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.