Be a smart shopper in the supermarket.

It's easy to be casual in your approach to supermarket shopping. After all, we're not talking about SUVs or HDTVs here, just a bunch of small items you pick up every week that cost no more than a few dollars each. In reality though, you can save hundreds--even thousands--of dollars each year by following our supermarket money-saving strategies.

To see just how much you might save, Consumer Reports sent two shoppers to the same supermarket to buy similar groceries, asking one to use our tips and the other to shop without a care for savings. The smart shopper spent $56 on her groceries. And the other shopper? She spent $135--a difference of $79. If you saved that much each week, you'd be ahead by more than $4,000 a year.

MONEY-SAVING TIPS

Try store brands. They can yield big savings, often with quality similar to national brands. Also consider regional brands. Our thrifty shopper bought 2 pounds of Fireside Old-Fashioned fig bars for $2.49; 2 pounds of Fig Newtons were more than $7.

Buy big, but watch for "gotchas." Although bigger packages tend to be more economical, there are exceptions. At a Wal-Mart, we found cereal that cost 8 cents less per pound in a 14-ounce box than in a 20-ounce box. Comparing unit prices is especially important when one size is on sale.

Beware of sneaky price differences. At one store, Alpine Lace low-salt Muenster cheese was sold in two areas: sliced-to-order at the deli counter and prepackaged in a display 10 feet away. The smart shopper bought the cheese at the deli, where it cost $2 less per pound.

Weigh the cost of convenience. Prepped foods often cost more. For $1.49, our smart shopper got a 214-pound head of iceberg lettuce; for the same price, her colleague got just 1 pound of bagged salad consisting mostly of iceberg lettuce. Convenient packaging costs more, too. Our smart shopper chose a canister of store-brand quick-cooking oatmeal (13 servings) for $1.59, plus the cost of milk. That was much more economical than 10 single-serving cups of Quaker Instant Oatmeal Express, costing $9.90.