Beating The High Cost Of Eating

Consumer specialist, author, lecturer and regular television and radio talk show guest Barbara Salsbury is the presenter for this guide to smarter grocery shopping. Salsbury offers a mix of simple common sense and useful tips in a style and language that is both annoyingly commercial and unnecessarily jargon-ridden. For example, Earth shattering secret No. 1: "multiple resource shopping" which, in plain English, means shopping at more than one store (who doesn't?). Viewers are repetitively told about "clues," "secrets," and "reverse keys," while being shown yet another form to fill out to apparently maximize one's shopping potential (sets of forms can be ordered from Salsbury). There are indeed a handful of useful tips here (comparison price shopping, "plan to eat the bargains that you find," etc.), but they could have been delivered in a solid half-hour tape, not a 100-minute opus that is more exhortation than advice. Do people really need to be lectured on the fact that their individual chances for winning supermarket contests are slim? In short, there are a couple of good pointers here that will help really serious grocery shoppers save as much as 1/3rd of their grocery budget over the long run. But you've got to wade through tons of paperwork and buzzwords to get them. For many, the price of saving money will be just too high. An optional purchase. (Available from: Salsbury Enterprises, 1453 Mary Ann Dr., Santa Clara, CA 95050; (408) 984-8611.)