For myself, I have a few different stores in my city: Albertsons, United, Amigos, Fiesta Foods and of course Walmart. All these stores have ad flyers that go out every Tuesday for the Wednesday weekly sales. You don't need to actually get the flyers in your newspaper or mail, heck, I ONLY get United! BUT you can find the ads on their websites! So you get a piece of paper and pen handy (or do what I do and open up a Word document) and start to jot down all the sale items you would use, listed by store and the sale price.

Then you take the list, whatever cookbooks or recipe sites you use and start to craft a meal plan from it (I usually plan each week). Typically I plan out a week's worth of meals (breakfast, lunch and dinner plus snacks and a desert or two!).

From your meal plan you can then write out a grocery list of exactly what you need for the week, then just take your grocery list and the list of sale items and go to Walmart. Walmart will match ANY sale price and so you can get everything that was on sale without having to drive to a bunch of different stores. Also, you don't need to have the flyers on hand (but to be safe you should print out a copy of the price match policy and keep it with you when you go because some cashiers don't know their own policies! http://www.walmartstores.com/10563.aspx ). This also helps to vastly cut down the time you spend in the store as you know exactly what you want AND it helps from spending more money by buying things you don't need.

This type of shopping works very well with Batch Cooking and Freezer Cooking and has the potential to save a ton of cash, more posts on this later.

Here is a simple example:

I have found these items on sale (very simplified as usually I can find a whole lot of stuff on sale between 4 stores):

Meats: whole chicken, chuck roast, pork ribs

Fruits and Veggies: apples, pears, kiwi, onions, celery, green beans, broccoli, salad mix, limes, mushrooms, bell peppers.

So armed with my list I look over recipes I have and decide on:

Dinners:

Roast Chicken with Vegetables
Broccoli Chicken Braid
Simple Country Ribs with Vegetable Chowder and Salad
Vegetable Beef Soup
Slow Cooker Pot Roast
Shredded French Dip Beef for French Dip sandwiches and homemade oven fries
Spicy Garlic Lime Chicken with Steamed Broccoli & Carrots and Salad

(Keep in mind we are a very carnivorous family so we have meat almost every day, but you could save money on cutting out a few of the dinners and making slightly bigger batches and then having leftovers.)

Lunches: (cook a bit extra of the meats)

Chicken Salad
Chicken wraps
Roast beef sandwiches
Left over vegetable chowder and vegetable beef soup

Breakfast:
Fruit to go in pancakes, cereal, waffles, oatmeal
Vegetable omelets (peppers, onions, mushrooms and a bit of cheddar cheese)

Snacks:
Fruit
Various vegetables (sliced bell peppers, celery sticks, carrots, etc)

I can then make my grocery list from the menu plan, listing exactly how much of everything I will need and hit Walmart!