Quilter68, I discovered the salad bar trick a few years back. I mean, you can get salad greens for a fractions of the price of those pre-packaged ones, and they're fresh that day.
For soups and other recipes using only a bit of celery, you can fit the chopped celery in one of those salad dressing containers and it rings up for pennies. (Some stores were giving them to me for free, telling me they were sample sized anyway. That's one thing when it's celery, but quite a savings when it's chopped bacon!)
I don't get all the salad bar items. Shredded carrots were not freshly shredded, and all that exposed surface area just makes them decay that much faster. Same with cheese. And it used to be, they set out freshly chopped fruit, but now they just set out the fruit from the catering platters that didn't sell, so you're getting 1 - 2 day old chopped fruit.
And I agree with you about smaller sizes. A pint of Haagen-Dazs is 14 ounces now, I think. I bought pita bread and whoa! Size cut by at least a third. Wal-mart is selling Kellogg's Corn Flakes boxes for $1.50, which sounds good until you notice it only has 7 servings in it. Used to be, a box of corn flakes lasted a month. And Dial soap has a narrow "waistline" now, which only makes you use it faster and get rid of it when the center breaks into two pieces.