So after class yesterday I made a quick run on the Safeway, figuring to pick up enough to tide me over for a week. Not figuring to damn near faint dead away at the price of groceries!
Paid $60 for about $30 worth of food. Only food: no cleaning goods, no paper goods, no personal products, no wine, no beer, no coffee, no tea, none of that. The checkout guy was actually about to charge me $80, until I produced the Safeway red card, by which Safeway promises to give me a fair price in exchange for the personal disinformation I enter on an application form. We could say, actually, that Safeway charged my deceased German shepherd, whose telephone number (oddly enough) is the same as that of Safeway’s regional headquarters, a mere $60 for $30 worth of food.
Two and a half bucks for a head of romaine. Yea, verily, $2.50 for a head of any kind of leaf lettuce, including the pricey hydroponic stuff! After some cogitation, I realized that a large package of prewashed baby lettuce was cheaper by the ounce than a tough old head of clean-it-and-cut-it-yourself romaine. A dollar sixty-nine for a pound of apples (I got one, count it, (1), Jonagold apple at a bargain price of $1.49.
For Cassie, I found chicken hindquarters at 99 cents/pound, no “EXTREME VALUE!” since they’re full of bones. I’ll use the bones to make stock, of course. But still… Also got a package of “EXTREME VALUE!” boned pork for $1.59 a pound. These were the two cheapest items on the meat counters.
The pork, actually, looks pretty nice: it’s good and lean. Tonight I’ll cook it all up, have some of it for myself, and cut up the rest for Her Dogship. These two packages should last her about ten or twelve days. Assuming I refrain from eating much of it.
What sixty bucks bought was…
1 box of lettuce (large!)
1 bag frozen spinach
1 bag frozen mixed veggies
1 bag frozen bean/veggie/rice mixture
1 pound bacon
1 bunch fresh asparagus, about a pound
1 bunch green onions
1 head cabbage
3 bananas
1 cucumber
1 apple
32 ounces plain yoghurt
4.4 pounds pork
4.9 pounds chicken
1 package baking chocolate
Exclusive of meat for the Queen of the Funny Farm, this stuff is gonna last about a week or ten days, with luck. I have some fish and a couple small pieces of steak in the freezer, a lot of beans on the shelves, and enough cleaning supplies and toilet paper to last six months. If I don’t buy any more bacon this month, I might manage to go as much as two weeks without another grocery-store run. But I seriously doubt it.
My plan for this budget cycle is to wait until about two days before the cycle ends before making the monthly Costco run. Normally, I raid the Costco in the first day or two of the budget cycle. Because I’m about out of food and household supplies by then, I often spend upwards of $250 on this junket. Invariably some unexpected zap occurs shortly after that, making it difficult or impossible to stay on budget for the rest of the month. What I’d like to do this time is scrape along until the end of the month and then head for Costco, knowing at that time how much remains in the budget to spend. Otherwise, don’t go into Costco at all.
The theory, such as it is, proposes that one may be less likely to run out of money at the end of the month if one holds off on large routine shopping trips until the close of the budget cycle.
Now, it remains to be seen how well this theory does when tested by reality. However, I think I can eat out of the freezer and from relatively inexpensive purchases until pretty close to the ending day of this month’s budget cycle, which will be May 20. Today is April 28, a week into the current month, and this is the first grocery purchase I’ve made. Two more supermarket junkets would carry me through to the proposed month-end Costco run.
An end-cycle Costco spree would stock the larder for a good two to three weeks, delaying the need for much grocery shopping until more than halfway through next month. Thus that retiming of the Costco run could set me up to save a little on groceries, because I’d make fewer trips to supermarkets than I’m having to do this month. The problem is, I’ll be very surprised if, in a month when housekeeping supplies run low, it would be possible to stay much under $380 at Costco.
Just now I have $501 left in the cycle that started April 21. Assuming the two projected grocery-store trips also cost around $60 apiece, I spend another $55 or $60 on gasoline, I don’t get my hair done, I don’t go out to eat, and no little surprises pop up, that should leave around $321 for the proposed May Costco raid.
Sounds like a lot, eh? But last month I spent $362.10 at Costco, not counting the gas purchases. The previous month: $394.70. The month before that: $399.43. So, if that expenditure drops to $321, it’ll be a noticeable improvement.
Can it be done? Sure, if I don’t buy any booze. I buy almost all my wine at Costco; by the time you factor in a tax rate of almost 10 percent, that comes to around fifty bucks a month.
$362 – 50 = $312
Well within the desired range.
😀
If you don’t want to spend money in stores, stay out of stores!
Image: Store aisle. No artist given. Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.
Funny! I will look at the Safeway ads for your area (Phoenix?) and help you shop! I spend almost nothing on food. It’s so easy.
LOL! That would be great!
My observation has been that most of the discounts are on processed, prepared food, which I don’t eat. I usually cook from scratch; now and again you’ll see bargains on produce that’s massively in season (didn’t spot much today), and on Thursdays they often mark down meat. Yesterday (a Thursday), the only two meat items that were under $2/pound (my top limit for dog meat) were the chicken and the pork. For the dog, I search for stuff that’s under $1/pound…but if it has bones, then you’re really paying significantly more for the meat in the package.
SDXB is a superb grocery shopper. However, for him it’s a game — he gets the biggest hoot out of finding a great bargain and organizing his shopping to take advantage of each week’s offers. And…he’s willing to drive from place to place to get what he wants. He rarely buys anything from Safeway, which he thinks is too expensive. He’ll shop at Fry’s (the stores near me are in neighborhoods where I don’t unlock my car doors), Albertson’s, Food City, Walmart, Target. Instead of going to Costco, he does his big shopping trips at the Luke Air Force Base BX, which is a LONG drive from his house. Because he doesn’t have to pay local taxes, he gets a much better deal out there…maybe even enough to cover his gasoline.
Me, I don’t have the patience to do that. I’d rather pay a little extra for convenience, and I’ll pay a lot extra to shop at a venue where I feel safe in the parking lot, especially if the store’s layout, lighting, and customer service are pleasant.
This is one reason why I use coupons. And no, most of what I buy is not processed, prepared food. I cook almost entirely from scratch, (partly because of my husband’s problem with salt) . I avoid Costco. And, like SDXB, I consider grocery shopping a game.
Another reason for using coupons is that it’s tax-free money and that tickles me!
Ouch. I’m about to embark on a food-stamp budget for an article, and I’m glad I don’t shop at your Safeway….or own a dog.
Come on over and enter my anniversary giveaway. If you win the $100 Amazon gift card (or any of the other four gift cards), you can sell it online and use it to buy, oh, as many as four or five apples! 🙁
@ Donna: ohhhhh i wuz gonna blog about that today! Worked all day and haven’t had a chance to write a word. This post got written last night and scheduled to go up at 6 this ayem.
Tomorrow, for sure!
Meanwhile, Honored Readers: GO OVER TO DONNA’S SITE AND CHECK OUT THE INCREDIBLE GIVEAWAY!
Apples aren’t in season now, so of course they’re expensive (being rationed out of storage from a declining supply). On the other hand, our local markets have strawberries at buy one 2-lb box, get two identical boxes free. Bananas are really cheap. On the other hand, I’ve seen lettuce prices varying widely from week to week (and we live near the lettuce fields of California) depending on the harvest – iceberg has ranged from 37 cents to over $2 a head, green or red leaf has varied (tho not over that wide a range). Potatoes were relatively cheap early in the current harvest season, but I’ve heard their prices are going up too – in part due to the added harvest expense because of fuel prices.
With fuel & utility prices going up, I think buying seasonal fruits & vegetables is going to become even more financially prudent for the same reason – farmers are spending more to cultivate & harvest and shipping/storage expenses are higher, as a trickle-down of the fuel/utility price increases.
The food in our area seems to be steadily rises in price right along with the price of gasoline. It is a scary thought but not much can be done but to work even harder at find coupons and watching for sales to buy needed items. Good luck with your plan. It would seem to work in theory. I hope it all pans out for you in practice.
We just did a quarterly Wal Mart/Smiths run and we noticed was Wal Mart is carrying less name brands and more of their Great Value (Ha!) brands.
The bill for the 2 1/2 buggy loads at Wal Mart was easily 10% higher than in January.
Smiths on the other paw had a plethora of brands and selections (even had Sea Pac clam strips) and with our Smiths cards we got discounts that made the prices lower on many items than Wal Mart.
Checking out at Smiths is easier as they have 8 U-Scan checkouts. Wal Mart won’t do that because they think every customer is a thief and had 5 pounds of ground beef stuffed in their shorts or bra or both.
Prices are only going to go up with the Feds QE2 happening.
Yikes! I eat fresh produce almost exclusively these days and find I don’t get a lot of help from coupons either. I’ve been going budget-less for awhile and your post reminds me that I need to get back on the wagon. I’m afraid I’ll find that I’m even farther off course than I think I am!
OT – The son’s girlfriend has been accepted to graduate school at Arizona State so they are moving to your town in July. Mixed emotions but since my home keeps changing, I can’t exactly say I’d like him to be closer!