My Walmart has sales sometimes, but the lowest I've ever gotten butter there for is $2/lb. My costco only carries salted butter, which isn't much help. Lol!
Sam's and BJ's both have unsalted butter. I've never been inside the local Costco (2 wholesale memberships are enough for me 
) so I can vouch for what they have for butter.
I've never seen the butter less than $1.99/pound either at the local gorcery store or Wal*Mart either. It definitely is hard to make sure you are getting the best deal.
FromScratch, did your username used to be Jkalman (or some variation)? Your avatar is very familiar.
It took me a while to "like" IMBC because I do NOT like butter. I love the texture and smoothness of it and I also like the fact that it doesn't have shortening in it. I use it exclusively for my business and everyone seems to love it.
I use as little butter as possible in my recipe and I also add a lot of clear quality vanilla extract. To keep it from being so yellow, I use Challenge Butter which is less yellow in color than most butters. I also use dried pasturized egg whites which are less expensive than "real" egg whites and then I have no worries about the "egg" safety issues.
For my 8 cup recipe I only use 6 sticks of butter and 1/4 cup of vanilla extract. IMBC is also really good when you add other flavors in it such as strawberry or raspberry puree (my clients think the Strawberry taste like strawberry icecream). If you add oreo cookies into it, it makes an awesome cookies and cream cake.
SMB is the exact same as IMBC but with a different cooking method.
My husband and I also think its taste like sweet butter. We ended up using it on toast and muffins. I was very disappointed. I actually liked it before I added the butter when it was just a meringue but can you use it in that state without the butter?
You can use the frosting in the meringue state without adding the butter. It is called 7 minute frosting actually. There are recipes all over the internet for it. 
As for too buttery tasting IMBC (I use SMBC myself), you CAN play with the amount of butter you use! It took me a LONG time to get it right because mine tasted WAY too buttery in the beginning too, but once I got it, it was prefect and heavenly!
The white chocolate recipe that someone else posted sounds awesome, but I actually use even significantly less butter than that to the same amount of egg whites and just a tad bit more sugar, and it still works and holds up like a dream! The frosting is even much whiter than it used to be when I was using a recipe that contained much more butter. I do not use salted butter, but I do add a little salt. It's darn good stuff. My vanilla bean SMBC tastes exactly like Dryer's vanilla bean ice cream! I could eat this stuff with a spoon right out of the mixing bowl! (sometimes I do! hehe) YUM!!
FromScratch, did your username used to be Jkalman (or some variation)? Your avatar is very familiar.
Yes... I changed it to lie low as someone was giving me a hard time... not on here directly but via email referencing some things from here. But I am going to see if I can change back as I can't get used to my new skin and hiding is letting them win anyway.
Eh what can you do right? I've blocked the email addresses and have sharpened my abilities to ignore.
Thank you though for the support... it's good to know that people appreciate what you have to offer. 
I can't imagine someone taking the time to write a hateful email. That is just plain ol' stupid. Besides, I've only good things to say about your advice.
For those who use IMBC or SMBC on the outside of your cakes, does it matter to you that it doesn't crust? I've only done one like this and it didn't go very well because I kept marring the surface every time I tried to add the fondant decorations (it's the ALEX cake in my pics). I got paranoid and put it in the fridge until serving and then nobody would eat the icing... not a great success so I've tended towards crusting BCs instead since then. I do love the flavour and texture of SMBC though, and would really like to master the technique. Any tips welcome... plsthnx!
it's best to decorate the cake when its really cold so you do less damage to the icing and then when its time to serve it, you need to bring it up to room temp, usually takes about a half hour but sometimes longer depending on how cold your fridge is and how cold it is in the house.
I didn't read all of the pages here but definitely use good unsalted butter, make sure your syrup is correctly made and you can even add a little 10x to it if it's too buttery and not sweet enough. It's best when used fresh. I loooooove it. I switched from Martha Stewart's IMBC to Rose Levy Beranbaum's mousseline, it's even better.
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