Grocery Shopping.....Part 1

Can we talk about grocery shopping?  This has always been my go-to category when I needed to really tighten the belt.  But I've kind of reached a point where I'm not sure I can reasonably cut this budget down any more without resorting to my college diet of ramen noodles and Cheerios.  Between meal planning and buying in bulk when I can, I've pretty much got a system down where I can feed three people for $75 a week, though the boys do tend to bitch about not having "good" snacks.  Plus, I'm eating low carb, so that poses an additional complexity.  Here's how I do it:

The process usually starts with figuring out what the heck we're going to eat for the next two weeks.  I use an app called Pepperplate to organize my recipes and menus.  It even generates my shopping list.  I can also plan which meal to make on which day so I plan to make the meals with the stuff that's likely to go bad sooner earlier rather than later.  The "what's for dinner?" question is solved quickly as well.  It's pretty awesome.

I try to plan ten dinners for every two weeks (plus a few breakfast type things and lunches for the kiddo).  Of these ten , two of them will be meals that can be made in batches and frozen.  This week I'm making a creamy, spicy chicken thing for the crockpot.  I'll make three or four of them, eat one this week and put the rest in the freezer.

Freezer Number 1.  I've just stocked ground beef apparently

But wait, why only 10 meals?  That's 5 meals a week.  This is where the freezer meals come in.  I've built up quite the stock of freezer meals, so one night a week we plan to eat something out of the freezer stash.  One other night is what we call "Open Night."  That means that everyone, including the 6 year-old, can open the fridge, open the pantry, or (rarely) open the car door to go to the store/restaurant.  That can mean leftovers, or a freezer meal, or we can get creative with what's in the house.  A lot of times this means that the carbivores who live in my house have some kind of noodle-y creation or cheapo frozen pizza.

Next, I let Pepperplate create a shopping list for me.  I go through the house and check off anything that I already have.  This usually cuts my list in half and mostly prevents me from doing stupid shit like buying onions every time I go to the store because there was that one time I was out of onions and now it's stuck in my head that we need onions....or is that just me?  I take my shopping list (and Alexa list because I've finally trained the rest of the members of my house to put things on the list as we run out) and I plug it into an online grocery shopping portal.  I have a confession to make.  I love, love, love being able to order by groceries and then pick them up without having to go into the store.  I'm an introvert who just doesn't want to people, especially after a long day at work.  It also cuts impulse spending down to nil.

In addition to avoiding humanity, having an online order also allows me to establish a baseline price for my shit.  Because something might seem like a good deal until you realize that you'd be going out of the way to save a quarter.  It's at this point that I finally check the other stores for their weekly loss leaders.  I know this is kind of backwards from how a lot of experts say it should be done, but hear me out.  If the loss leaders are a great deal and it's something that I can store and/or use up before their expiration, I stock up.  I'll check these items against my online order and delete anything that I will be stopping for elsewhere.  If I decide it's worth it to stop for one thing, I'll also check everything else on my list.  It might not be worth it to me to stop at the little corner store that's a mile out of my way for 20 cents off lemons, but if I'm going to be stopping for $5 off ground beef, I might as well get the cheaper lemons too.

So all this is to say that, for me, it doesn't necessarily matter if chicken isn't on sale when I'm planning my meals because chicken was on sale three weeks ago and I still have a ton of it in the freezer.  I'll replenish it when it goes back on sale.  I try to keep, at minimum, a working supply of chicken, beef, and pork on hand.  Having the bulk of my groceries already ordered means that I have a good idea of how much I have to work with that week for bulk buying.  If my budget is $150 and my regular order is $117 then I know I have $33 to spend on loss leaders.  And some weeks, the loss leaders suck.  In that case, I'll either see if I'm running low on something and buy the family pack for a slightly better price or stick the surplus into a sinking fund so that if there's a smoking deal a few weeks later I can really cash in.  It pays to know your local sales cycles to know when certain things are likely to go on sale.

Now it's just a matter of ordering everything else and picking it up.  And prepping everything for storage.

BUT......................

This week I thought I'd give Aldi a real try.  It's not that I hate Aldi or think that it's icky.  On the contrary, I have liked it every time I've been in.  I really like their coffee.  But the closest one is 20 miles from my house and on a really congested intersection.  It might as well be across the world most days.  Even going after work when I'm already sorta, kinda in the area seems like it's a long way.  However, Google Maps tells me that it's really only 4 miles out of the way.  Even with my big ass SUV, that's like 50 cents worth of gas.  So, this afternoon I'm going to give it a try.  I've got my reusable bags.  Okay, it's actually a bunch of plastic bags from other stores that I'm going to reuse for this...that counts right?  I've got my quarter.  I've got my shopping list already loaded in the Walmart app so I know what my target prices are.  I'm very curious as to whether or not it will end up being worth it.  Stay tuned for part two...