Are bulk-buying and offers just a false economy?

[LovingTheseAutumnSnippets]

I am just taking a break from spring cleaning my kitchen. One of the reasons I am doing this is to take stock of what I have.

I've run down my cupboards of food and just started on the herb/oils/tea & coffee cupboard of which there are 2.

For some reason I have 4 bottle of Rapeseed oil, 4 bottles of Olive Oil, Olive oil with garlic and 5 bottles of coconut oil. 50% of them are half empty. Then there are quite a few boxes of tea bags I forgot I had.

I'm pretty sure that I bought these either because they were on offer or because I felt under pressure to have them incase WW3 happened.

So, it got me thinking. If I was running a shop, I'd probably go out of business because my stock control is bad. Peter Jones and Deborah Meaden would hand me my arse on a plate. It's money in the cupboard, not working effectively for me. It is not worth anything until I use it, or bin it as the date has gone.

How do you effectively stock control your kitchen so you don't run out, but then aren't wasting money? Any tips?

Also, is bulk buying just a false economy? Are we better off and waiting till we need it, even if it costs 20p more?

We only bulk buy things we actually need and use regularly. I keep tabs on which supermarkets are doing the offers by using their online shopping apps, and use that to write my shopping lists. I rotate the shops I go to, so Tesco one week, Morrisons the next, and so on, so over a month I go once to each of the main stores, and buy things that are on offer (that we need) from each when they're on offer rather than when we need them.

I never do impulse buying, always shop by a shopping list, which means I never buy things we don't need. I also never buy things that aren't on some kind of offer unless there's no alternative or they're things that are never on offer.

I know I save probably £10/£20 per week by pre-planning and rotating which shops I go to.