By Kathy Lally
Special to The Washington Post
Sunday, January 23, 2005; Page F06

My husband still hasn't forgotten the time he opened a carton of cottage cheese, discovered a spot of mold and took it back to the store in Manhattan where he bought it.

"How about if I scoop that out and give you a dime back?" the store manager offered. My husband refused, and he held out for an exchange. The new container was fine, but even though some years have passed, the memory lived on, rising to the surface recently with a couple of rotten onions.

I bought a five-pound bag of onions a week or so ago and had used two or three of them before discovering that two were rotting. When my husband took the bag back to our neighborhood supermarket -- part of a big chain in the Baltimore-Washington area -- the manager on duty gave him a new bag, no questions asked. My husband had to wait only a minute, while the manager was busy with the armored car guys picking up bags of money from the store.

I've returned things to the supermarket before, but it never occurred to me that returns could be part of a smart shopping strategy until I got on the phone with Rick Doble, world champion shopper, author and operator of a Web site called Savvy-discounts.com.

Doble, who lives in North Carolina, is the kind of guy who has never paid more than $2,000 for a car and never fails to ask hotel reservations clerks, "Don't you have some kind of special at this time of year?"

He is quite prepared to return something to a supermarket, even if it isn't spoiled. It's all part of his strategy to keep his grocery bill low. Doble has several suggestions to cut costs: Make a list before shopping, design your meals around the sales, use leftovers, and -- this is where the returns come in -- buy store brands, also known as house brands, instead of more expensive national brands.

"Try a store brand for everything you use regularly," Doble said, "and if you don't like it, return it."

"The returns are very important because often people say they don't try store brands because they might not like them," he said. "But if you're prepared to return something you don't like, there's no risk."

Doble said if a family replaces about half the national brands in the grocery cart with store brands, it can save $1,000 or more a year on food bills. "Look for your food on the top shelf and the bottom shelf instead of the middle shelf," he said, adding that the national brands often pay a store a premium to place their products at eye level. The store brands are cheaper, he said, because essentially, you're buying wholesale.

"There's no advertising cost," he said. "There's no product-development cost. There's no middleman. And you're going to pay less as a result."

In the Baltimore-Washington area, supermarket chains tend to have a liberal return policy. If you have a receipt, said Jamie Miller, a spokesman for Giant Food, you should have no trouble making a return. If you don't have a receipt, it's up to the manager to decide whether to take it back.

Craig Muckle, a spokesman for Safeway, said the store will take nearly anything back with a receipt and will take back any Safeway brand. (Safeway has a couple of its own brands, including Lucerne and Safeway Select.) Baby formula is the exception: If you buy it and decide you don't want it, the store won't take it back because of health concerns. "But everything else is returnable," he said.

He agrees with Doble's suggestion that store brands are a good buy and risk-free. "We spend a lot of time developing our house brands," Muckle said, "and customers who try them are usually satisfied. If a customer isn't satisfied, we would definitely take it back."

Both Muckle and Miller said that statistics are not readily available on how many or which kinds of items are returned. Usually, Muckle said, customers return something because they bought the wrong item. While spoiled food is thrown out, stores often give dented cans or food that has expired but is still safe to organizations that help the needy. Many manufacturers and supermarkets, including Safeway and Food Lion, participate in America's Second Harvest, a national network that distributes damaged or surplus products to food banks.

Returns are important, Doble said, not only for your personal economics but because they give the store feedback, letting managers know what customers like and what they don't. He said that often shoppers resist store brands simply because the taste is different from what they've grown accustomed to. "The only trouble with store brands is that they often switch around the cereals," he said. That happens, he added, when the store turns to a different manufacturer for its sugar-coated cornflakes or other cold cereals, or simply changes the recipe. "The taste or texture will change on you."

While recipes are occasionally tweaked, Muckle said, store brands at Safeway don't change with any great frequency.

Doble suggests trying blind taste tests with your family to see if they really do notice differences in brands. "I think national brands are really excellent, but you're paying a lot more for consistency.

"Mainly, you're paying for a certain taste and texture, often a taste you've been used to since childhood."

His neighborhood supermarket is a Food Lion, and he has bought the Food Lion brand orange juice for so long he no longer likes the taste of national brands. The same is true of coffee. The trick with coffee, he said, is to make it properly with the right combination of coffee and water. If you make it badly, even the most expensive coffee will taste terrible, he said.

"If you make coffee exactly right, the store brand will taste better than the gourmet coffee," he said. And he has the testimonials to back him up. "My wife says I make the best coffee of anyone she knows."

So here's Doble's advice. Try those store brands. Give the new tastes a chance. If you're not satisfied, get your money back. But if you persevere, put the $1,000 you save into an individual retirement account every year and, after a mere 40 years of shopping, you could be banking up to $400,000 -- if you're getting a pretty good rate of return.

"People think it's only a quarter here and 25 cents there, but it adds up," Doble said.

Doble was barely warming to his subject, but he had to get off the phone. He was closing a deal on a car, a Buick Park Avenue. "I'm getting it for $1,800, and it's a '91," he said. "I'm buying it from a mechanic who put an engine in it that only has 40,000 miles. I looked in the glove compartment and saw the repair record.

"This is a good car."

He's not even thinking of returning it.