Get a pinta on your doorstep to save £££!

Published on 24 November 2010 in Shopping, milk, milkman, shopping, supermarkets

Clink clink goes the bottles as the milkman picks up the empties and deposits the white filled replacements.

Yes it’s now been two years or so since we went back in time and got a milkman. And it’s lovely. The satisfaction of holding those chunky glass pint bottles. The celebration as you press down on the foil top… And that’s just the start for having our milk delivered is providing financial benefits to our household.

One of my aims through getting a milkman was to save money. This may sound perverse as milk through your milkman is undeniably more expensive than buying milk in the supermarket. Yet as I found out, it’s certainly possible to do.

Before Milkman (or BM as it’s not known as) we used to go to our local Sainsburys every week and the main regular staple on the weekly shopping list was milk. Indeed it was our only staple item as we get most of our fruit and veg from our fortnightly veg box, I make my own bread, and we need no meat as Catherine’s vegetarian.

As such most of our supermarket trips are for non-fresh items – stuff that doesn’t go off quickly. Bar the milk – a four pint bottle to last the week.

Now we could have got the milk from the corner shop however over the course of the week our shopping list would generally grow and we’d always need milk so we went to the supermarket. Looking at the credit card bills, we’d spend roughly £150-£180 a month in Sainsburys in four trips.

After Milkman (AM – you get the idea with this one) we managed to cut out shopping trips down to about 2.5 times a month – my aim is to go once a fortnight but it doesn’t always work out like that. And the bills? Well they’ve gone down to around £120-£150 a month – a £30 difference.

Individual shopping trips have got more expensive as they’ve got bigger however we do less of them and overall credit card bills have gone down. Prices may have changed of course, however the bill reductions were almost immediate – as soon as we switched the bills went down.

Obviously some of the saving is spent on our milk man which costs about £12 a month. Even so we’re saving about £20 a month just by going to the supermarket less.

The interesting question is where the saving comes come from. We haven’t changed much else about our purchasing habits in all this (or at least I don’t believe we have), and we’ve never been ones for food not to be used so the only answer I can come up with is making less impulse purchases of things you don’t need. Cakes, wine, whatever. The stuff you don’t necessarily miss if you don’t buy them.

Whilst £20 a month may not seem a huge amount to some, it shows the interesting principle that if you want to save money, finding ways to cut back on your supermarket visits is a definite way to do it. And one way to cut back on those trips can be find with a pint of nice cold, ice cold milk!