This article is about saving while still buying quality products, some of you will find it a little bit ridicolous but when you're 25 you need to save where you can and it's still nice to be able to buy branded products; obviously if you go to a discount you'll pay probably even less.
I'm using Pantry since months now and I'm starting to notice some relief in my monthly budget for food and grocery shopping.
For those who don't know, Pantry is a service from Amazon that let you fill one box of 20kg capacity for 4Eur (it may depends on where you're located) with branded articles sold at discount prices.
First of all prices aren't always the same, they tend to be less than the ones offered in Grocery stores but even on Amazon there are offerts sometimes as well as expensive articles, so the first thing to do is go to your routing store and buy every article that you normaly use and also that aren't Discount Articles, so you'll have your receipt for comparison.
Now that you have an idea of what you usually need in your home go to Amazon in the pantry section and start to look at every article you normally buy, and place the ones with the lowest pricetag in your cart.
one thing you should avoid is to place articles that fill more than the 2% of your box so in order to succed you should choose articles that are lower in price than the Grocery's store.
So now talking about numbers;
If you use Amazon pantry, buying one box of articles you'll spend:
4eur + 20eur (Amazon Prime)per year,
That means if you buy one box every months you'll spend 5,6eur just for the service
This is the treshold you need to look at when calculating the prices.
Now if you buy articles that occupy 2% in your Pantry Box, you'll find yourself with 50 articles.
Let's have some examples:
Now the trick is to calculate every month how much you use of each article and place it that exact amount in the cart.
Being myself italian, I eat a lot of Pasta, me and my girlfriend tend to eat almost each day half a pack of pasta or 2/5th a package every day.
So being 30 days each month eating 2/5th each days we eat around we eat around 5 packs of 500gr pasta and I have my preferences on Brands (Garofalo, Rummo, Del Fiore) if I go to a Store like the ones we have here (Conad, Coop, Coal but also international Aucan, Carrefour) costing 1,10 each I'll pay for my branded articles around 6 eur for a month of Pasta.
On amazon they cost around 70 cent, so I will save around 40cent for each pack for a total of 2,50eur.
So we have 2,50eur so far and we occupied just 13% of the box.
If you have enough space in your home you could think about buying articles like detergent or soap that you could store, looking always for products that occupy less than 2% of the box and trying to save at least 30cent on each one you could save more.
Let's pretend we're still with our pasta box, and we have to fill an 87% of it, so going with articles that occupy 2% and cost 30cent less than you're trusted Grocery Store you'll have 44 more articles to save on, for a total of 13,70eur + the 2,50eur we already saved; we can round it by deficit at 16eur minus the infamous 5,6eur we have saved around 10 eur.
...And it's delivered to your house...
Hey! it's enough for your monthly Netflix account, Spotify or a pizza with friends.
Conclusion
Yes you can save using Pantry, buy you need to buy a considerable number of articles and also just the ones that are considerably lower in price, so it's no good for buying things that you need that exact moment.
I believe if you have one article that doesn't waste or that you just use a lot you could fill the box, probably saving even more than 10eur on that specific article.
Cons I found:
Still not enough articles to choose from and it would be cool to be able to buy from other nations Amazons. (.co.uk for example)