Coffee heat rising

Shopping

What’s “groceries,” anyway?

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How do you account for your spending at emporiums that sell household and personal care items as well as food? In the past, I’ve let Quicken record any charge that occurred at, say, a Safeway or an Albertson’s as “groceries.” But the truth is, a substantial part of what you buy there isn’t groceries at all—it’s household gear, personal care products, or even yard-care items.

When I bought a freezer and started the great Food Hoarding Project a few weeks ago, I decided to break these things out, so that I could see what portion of my spending is really going to food and what to household and other items. It occurred to me that this might explain how some punkin’s can report spending $200 a month (or even more spectacularly parsimonious figures) on groceries for a family of four: maybe what they’re classifying as “groceries” is food and food alone.

Yesterday I made another run on Sprouts, Costco, Target, and Safeway, pretty well making my goal of storing about three months’ worth of food and household supplies. Except for a few perishable items, I now have enough meat, vegetables, cheese, beans, rice, sugar, flour, cornmeal, pasta (& cetera) to last for a good three months, stored up against the specter of catastrophic inflation or, more realistically, of a layoff. From here on in, it shouldn’t take much to keep this store up to date, and I believe I can do that in no more than one or two trips to the markets each month.

The total amount I’ve spent on groceries (bear in mind that I was almost out of everything when I started) is $519.36. That prorates out to $173.12 a month: an all-time record low for me. Especially when you realize I don’t break out pet food, what with Cassie the Corgi dining on human food.

But maybe not so record-breaking, because cleaning products, shampoo, contact lens stuff, Bandaids, and the like previously counted as “groceries.”

Since the start of the Hoarding Project, total spending on household and personal care goods has been $151.80, which would work out to $50.60 for each of the next three months. That’s not bad either, in my universe: a total of $223.72 ($173.12 + $50.60) is still significantly less than I ordinarily have spent per month in that lumped-together “groceries” category.

But…we have to bear in mind that while I was almost out of food when I started this scheme, I had plenty of household goods: lifetime supplies of Simple Green, paper towels, toilet paper, and the like. This month’s “household” category was inflated because my ancient Brita water filter gadget broke, because I dropped my indispensable little kitchen timer on the floor and broke that, and because I decided to buy a lifetime supply of Costco’s tinfoil at a very good per-unit price but a breathtaking out-of-pocket price. If I hadn’t purchased those items, the total for “household goods” would be much lower. But in either event, the total we have is unrealistic, because I avoided buying stuff I would normally need to stock up on and because I bought items that I would normally purchase once every few years, not once every few weeks or months.

IMHO, it’s a little more enlightening to be able to see how much is actually spent on food, as opposed to everything that’s spent at a particular type of merchant. I’m not sure it’s worth the trouble, though.

So, out of curiosity: how does your accounting system register “groceries”? Do you break out supermarket and big-box purchases into categories such as “food,” “household items,” “personal care items,” and the like? Or do you lump everything that appears on a supermarket receipt into one category?

A Sucker for Packaging

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I love a cool package. They say a large part of product mark-up comes from and is made possible by creative packaging, especially for make-up. Well, I’m wise to make-up and buy that in drugstores, but when it comes to ice cream…doomed!

This noon I drove to the Social Security Administration’s offices up on Tatum, at the north end of Paradise Valley, a pretty tony venue for us welfare codgers. The Trader Joe’s that used to be nearest my house closed its doors in the ghost mall that is Metrocenter and moved to the corner of Tatum and Shea, in the same shopping center as—oh, yes!—Whole Foods. I hadn’t been into that Trader’s, because I can’t afford to shop at Whole Paycheck and because I rarely go into those rarefied climes. So, partly out of curiosity and partly because I needed to add a couple more pounds of TJ’s $2.76 butter to my horde, I stopped by the shopping center on the way home.

Trader Joe’s: no bigger, no fancier than the one at 20th Street and Camelback, but cleaner, tidier, less crowded, and ever so much more air-conditioned.

Trader’s doesn’t carry spices to speak of, and I’ve been needing some fennel seeds and some poppy seeds. Annnddd….I happen to know that Whole Foods carries a line of spices packaged in large bottles with the name of each spice emblazoned across the lid. So…if, like moi, you store the bottles on a slide-out pantry shelf below eye level, you can find what you’re looking for without having to write the spice name on the lid with a Sharpie (who would ever want to have to lift her dainty little hand for that kind of labor?) and without having to pick up each bottle in search of whatever you need.

Do they cost too much? Undoubtedly. Do I need a justification? Sure, here it is: these bottles are so big I can store all sorts of other things in them, such as dried herbs from my own garden. Love bottles I can reuse.

Now, it gets worse.

Headed out of the place, what should I pass but the ice cream freezer. It is not possible to avert your eyes from ice cream, is it? No. Ah, Ciao Bella…love! But what is this? Something called “Talenti Italian Ice Cream”…in clear, hard plastic containers with screw-on lids. Stuff’s about 20 cents more than Ciao Bella and the like, but O…M…G… Just look at those amazing reusable containers! The size of an extra-large cold-cream container with an enormous wide mouth, exactly the thing I’ve been looking all over for but haven’t been able to find. Exactly the thing to store, say, home-made potato soup in the freezer.

So. There they are in my fridge: two fine plastic containers. Incidentally, there’s some peach-champagne and some lemon sorbet in there, too. And the containers only cost me 20 cents apiece.
😉

The Grocery Pool: So far, so good

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Mwa ha hah! It’s working! It lives! The scheme to stockpile groceries and shop as though I dwelt in a remote small town where a trip to the corner store would entail a 120-mile round trip is going well. As we enter the third week of maneuvers, I’m $91.98 in the black—and that includes purchases of everything, not just groceries. Last weekend I avoided going to the grocery store altogether (!!!!!). Yesterday I bought a couple pounds of tomatoes at a farmer’s market.

febmarbudget

Having cleaned the house, edited copy, and passed the time of day with one of my best friends, today all I really must do is continue working on the Festival of Frugality (don’t forget to send in your submissions, please!). So in theory I could make a grocery run. But…do I have to?

My cumulative shopping list says “no.” The only things I need urgently are smoke alarms and mascara; to get the smoke alarms installed, I’m gunna need to get a handyman in here, and that will entail finding someone and then persuading him to show up. Neither of those are grocery items, anyway. And though it would be good to get those smoke alarms in sooner rather than later, neither item needs to be bought right now.

If I were living in Yarnell, the desert rat’s answer to Shangri-La, would I drive 120 miles to buy these things? Probably not.

At the Farmer’s Market

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Yesterday morning a friend drove into town from the far-flung suburbs so we could visit the downtown farmer’s market together. People say this is the best farmer’s market in the city. The ones I’ve seen in other parts of town have been a bit lackluster, more crafts fair than produce market, so I was curious to see what “the best” means, particularly since other bloggers say they get good deals on local produce at these operations.

Getting there was a challenge: you have to navigate the new train tracks and a labyrinth of one-way streets—the City has kindly made a nightmare of driving downtown. Parking, at least, was free: in a graveled lot with no markings, overrun by people scrambling to get space between cars left sitting cattywampus, higgledy-piggledy and willy-nilly. My friend found a paved lot, where she parked in an end space; when we went back to leave some of her purchases in the car while we walked to a restaurant, someone had parked a pickup with an extra-long truck bed at right angles to her vehicle, blocking her exit. Fortunately, the space next to her was empty, so she wriggled her car out and reparked it in that spot. While she was backing out, two drivers came along and tried to grab the empty space; if I hadn’t been standing in it, they would have blocked her from getting her car out.

We enjoyed walking around. It was a stunningly beautiful day, cool and clear. The downtown area is gentrifying apace—or it was, until the Bush economy collapsed. Strips of old, formerly abandoned 1940s stores have been renovated and repopulated with new shops, and great blocks of so-called “lofts” fill former empty lots and the sites of demolished flophouses. In downtown Phoenix, a “loft” is an overpriced condominium apartment, less overpriced now that no one can or will buy them but still out of most buyers’ reach. Sadly, the area is still populated with homeless mentally ill people living on the streets, the first and worst symptom of America’s ailing healthcare system. As I was leaving, a particularly desperate panhandler came after me and would not stop pestering me even after I got into the car and locked the door.

The farmer’s market offered more produce and preserves per square yard than others here in Arizona, but about half the booths were occupied by people selling tie-dyed shirts, crocheted scarves, wood carvings, pottery, handmade soap, lost-wax metalwork, bead jewelry, and on and on. Prices didn’t strike me as much of a bargain, considering that a raft of middlemen supposedly are cut out of the marketing process.

I bought 2.5 pounds of tomatoes—a handful of vine tomatoes, two heirlooms, and two green tomatoes that I intend to fry for breakfast this morning—for $7.39. That was not a bad price: $2.95 a pound; unclear whether these were organic, but they didn’t appear to be. Potatoes and sweet potatoes were a dollar a pound. We came across a lady selling some exceptionally delicious hummus; I proposed to buy a container of that for $3.00 and a bag of pita chips for $6.00. On second thought, though, after the vendor mentioned that the stuff didn’t contain any tahini but really was just puréed chickpeas, garlic, and olive oil, I decided nine bucks was a little much for a can of beans and a bag of chips, especially since I have a perfectly fine food processor sitting in my kitchen.

After my friend and I parted, I wondered idly how some of the prices we’d encountered would compare with with grocery-store prices. So, on the way home I stopped by AJ’s (my favorite gourmet emporium and home of the Elegantly Overpriced Commodity) and Safeway (itself no bargain corner).

At AJ’s, vine tomatoes were selling for $2.99 a pound; green tomatoes, a rarity in stores here, were offered for $3.99. Campari tomatoes, the variety I buy because they are the only tomatoes with anything resembling flavor available in this part of the country, were $4.99. Pita snacks ran from $6 to $20 for a package. AJ’s carries our vendor’s hummus: $4.99, two bucks more than buying it directly from its maker at the farmer’s market. Potatoes were $1.49 a pound.

At Safeway, I couldn’t find pita chips, but a package of pita bread sold for $2.19 for ten pieces; easy enough to paint it with olive oil, cut it into triangles, and crisp in the oven. A can of chickpeas cost all of $1.39 for organic and $1.00 for nonorganic. Campari tomatoes were selling for the same price as AJ’s; vine tomatoes were $2.69 a pound. Neither store had any heirloom tomatoes. Sweet potatoes were $1.29 a pound, but regular Idaho potatoes went for 5 pounds for 99 cents—about 25 cents a pound.

Okay. Given that you’d have to make your own hummus (a process that would take all of about 5 minutes) and substitute bread, toast, or tortilla chips if you didn’t want to dork with cutting up and toasting pita bread, let us compare the costs:

Hummus:

Farmer’s market: 3.00
Gourmet market: $4.99
Safeway DIY ingredients: $1.00 plus a few drops of olive oil and lemon juice

Tomatoes:

Farmer’s market: 2.95 a pound
Gourmet market: $2.99 to $3.99 a pound
Safeway: $2.69 a pound

Potatoes:

Farmer’s market: $1.00 a pound
Gourmet market: $1.49 a pound
Safeway: 25 cents a pound

Pretty consistently, the Safeway underpriced the farmer’s market and the AJ’s on the goods I was prepared to purchase this weekend.

Even where the farmer’s market was a few cents cheaper, one has to question the cost of the hassle factor: shopping there requires a significant investment of time. The site was so crowded and so cluttered with sellers of kitsch that it was hard to make your way to the food stands. To buy something, you were supposed to get a slip of paper on which each of your desired purchases was marked, go to a central cash collection site to pay, and then take the receipts back to each of the vendors you’d visited. This would entail elbowing your way to the desired vendors and standing in line not once, not twice, but three times for each purchase you made!

Fortunately, some of the vendors would take cash and credit cards. Just as fortunately, the hummus vendor did not, and the prospect of dorking around in two more lines deflected me from making that impulse buy. In terms of gasoline expended, the Safeway is a third as far from my house as is downtown; the AJ’s is half as far. And no panhandlers harassed me in either grocer’s parking lot.

For a special outing, it was fun. But day by day, it’s not a venue I would add to my regular round of places to buy groceries.

Food Futures! Three-month stash grubstaked

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The plan to store and keep on hand three months’ worth of foodgot fully under way with a day-long voyage to every food and junk emporium within driving distance.

A week ago, M’hijito and I picked up the freezer at Costco, and he helped get it out of the vehicle and into its place of honor. Yah, I know: would’ve been cheaper to buy it off Craig’s List. But that would have a) entailed traipsing 30 or 40 miles across the Valley and b) left me with an unknown quantity. For a reasonable price—two hundred bucks—I got a brand-new unit with a warranty from a retailer that will take practically anything back.

Next steps were to estimate about about how much I would need to create a three-month stash of food and necessities, and then to reconnoiter to see how much was already on hand. I created an Excel list of all the storable supplies I could think of and estimated (sometimes wildly) how much would be needed for one month and how much for three months—the one-month guesses because there’s no way I can afford to buy all of three months’ supplies of everything I use from day to day. Here’s a PDF of the result.

A check of the refrigerator’s freezer revealed a surprising amount of meat—over a month’s worth. Of late I seem to be eating less and less meat, partly because in the absence of a gas grill it’s more trouble to cook than it’s worth. My stash was heavy on pieces of steak and light on fish and chicken, so I decided to pick up some of those at Costco, where both are already packaged for freezing.

Based on how much I already had in the house, I made a shopping list in Word showing how much of each item was needed to supply one month’s needs and how much for three months. Some items were likely to be found at more than one vendor: some things Safeway carries, for example, might be cheaper at Target or Food City. And some items that I would like to buy in lifetime supplies don’t appear at Costco: demerara sugar (shown on my list as “crunchy sugar”) is one such. In those cases, I listed the possible sources in separate columns. Then I had Word sort the table first by Vendor 1 and then by Vendor 2. This grouped all the things I needed to purchase by the stores where I thought I could find the stuff.

And then it was off to the high seas of commerce! M’hijito, having nothing much better to do with his time and needing to go to Costco anyway, joined the expedition as sherpa-in-chief. Thanks goodness! I don’t know how I would have hauled all the junk myself, or even stuck with the plan: it was 2:30 in the afternoon before I got home, and I’d left around 9:30 in the morning.

Surprisingly, this enterprise cost nothing like what I expected. I’d planned to spend about $500 for the initial grubstaking of the project. But the grand total of charges from Costco, Safeway, Sprouts, and Target came to $375.36, only $75 more than my usual weekly budget. I still have to buy gas, which will cost about $25—but that’s still only about $100 more than I normally spend every week trotting around to supermarkets and big boxes. For that amount, I got a full month’s supply of food, and then some.

But the truth is, the food alone cost significantly less: about $322. As part of the junket, I bought a number of nonfood items: storage jars, baskets to organize goods in the freezer, antibiotic ointment, trash bags, sponges, seeds for the garden. Three hundred and twenty-two bucks is not bad, for putting in up to three months’ of food.

Now we’ll see if this works! Can she stay out of grocery stores?

jul8yarnell1It would be ideal if I could cut trips to grocery and box stores to no more than two a month, after a first-of-the-month stocking-up foray. Because I have some produce growing in the garden—chard, lettuce, carrots, beets, onions, herbs—this just might work. It would be like living in Yarnell, my sun-parched brain’s idea of Bali Hai: clinging to the edge of the Mogollon Rim, you couldn’t very well drive 60 or 80 miles one-way to buy a few convenience items, and so you’d learn to make do between monthly expeditions.

In addition to the obvious savings from simply staying out of stores and having to plan each shopping list carefully, I believe that storing up a cache of food and household supplies, which undoubtedly will grow as the months pass, will create a hedge against the inflation we can expect to come down on us with a vengeance. Whether that happens or not, at the very least it will be a safety net in case of a layoff, or against the time when I retire and see my income drop by about 60 percent. Any way you look at it, this appears to be a good idea.

The grocery pool

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The pooling scheme I came up with for budgeting has worked exceptionally well. In short, all inflowing cash goes into a single checking account at the credit union. From there, the amount needed to cover recurring monthly expenditures, such as utility and insurance bills, goes into an account from which EFTs are drawn, automatically paying my various creditors. Another amount, currently budgeted at $1,200, goes to a money market checking account, where it is held to pay the monthly American Express bill; I charge all expenditures other than regular bills on this card and pay it off at the end of each billing cycle. Three hundred dollars goes from the “pool” into an escrow account each month, to pay annual property tax, car insurance, and homeowner’s insurance. And finally, $400 a month (soon to drop to around $100, thanks to the furloughs) is transferred to savings.

The upshot of this is that there is always enough to pay the bills. And then some: because the de facto pay cut created by the switch to bimonthly pay forced me to live on $220 a month less than I used to have, the two so-called “extra” checks this system presses on us go unspent. Over the course of a year, the equivalent of two net paychecks has ended up in savings.

Here’s where I’m going with this: Why couldn’t you do something similar with grocery and household supplies?

Suppose you took a chunk of savings, as I did when I originally bankrolled the “pool” account, and used it to buy a full month’s worth of groceries and cleaning supplies. Wouldn’t that have the same effect as “pooling” your income? Over time, it would create a fair amount of savings. Here’s how:
1. Given that the original month’s grocery stash would include a lot of staples (things like flour, salt, sugar), you probably wouldn’t use it all during a month. So, if you repeated your first stash run at the beginning of the second month, by the start of the third month you would always be way ahead of yourself. In other words, after the first two months, instead of buying a whole month’s worth of goods at a time, all you’d be doing is restocking, and you would never drop below a month of supplies in your stash. Over time, you likely would find yourself having to restock less and less.
2. Because you rarely would be in any hurry to restock—this assumes you keep an eye on what you have and become aware that you will need x or y before you run out—you could wait to make purchases until you found the items on sale or until you had time to drive across the city to retailers with better prices than those available at closer-in stores.
3. Three weeks of every four, you would stay out of grocery stores! We’ve already seen that simply not going into stores saves a surprising amount of cash.
4. It would force you to plan and to write lists; once you arrived at a store, you would be very focused on acquiring only the things you needed, and so you would be less tempted to make impulse buys. As commenter Anne reported, research by the supermarket industry has shown that a list is one of your most powerful money-saving tools at the grocery store.
5. Think of the amount of time it would save! I dunno about you, but I spend half of Saturday or Sunday driving around to grocery stores, searching for products, and standing in line at check-out counters. That doesn’t count the time spent stopping by a store on the way home to pick up things I’ve run low on or forgotten during the weekend expeditions. Shopping is far from my favorite pastime. Imagine having your entire weekend free to do what you want to do!

I’m going to try it.

Here’s my plan:

First, use some of the savings I’ve stashed over the past few months to buy a freezer ($200 at Costco).

Next, clean off some shelves in the storage room and in the garage to make space for dry goods, cleaning supplies, and personal items (such as shampoo, contact lens solutions, soap).

Third, compile a well thought out list of all the stuff I need over the course of a month.

Fourth, buy some airtight containers for grain products, such as flour, cornmeal, and oatmeal (or make room in the freezer for them).

Fifth, buy some wire baskets to organize goods in the freezer.

Sixth, reallocate the AMEX budget, which currently is divided into four equal “chunks” allowing about $300 a week for food, gasoline, household and yard goods, pool supplies, pet costs, and incidental expenses. Front-load the budget to allow about $500 in the first week (this will cover gasoline and a few other items in addition to a month’s worth of groceries), and cut the amount available in the other three weeks.

Seventh, download or clip coupons to assist in getting better buys.

Eighth, on February 21, which is the first day of the billing cycle (the food & incidental budget runs on the AMEX billing cycle, not from the first to the last of each month), spend the entire darned day running around buying enough to stock the first one-month stash. Package and store things so they will keep and can be accessed from the oldest stuff to the newest.

Ninth, keep a running list of items that need to be replenished. Try to refrain from buying these things until the next shopping expedition.

Tenth, on March 21, make a second run on the stores. In addition to replenishing things that have run low, purchase a second full month’s worth of stash goods. This will enlarge the stash so that at any given time it should contain well over a month of food and household goods.

Freaking brilliant, isn’t it? Sometimes I amaze me.

It has several golden advantages.

1. Over the long run, it should save a lot of money on groceries.

2. It forms a kind of “emergency fund,” in kind instead of in cash. Should I lose my job (a prospect that looks less unlikely as the days pass), I’ll have enough food in the house to last for several weeks. During that time, I should be able to earn enough to get a grip on making ends meet. Not having to buy groceries for a month will make that challenge a lot easier.

3. It saves a phenomenal amount of time and, three weeks out of each month, relieves me of a tedious chore.

4.Over time, the stash may accrue, just as money in the “pool” checking account accrues. In a year or so (assuming I keep my job and so can continue the monthly purchasing), this strategy could result in my having a lot of food, household supplies, and personal goods stored in the house. Effectively, it will grubstake retirement. When I do retire and see my income drop drastically, I will not have to worry about where my next meal will come from.