How do you optimize regular purchases?

[ender]

I'm tired of feeling like saving money at stores is a pull activity.

What I mean by this is that I have to actively seek information out, whether sites online, the paper ad, or otherwise and pull the information. As a good example imagine that you use 3 pounds of ground beef every week. This means you regularly purchase it and it occasionally goes on a fairly significant sale. The way that I find this is by skimming the grocery ads.

Ideally, I would instead love the ability to somehow (through an app maybe?) set a price point (maybe $2/pound) and get a push type of notification for when a local store has this on sale so that I can be aware of the sale. This notification can be an email or something less intrusive but otherwise allow an app/service to do the searching part for me. This is particularly relevant for frequent purchase that can be stockpiled.

It seems like this would be a common problem here as many of us like to save lots of money.

I'm curious what other folks do for this. Do you just browse lots of store ads?

[JLee]

This won't work for your situation, but for items you don't need on a specific timeframe - camelcamelcamel.com can email you notifications when an Amazon product has dropped below a specified price threshold. 

[ender]

This won't work for your situation, but for items you don't need on a specific timeframe - camelcamelcamel.com can email you notifications when an Amazon product has dropped below a specified price threshold.

Yeah that's actually what made me think about this for local stores, too.

[Goldielocks]

There are sites that pull all the information from the flyers for you, and you subscribe, and they tell you what items to buy this week, and which coupons from which papers to use.

There are different ones, the first I looked at had too much name brand / processed/ P&G items listed as the "12 week sale" or "lowest price of the year"...   not my type of shopping needs, at all.

The second one, thought was pretty good, I just did not like the subscription price...

____________
Best is to reduce your shopping. period...

[Jschange]

My system for flyer reading is that I love reading them, but unfortunately I don't get them unless I beat everyone else in my building to grabbing a copy of the paper. So my mother will call me and tell me what's on sale that I might want. She texts if we're busy.

For electronics, my boyfriend will text me deals and suggest that I go, or send my parents.

For diapers, my boyfriend calls me if I tell him that I'm in Walmart/Shoppers etc. and asks me to check prices. Eventually I got trained into stopping in the diaper aisle and snapping a photo for him. (I live alone) And once I was trained, his munchkin grew out of them.

Is there a kindly person that you can start saying "can you check the price of beef" when they say they are stopping by store x on the way home? Train different people on different items until you get text alerts set up? Or small people that you can add flyer reading to their chores?