from eating a box of cereal that they bought. We split it 13 ways evenly, and that was that.

Signing up for Foodland’s Maika’i loyalty card saved us some money too. It also accrued us two Catalinas for 5% off our next shopping trip, a free product of the week (which when we were there, was a tub of ice cream — we got that!) or 200 miles toward Hawaiian Airlines. Each of these Catalinas prints when you’ve bought $250 worth of groceries. A manufacturer Catalina for $1.50 off 3 General Mills cereals also printed after this trip – presumably because we bought a competitor, Malt-O-Meal!

With a bill like that, I’ll BET they were thanking us for shopping there!

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Big Save

The next store I stopped into was Big Save. Later in the week we drove up to Hanalei, which is a neat little town filled with gift shops, fruit stands, surf shops and the like. Much of our group went souvenir shopping here, but I headed to Big Save first to check out the prices in comparison to Foodland.

As soon as I got to the produce aisle, I realized that the $3.99 Dole salads at Foodland really had been a deal:

Ouch.

While the $9.99 regular prices of these DiGiorno pizzas was very high, on sale they weren’t too much more expensive than back home. But oh boy… head over to the cereal aisle, and you’ll see why we were buying Malt-O-Meal on our first trip out:

Prices like these made me wonder — could I really be a good couponer if I lived in Kauai? But as with everything, if you looked for the right sales and combined them with coupons, deals could still be found:

Honey Bunches of Oats were on sale for $3 a box, down from a whopping $6.49. Our couponers’ rule of thumb would say that anytime the price is half of the shelf price, it’s a buy. With the current $1-off-2 coupons, I could have taken this home for $2.50 – less than we paid for the Malt-O-Meal brands at Foodland.

Of course, if you want milk with your cereal… get ready for some real sticker shock:

I left the Big Save, having bought nothing but gaining a new appreciation for the $4.99 gallon of milk we bought at Foodland. (While we normally buy only organic at home, we made an exception for this trip because the prices were so high, and the milk was being shared by everyone.)

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Safeway

I was most curious about checking out the Safeway, partially because I expected it to be somewhat familiar to what we have at Dominick’s in Chicagoland. On a day in which we were headed back from the other side of the island, we made a stop in Kapaa for some price-hunting and supplemental groceries. We were out of cereal and low on snacks too, and I knew from working on the Chicagoland Dominick’s ad that General Mills cereals were $1.49, and many fruit snacks were .99 during the “Buy 4, Save $4” this particular week. (And I was armed with coupons!) How much were they at Safeway in Hawaii?

Well, even my 5-year-old knew $1.99 would not be a buy point at home… but in Hawaii, it was a deal.

If you compare the Hawaii Safeway ad and the Illinois Dominick’s ad for the same week, it’s interesting to note the differences in prices:

And if you’re a grocery geek like I am, you can peruse both ads for the entire week. I photographed them side by side. The Safeway ad is on the left, and the Dominick’s ad is on the right:

Page 1 | Page 2 | Page 3 | Page 4 | Page 5 | Page 6 | Page 7 | Page 8 | Page 9 | Page 10

Inside, the store looks identical to pretty much every Dominick’s around here (and likely, every Safeway store nationally.) In Hawaii, the Just For U ecoupons are just rolling out, and there were many employees on hand encouraging shoppers to sign up for the new program. I remembered that I had a free bottle of Pepsi Next on my JFU that was expiring soon, so I stopped at the JFU table to print my ecoupon list.

We were out of deli meats and bread (we’d been taking sandwiches to the beach in a cooler most days) and got some more lunch provisions. And once again, the “shopping with friends” element added some other items to the bill (did we need those donut holes? The majority rule said “YES.”) We escaped Safeway with a much smaller bill than our previous group shopping venture, $62.29. Split 13 ways, this added another $4.79 to everybody’s weekly food total, or about another .60 per person per day. Not terrible.

However, I noticed that my free Pepsi Next Just For U ecoupon didn’t come off! (Talk about feeling like you’re shopping at home..!) The cashier rang all of the paper coupons together into one $5 discount, but the free Pepsi ecoupon wasn’t there. I had my JFU printout with me, so the cashier returned and re-rang me up at the self-checker, and I netted the Pepsi Next for a whopping .06 – the bottle deposit.

Other interesting notes: We have “$5 Fridays” here in Illinois, but in Hawaii, they’re “$6 Fridays.” A good rule of thumb for most things is that the price was about a dollar higher in the Hawaiian Safeway ad than it was here. But if you strictly shopped the sales, you could still be a pretty effective couponer here, as their sale prices were often good compared to the two other chains’ prices.

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Longs Drugs

I’m adding this as a footnote because I just found it interesting. There isn’t a single Walgreens or CVS/pharmacy on Kauai. (Oh, the heartbreak of not being able to do all of those pharmacy deals as a couponer! Life would be so much different here.)

On the same day we stopped at Safeway, I also checked out Longs Drugs. It was in the same shopping plaza as Safeway, and my husband had lost his sunglasses in the ocean. I hoped I could find a cheap pair at Longs so that he wouldn’t have to spend the rest of his beach days sans shades. So I went inside and immediately wondered…

What’s up with all the CVS-brand products at Longs? I learned that CVS bought out Longs Drugs in 2008, and while the Longs Drugs on the West coast were all converted to CVS/pharmacies, the Hawaiian stores are still Longs. And no, they do not participate in ExtraBucks offers.

They were, however, a great place to souvenir shop. My Hawaiian-shirt-lovin’ sons each wanted a real Hawaiian shirt as their souvenirs. This proved to be a bit taller of an order than I anticipated, as many of the shirts available in shops on the island are not actually made in Hawaii — they’re made in China or Indonesia. At a shop in Hanalei, I finally found some that were made in Hawaii, but they were $22.95 each. Keeping those in mind, I decided to wait and see if I could find a better price.

Well, Longs had an entire aisle of Hawaiian clothing made in Hawaii, including the identical shirts I had looked at in Hanalei —

The same shirts were $18.99 at Longs… and they came with matching shorts! Don’t overlook souvenir shopping at places other than souvenir shops…

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Other shopping options on the island

Kauai has one Walmart, one Kmart, and one Costco in the area near the airport… and that’s it, for the entire island! However, all of these were about a 50-minute drive away from where we were staying. (In fact, we never saw any of those stores on this trip at all.)

If I lived here, I’d probably do most of my shopping at Safeway, provided I lived relatively close to it. But with its location being about 40 minutes from the house we were staying at, I don’t know that I would want to drive that distance back and forth just to run deals either. Lots to consider if you’re a Hawaii couponer.

There are farmers’ markets and fruit “honor stands” on the side of the road in Kauai. The honor stands are funny – take what you want, and put your money in the box. Everything’s pretty laid back on the island! We did not shop at these though, as we got a lot of the fruit we ate from the trees at our house.

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Random stuff to wrap it all up…

On Sunday, I headed out to buy newspapers and compare inserts. (I am a couponer! What did you expect?) I went to Big Save and got a copy of the local paper, The Garden Island, and flipped through both it and the “big city” paper, Honolulu’s Star Advertiser. Neither of these contained the “fat” inserts we receive in the Chicago Tribune back home — in fact, they both had identical inserts labeled for both newspapers on the spine, so there was no advantage to buying the local paper or the big paper.

I bought the local paper. And here are the 8/12 inserts… skinny SmartSource, skinny RedPlum. And this is IT for the ads too in the Kauai paper — a USA Weekend and a Sears flyer.

Incredibly, there are no grocery circulars in the newspaper at all. I asked the clerk at Big Save why there weren’t any ads for their store, or for that matter, Foodland in the newspaper. She handed me a paper Big Save flyer for the week. Apparently it’s not even worth advertising in the paper..! When shopping options are limited, most people likely shop wherever is closest to them.

Other randomness… Hawaii is the first state in the nation to enact a plastic bag ban. Your groceries will be bagged in paper unless you bring your own bags.

And here’s something that I haven’t shared with you guys to date on the blog. In addition to being a bag junkie, I’m also a grocery bag junkie. As much as I love cute, cheap bags, I also love cute, cheap grocery bags. And Foodland’s reusable bags were just so much fun! When everyone else was buying macadamia nuts and shell jewelry to bring home, I was buying these for $1.99 each.

(Hey, these were MY Hawaiian souvenirs, and as souvenirs go, they were a bargain! I told you I was a grocery geek!)

These are now officially my favorite grocery bags. One features a bowl of poke, which is a delicious Hawaiian dish consisting of ahi tuna, onions, seaweed, and various oils. (We had some at a local fish market on one of our two rare lunches “out.”) The other bag features a musubi roll. Sushi junkies will either appreciate this one or not… musubi is a piece of sushi made with Spam. Spam is extremely popular in the islands, and every supermarket seems to sell both fresh poke and musubi rolls at the deli. Doesn’t that make you say, “Mmm?”

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Want more Hawaii talk? Here’s the other half of the trip report detailing where we went and how we shared expenses with friends. We also had an endless supply of free fruit and eggs, helping us save money too…