unit price shopping

[forestdale]

I did a unit price check on tea today.  I'd been thinking for a while now that loose tea was cheaper than tea bags.  It's certainly better quality tea and I much prefer the taste of loose tea.  I generally make my tea in a cup using a one cup tea ball that looks like a spoon with holes in it.  You just put the tea in it - I use ½ a teaspoon (2.5 grams) and pour on the boiling water.  When I have visitors, I make tea in a pot, using a larger tea ball on a chain.

Here's the breakdown using prices from my local supermarket.  I often use organic tea but these are regular pesticide-free tea prices.  All these prices are for the same brand of tea. The serving suggestion is 1 teasoon per person, I use half this and still get perfect tea.

Loose tea 250 gram pack - $2.74 - 0.054 per teaspoon

50 tea bags - $2.38 - 0.476 per cup

200 tea bags - $4.43 - 0.224 per cup

Even though the 200 pack of tea is cheaper, I'm sticking with the loose tea as it's 0.027 per cup using the Â½ teaspoon measure that I use.

Do you have any interesting unit price breaksdowns to share?

[cheapgeek]

There's a bulk food chain here in Canada that prices everything /100 g. So I recently set up a price book (spreadsheet, actually) where I could compare their prices to prepackaged goods at the other stores where I shop. Of course, the packages are rarely the same weight, and I'm not good at doing math on the fly so the spreadsheet has been a real eye-opener.

Bulk baking powder: .36/100 g
packaged: .55/100 g

Bulk molasses: .13/100 g
packaged: .26/100 g
Cheaper to buy in bulk.

But: their bulk pasta: .22/100 g
packaged: .11/100 g
Double the price to buy from bulk.

Lots of little surprises that you'd never notice if you didn't break it down to unit price.