As usual I was shopping around for deals. Over the past few weeks I saw some apple juice on sale for about 99 cents as you can see. This a pretty normal sale price from my experience where it gets cemented into my head that any other price is simply too expensive to warrant a time to stock up mindset.
As the weeks gone by the sale price was over and it’s kind of surprising at just how much more expensive the regular price is. As you can see, at the same store the price was now $1.98.
I was invited to go into a wholesale membership store as a person was telling me they feel things are always so much cheaper when you buy in bulk with his membership. I happened to see the exact same product where you would have to buy the items in bulk. In this case, you could buy a pack of twelve for a sale price of $11.89.
If you do the calculations, that pretty much works out to 99 cents each as well. That means it is the same sale price as from the non-membership store. At its non-sale price of $14.99 that means each of them would normally be about $1.25 each. So depending on the day you bought this it could have been more than what a regular store charged. What it made me think of too is how there are a ton of people who have a mindset where they see the price tag of this juice for $1.98 at a regular store to then see a bulk price of 99 cents each and it is like a confirmation bias of sorts that everything is always cheaper when you buy in bulk at places like these.
From my experience that just isn’t the case many times. If anything, you still have to shop around to get the best deals as each places usually have the best deals on specific items. It’s just so much more convenient to think you are saving money all the time by buy purchasing a whole stack of items as many of us are conditioned to think you must be saving a lot if you purchase so much at once.
I personally viewed these kinds of purchases more as convenience where you can just buy stacks of items at once. There is a reason why regular supermarkets as an example at times limit the amount of items you can buy with a sale price. Cause many times it is way cheaper even if you were to buy items at a bulk price or that you are getting it for the bulk price and they don’t want one person to take it all.
Again, not saying you can’t save money at places like these as there are great deals to be found. But you mixed in with those great deals are often a ton of items that can be way more expensive at other places despite you have some kind of membership.