Smopper Insights
Grocery prices around Pittsburgh. A blog.
I’m Ashley. I built Smopper and I write everything here. Usually a post starts because something in a store did not add up and I went home to check it against the data. If I cannot verify a number, I leave it out. About me
December 31, 2025·Buying Guides
Meat Price Patterns: Timing Your Protein Purchases
Meat is the most seasonal thing in your cart and the most freezable. Here is the month-by-month pattern for beef, chicken and pork, and how to buy against it.
December 31, 2025·Buying Guides
Five Habits That Actually Cut My Grocery Bill
Seasonal planning, preserving, substitution and knowing what your store costs you. The five things that survived contact with a real week, and the two that did not.
December 29, 2025·Buying Guides
Your Grocery Buying Guide: When to Buy for Maximum Savings
buying fresh groceries can be more affordable or pricier depending on the time of the year.
December 29, 2025·Store Comparisons
My backstory
growing up as an only child to a single mom who works full-time, having homecooked meals was a challenge.
December 29, 2025·Inflation
The Real Cost of Food Inflation, and How Smart Shopping Can Help
Food prices rose 24% between January 2020 and January 2023 and never came back down. Here is what that actually did to a weekly grocery bill, and the part of it you can still control.
December 26, 2025·Store Comparisons
How Smopper Was Born
Smopper was created to fight back against high grocery prices
November 13, 2025·Price Trends
What a Free Turkey Actually Costs: The Threshold Promo, Worked Out
Spend $150, get a free turkey. I ran the numbers on our own price data to find out when that offer is genuinely good and when it quietly costs you money.
October 23, 2025·Buying Guides
Twelve Store-Brand Swaps, Six Weeks: Which Ones I Kept
I replaced twelve name-brand staples with the store brand and tracked what I actually noticed. Nine stuck, three did not, and the savings were not where I expected.
October 2, 2025·Store Comparisons
Which Pittsburgh Grocery Store Is Actually Cheapest? We Checked Our Own Database.
Aldi, Giant Eagle and Kuhn's Market, compared on price per unit across seven staple categories using Smopper's own price data. Aldi wins six of seven, and the exception is the interesting part.
September 10, 2025·Price Trends
I Weighed 31 Packages in My Own Pantry. Eleven Had Shrunk.
A shrinkflation story sent me to my kitchen scale with a notebook. Here is what a month of checking net weights against old receipts and archived listings actually turned up.
August 19, 2025·Buying Guides
Nine Ounces Is Not a Pound: How to Actually Use a Unit Price
Pennsylvania has required unit pricing on shelf tags since 1979. Our database holds butter priced eleven different ways. Here is where those little numbers fall apart and the habit I use instead.
Prices move and they are different four miles away, so check your own store before you count on anything I write. If a post has gone stale or looks wrong where you shop, tell me and I will fix it. You can also price your own list with the same data these posts come from.