There was a curious show on the Food Network about grocery shopping. I thought it was quite neat so I propped my Casio Exilim camera against the tube and recorded some of it. I then chopped it up, cut out the commercials and uninteresting parts. The quality still sucks, though. Sorry.

Here’s what I’ve learned:

• There are 200,000 grocery stores and supermarkets in the U.S.;
• We spend $900 billion on groceries per year;
• 88% of us want the store to be neat and look good, but only 83% want low prices;
• An average grocery store’s margin is 2.4%;
• An average American will chow down 421 lbs of vegetables, 298 lbs of fruit, 279 lbs of dairy, that’s per year.

So? Well, if we buy that much food (about $91 per week), it would probably make sense to try to cut the food bill. The lady on the podcast cut her grocery bill from $173.32 to $7.13 through the clever use of coupons.

Take a listen (9Mb, mp3, 112 kbps).