Monday Teeny Poll
By Glinda
Yesterday my husband went grocery shopping. He came home with approximately fifteen items. The bill came out to over one hundred dollars, yet there was no filet mignon or fresh crab legs on the list. More like apples, bananas, and whole wheat bagels.
According to this lovely table from the Beareau of Labor Statistics, the year-over-year increase in inflation of food and beverage prices from March of last year to March of this year was a whopping 4.4 percent. But as I stated above, I didn’t need that graph to tell me that the daily cost of living, from food to gasoline, has risen.
April 21st, 2008 at 9:44 pm
You know, you need to hire me to do your shopping. I could happily grocery-shop for a living. I adore it, and I am very, very good at it. The #1 way to control costs is to choose your stores. I live three blocks from a market veggie store that sells food at wholesale prices, but sells meat at retail prices. I buy my veggies there. I buy my meat at Save-On-Meats, which is shockingly cheap. I buy my canned tomatoes and staples at a bulk food store. Yes, it’s three trips. BUT. It’s also about $25 a week per person for food.
April 22nd, 2008 at 12:01 am
Also, it turns out that the largest single cost factor for food is transportation. The 100-mile diet is looking smarter and smarter, which is kind of too bad for people who live in Maine or the Yukon.
April 22nd, 2008 at 1:41 am
We are living off our food storage at the moment, so we are hardly spending anything of groceries. I am glad that we are moving to a place with a much lower cost of living than California. I know we would be hurting if we were staying here.
April 22nd, 2008 at 6:57 am
We just bought a CSA produce share, and we’re on a wait list for a meat CSA (Community Supported Agriculture.) Since food prices are going up, I’d much rather support a local farmer than big agribusiness companies.
This web site is great for locating CSA’s in every state:
Local Harvest
April 22nd, 2008 at 11:30 am
Left to his own devices, Mr. Twistie would spend pretty much our entire budget on food because he doesn’t grock the concept of bargain shopping in that regard. Every month I try to tell him that Trader Joe is cheaper than the most upscale Safeway and our friendly neighborhood boutique grocery. Every month I try to explain that if we go to Grocery Outlet and get some staples there at huge bargains, we can then fill in the blanks with Trader Joe, the weekly farmers market, and my trips to the Mexican grocery with our next-door neighbor all the while eating better and saving money.
I got him to see it for about two months when we really were teetering on the edge of financial disaster, but he’s not taking the lesson seriously now that there are three incomes in the household instead of one. Of course, two of those incomes are miniscule and one is not that big. I’m pretty frustrated.
Then again, if he sells that song to the Doobie Brothers, he can do the grocery shopping where he likes and I won’t complain.
In the meantime, I go to the farmers market and the Mexican grocery and try to remind Mr. Twistie not to buy too many extremely perishable things that ‘look nice’ in one trip to the damn Safeway.
April 28th, 2008 at 4:13 pm
I’ve been augmenting my “food budget” with whatever’s leftover from partners’ meetings, etc. at the office. No, I’m not joking. Combine having to buy a house just before the bottom fell out of the housing market, and budgeting pretty close to the wire before that, and I’m not in a good place. There’s a limit to how many places you want to go grocery shopping when you take the bus.