SWEEPING the supermarket for your weekly groceries can be a chore – and a costly one if you’ve been doing it wrong this whole time.
While Tesco isn’t the cheapest supermarket to pick up all your essentials, there are ways to slash your spends, from the secrets of the scanner to the saviour that is a trusty Clubcard.
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Supermarket spends are rising at an alarming rate for many shoppers, so it’s more important that ever to curb costs any way you can.
But you can be smart about which items you pick up off the shelf, and taking advantage of loyalty schemes and more, and quickly lower your bill at the checkout.
Shopping at Tesco is no different, and there are plenty of ways to find all the ‘hidden’ discounts at the store.
We reveal how you can bag all the best bargains at Tesco.
The Clubcard saviour
The best way to bag a bargain at Tesco is to equip yourself with a Clubcard.
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It’s free to get one and you can have a virtual version or a physical card if you prefer – just sign up online and you can start cashing-in on discounts and loyalty offers right away.
You collect one point for every £1 spent in store and online and one for every £2 spent on fuel.
Then, one point is worth 1p of a future shop in Tesco – so you can earn money-off vouchers after you’ve racked up enough.
You can also trade them in for three times the value with Tesco’s reward partners, such as Hungry Horse pub or Cineworld.
You get immediate discounts in-store and online with the Clubcard too though.
Right now shoppers can get Warburtons crumpets, for example, for just 75p, when they are usually 95p to buy – but only if they have their Clubcard to hand.
Without it, the breakfast bakery treat is full price.
Having the card means a discount of almost 20%, but it only lasts until March 8 so there’s just a week to claim that particular offer.
It’s not only food that you can get discounted with the card either – another example of a deal you can cash-in on right now is Glade candles.
The 250g Glade aromatherapy candle was £9, but a third has been slashed off until March 8, making the home decoration now just £6 to buy.
‘Secret’ scanner
You can pick up hand scanners at the front of Tesco before you even start you shop.
The scanners can give you a better idea of what your bill is going to look like before you get to the checkout, but they can also highlight “secret” and “hidden” bargains.
Money saving YouTuber Holly Smith, aka Holly Vlogs, took to TikTok to reveal how she’d picked up one bargain for £3, when it said it should have been £12 on the shelf.
She’d scanned an item that said it was reduced to clear, and to her surprise the item was even cheaper than it said it was on the label.
“This happens with a lot of items in the Reduced to Clear section so definitely pick up a hand scanner,” Holly said in the 25 second long clip posted in February.
It can be worth using the scanner to check just how cheap you can get something you might have had your eye on – but remember it’s only a bargain that way if you were planning on buying it anyway.
Waste not
Yellow sticker bargains are like gold dust to some shoppers.
Supermarkets, including Tesco, will often reduce the price of food nearing its use by date to shift stock and avoid food wastage – and the store will flag these discounts with yellow stickers.
You can often save up to 75% off products marked up in this way, so it’s worth keeping an eye out in the store.
One shopper managed to score £60 worth of food from Tesco for just £16 once she’d tracked down the colour coded bargains herself.
And in the same way that you can pick up yellow sticker bargains in-store, you can also use food waste apps that offer reduced food the supermarket would only have thrown away at the end of the day.
You can even get FREE food from Tesco from food-waste app Olio.
The supermarket initially trialled the scheme in 250 stores, but since last year it has been rolled out to all of its sites across the UK.
While the groceries are completely free, there is often limited availability and no guarantee what will be on offer.
This is because Tesco hands out surplus food to charities before any spare groceries are given to Olio.
You can check on the free Olio app though, which will tell you all the Tesco food being given away in your local area.
How else can I slash my supermarket spends?
Other simple tips will help you save on your supermarket spends too.
Shopping around is a great first step.
As easily as you can find great bargains hidden at Tesco, it pays to widen your deal hunting to other stores – you might find another store has a cheaper offer you can cash-in on.
Which? put that to the test when it found that you could be paying £9 more for the same items if you shopped at Waitrose compared to Aldi, for example.
One savvy shopper managed to save over £200 on her food shop by taking a trip to the wholesalers instead of the supermarket as well.
You can also try planning your meals, or taking advantage of supermarket loyalty schemes.
Plus plenty of supermarkets have discount codes that you can snap up too.
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