How do you shop for food?

Just to point out in advance, I know that not everyone has the storage space to do what we do.  I also don't think that how we shop is how everyone should.  I'm not into judging how people live. :)

There are a lot of reasons we shop the way we do.  The store is 10 miles away, it's wasteful of gas and time to go shopping every other day, we like having things on hand in case of sudden guests or emergencies... and many smaller ones.  Right now we're renting a house that doesn't have a lot of room in the kitchen (our builder should start construction the beginning of June, provided everything goes well), but we've turned the entry way into a pantry of sorts, and added heavy duty shelves to the laundry area, also to increase our storage capacity, so I'm still able to feed 10 people a hearty, tasty meal at the drop of a hat. :)

We only go shopping every two weeks.  There are two supermarkets we go to (there used to be three, but one of them closed), plus Walmart, and a drugstore if we have a prescription to pick up, and any other side trips we might take (like going to the food co-op).  When Shaw's opened up in our area, we took several hours to go through each store we shop at to figure out which ones had the best prices on the items we keep in stock.  We then made up a list of our regular items for each store, sorted by aisle.  Before we go shopping, we go through each list for each store, and check off the items we need to restock.  During the preceding two weeks, if there's some special item I want that isn't on the regular list, I ask my husband to add it. So when we hit the stores, we have a complete shopping list, sorted by aisle, for each store we're in.

At each store we go through that week's circular and note things that are on sale so we can stock up on them.  This is where the decisions about meats are made. :)  I don't like paying full price for most meats, so I wait until they're on sale, then I buy it up and stick it in my deep freeze.  That's plenty good enough for my every day meals.  If there's a special occasion (like a the Soltice) I'll make a point of making a special trip to the store to buy things that I want fresh for the meal, but otherwise, what we have is fine.

Then we go through our list, moving from item to item on the list, rather than going up and down every aisle.  Sometimes something will catch my eye and I'll pick it up, but most of the time we keep impulse purchases to a minimum.  We go through each store this way.

Shopping this way takes us around 4 hours, though that includes time spent on a meal, and all the driving, parking, and waiting time at each store.  So we spend around four hours every two weeks and consistently have enough food in the house bought at reasonable prices that we could easily live for a good two months before having to go to the store again.  That's a significant savings over how much time we'd be spending if we went to the store every week and only bought what we were going to be using over the next couple of days.  Not to mention how much we save by taking advantage of the sales.

So how do you go about it?

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