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Post by ganews on Oct 21, 2016 20:20:54 GMT -5
There's a commercial on TV now for a budget-keeping smartphone app. In it, a couple (with no sign or mention of kids or anyone else to support) goes to the grocery store and spends $160. Then they lament going over the budget again this week, which implies to me that this was their weekly grocery trip. This is insane to me. I know I spend far less on groceries than basically anyone, but I could never spend that much per week on food. I mean, I know one can always spend more money for anything, I the serious chefs of the Food Board probably buy very nice ingredients and cook great food all the time, but these are people trying to keep a budget. And they don't have diapers and such to add to the bill. I include anything you buy at the grocery store in the bill. (I can move this to TMI if you think it is too personal to discuss family finances.) |
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Post by Pedantic Editor Type on Oct 21, 2016 22:03:42 GMT -5
We average $200-$250 a month on groceries, so sometimes it's a bit over $30 a person per week but close enough. Used to spend less, but am less price conscious than I used to be. We don't buy a lot of meat which tends to be the most expensive line item.
But yeah that commercial drives me nuts.
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Post by rimjobflashmob on Oct 22, 2016 9:40:08 GMT -5
We go once every week and a half or two and generally spend between $30-$40. Sometimes we go over a bit if we're cooking something special, but that's the ballpark.
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Post by 🔪 silly buns on Oct 22, 2016 9:52:18 GMT -5
I buy a meat item if I am cooking and the budget goes up if you are buying a few things that really add to the overall checkout price, but lasts a few weeks/months (rice, sugar, flour, coffee, nuts/dried fruit/trail mix). I will get a mix of generic and more expensive items. Plus, I bring my lunch for work so I need to get snacks and something different, than my home meal, for lunch, plus home snacks and weekly meal ingredients.
I can sometimes veer into $80 a week, especially if I am buying cleaning products.
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Dellarigg
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Post by Dellarigg on Oct 22, 2016 10:20:42 GMT -5
Ryvita and jam does me, thank you very much. None of your fancy goings-on.
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LazBro
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Post by LazBro on Oct 22, 2016 14:22:12 GMT -5
Despite the fact that I'm the one who does all the shopping, I don't pay very close attention to how much we spend. Another reason it's hard to remember is because I typically go shopping 3-5 times a week. Less so these days, because my longer commute has added time constraints, but I rarely buy for more than two meals at a time.
Depending on how much cooking I do, I probably spend between $60-80 on groceries each week, or $30-40 per person not counting Baby Snape. This has gone up slightly in the past few months, as Mrs. Snape has tried bringing her lunch to work more, necessitating that I cook more at dinner in order to make for more leftovers. I typically don't eat lunch myself.
One thing that differentiates me from most of my acquaintances when it comes to grocery shopping is that I very rarely buy pre-made stuff or snack-type things. For example, I have a friend who will almost always buy the seasonal crap the store makes. Hatch chili cheese dip. Pumpkin bread. Stuff like that. "Just to try it." I never do that. Even when it looks awesome. The though is always, "Nah, I don't need that." And to be clear, I'm not at all saying that's wrong. It's just not in my nature to buy that stuff. Maybe this helps me save money. I buy nice ingredients when I feel like it, but I don't splurge on stuff. I make my list, I stick to my list.
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Post by Pedantic Editor Type on Oct 22, 2016 14:49:23 GMT -5
I do a pretty good job of sticking to my list but Trader Joe's is a downfall, I do add maybe $30-40 a month there?
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Post by Not a real doctor on Oct 22, 2016 16:21:55 GMT -5
This thread has caused me to take this next few months and try to figure out how much I spend on average. I think t hings like "giant bags of frozen vegetables and brown rice from Costco" are going to take a few months to amortize.
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Ice Cream Planet
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Post by Ice Cream Planet on Oct 22, 2016 18:17:50 GMT -5
Oh, about £40 or so. Perhaps a bit more (£10-20) if Im purchasing something for a special home cooked meal.
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Post by Albert Fish Taco on Oct 23, 2016 12:10:11 GMT -5
It varies wildly week to week, because some weeks include lots of supply foods (cans, non-perishables) and/or non-food items while others just need only about $30-$40. But on average I'd say I average in the low $70s. Like 🔪 silly buns I cook all my own meals including lunches for work (really only buy food outside once or twice a week), so I think my grocery bill is off-set by lower lunch spending. Also I cook with (or eat) a lot of meats, fish, cheeses, eggs and produce, so that all adds up. There's also a loss of economies of scale since it's just me. And since I rarely go to Target I get about 90% of that kind of stuff (and about 2/3 of OTC drug store stuff) at my supermarket as well. And for the most part I buy store brand stuff. |
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Post by ganews on Oct 23, 2016 17:01:46 GMT -5
Today I got rather light supplies for $25, but also ten days worth of fancy granola at the hippie mart for another $13. There could end up being another trip, but not necessarily.
I rarely plan meals more than a couple days in advance. I buy sale and keep things in the freezer, just out of habit from my parents and college, unless of course there's something special in mind.
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Post by Ben Grimm on Oct 23, 2016 17:22:13 GMT -5
We're two childless, food obsessed professionals. I don't know exactly what we spend on groceries, but I suspect I should be at least mildly embarrassed by it.
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Post by 🔪 silly buns on Oct 23, 2016 18:36:02 GMT -5
I spent about $60 this weekend. I bought ingredients for this weeks meal ($25 - though rice $4 will last a bit), a pumpkin ($5) and a butternut squash ($2) for fall decoration/soup later this week or next week, and some snacks for home and work ($10) which will last at least 2 weeks.
For lunch I splurged on a $14 a lb in house roast beef from Wholefoods and smokes mozzarella $8 per lb, but I only bought a half pound each. I also pissed away $3 on lackluster hummus.
This thread is making me really think about how much I spend on food, and kinda regret last week which was 'take out/pre-prepared meals' week, because lazy.
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Gumbercules
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Post by Gumbercules on Oct 24, 2016 7:17:01 GMT -5
A few years ago I started tracking my budget in an excel spreadsheet, as I wanted to see where I was spending more of my money. By just doing that, I started cutting out things like buying breakfast every day, drinking at bars less, etc. I ended up saving thousands of dollars in 6 months. It was super helpful. Anyway, to answer the survey question, I average around $300/mo, so around $10/day, or $70/week. Since I'm often cooking for my girlfriend and I, let's say that's $50 for me, $20 for her per week.
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Post by Liz n Dick on Oct 24, 2016 9:04:22 GMT -5
We're two childless, food obsessed professionals. I don't know exactly what we spend on groceries, but I suspect I should be at least mildly embarrassed by it. Ahh, one of my own. We can sit over here and be mildly embarrassed together.  |
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Post by Liz n Dick on Oct 24, 2016 9:22:43 GMT -5
My food shopping is spread out all over the place (and all through the year; there's some amortization to take into consideration), so it's hard to get a real sense of how it all shakes out. My grocery store output is very low, coming in at under $10/person per week for my household, but there's our CSA subscription (which actually, spread out over the year between the three of us, comes in under $10/person per week), the farm stand for eggs, the farm market for meat/dairy/cheese, and various mail-order sources for a variety of direct-from-farm or "artisanal" staples (read: "things that could be bought much more cheaply from the regular grocery store"). I figure we probably average out to about $50-$60 a head per week. But that's probably me rounding down. I bet it's more.
If not for my insistence on buying normally inexpensive staples like beans and pasta from high-end sources, I tend to do the things you're supposed to as a budget-conscious shopper. Menu plan so as to only shop once a week, never veer off list, steer clear of pre-made stuff, buy in bulk where possible. I'm good at the grocery store. It's the local sourcing and small-farm stuff that's killer, though. Organic, free-range, happy-animal, small-batch, bought directly from the grower-baker-whatever... that all comes at a premium. By far the biggest piece of our grocery expenses is spent on meat, despite my efforts to keep the "cuts of meat" purchases to a minimum and rely more on ground meats and sausages. Oh, and I also cook extra at dinners so that Hugs and I can take lunches to work, so while that ups the grocery budget, it saves on "buying lunch out" expenses.
Don't even ask me about my at-home booze bills. If we're counting the wine budget, this gets a lot uglier.
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Post by Not a real doctor on Oct 24, 2016 9:48:49 GMT -5
I've never really thought about packing lunches as something that increases budgets although it certainly does. I've always just gone with "any marginal increase in grocery budget is minimal compared to eating out." That said, my lunches are never something that isn't just leftovers. Like ganews, I do a lot of buying things on sale and popping them in the freezer to make something out of later. I do this mostly with meat (sorry Liz n Dick, my meat sourcing is atrocious) and in my new place, farmers market vegetables. I was pleasantly surprised that the farmer's market in my new town was more "buy things cheap because they're direct from the grower" rather than "more expnsive because it's small scale." My diet is basically "large amounts of things cooked and frozen, reheated later to usually be eaten with rice or quinoa." *cries* The garden fits in somehow also but it's weird because the garden I put in this spring was 650 miles away by harvest time (thanks, job). So all the stuff my mom and GF picked and froze or canned that I had growing all summer is also now...650 miles away. |
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Post by Pedantic Editor Type on Oct 24, 2016 10:00:33 GMT -5
So here's a question for y'all, how much do you have in "backstock" at any given time? Things like pasta, canned beans/veggies, rice, frozen veggies, etc.?
Because I spent about $70 at the grocery store yesterday (that included some fresh brats, 3 lbs of ground turkey and deli turkey) but we have a ton of random freezer and pantry stuff - and about 2/3 of that turkey will go into the freezer for future use, to join the giant bag of frozen blueberries, and the rainy-day tamales, and the bags of frozen spinach...
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Post by Liz n Dick on Oct 24, 2016 10:03:23 GMT -5
I've never really thought about packing lunches as something that increases budgets although it certainly does. I've always just gone with "any marginal increase in grocery budget is minimal compared to eating out." That said, my lunches are never something that isn't just leftovers. Like ganews , I do a lot of buying things on sale and popping them in the freezer to make something out of later. I do this mostly with meat (sorry Liz n Dick , my meat sourcing is atrocious) and in my new place, farmers market vegetables. I was pleasantly surprised that the farmer's market in my new town was more "buy things cheap because they're direct from the grower" rather than "more expnsive because it's small scale." My diet is basically "large amounts of things cooked and frozen, reheated later to usually be eaten with rice or quinoa." *cries* The garden fits in somehow also but it's weird because the garden I put in this spring was 650 miles away by harvest time (thanks, job). So all the stuff my mom and GF picked and froze or canned that I had growing all summer is also now...650 miles away. My vegetable spend is comparatively quite low, because, like you said, the farmers market/CSA thing generally is cheaper because of direct-to-grower. The "more expensive because it's small scale" thing comes into play as soon as animals and hipsters get involved. I'd be a model of food-shopping efficiency if I'd stuck to filling my freezer and pantry with vegetable goods frozen/processed direct from the farmers market, but alas, they had to go and make meat and dairy easy to find around here! ::shakes fist at local foodshed:: |
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Post by Liz n Dick on Oct 24, 2016 10:11:39 GMT -5
So here's a question for y'all, how much do you have in "backstock" at any given time? Things like pasta, canned beans/veggies, rice, frozen veggies, etc.? Because I spent about $70 at the grocery store yesterday (that included some fresh brats, 3 lbs of ground turkey and deli turkey) but we have a ton of random freezer and pantry stuff - and about 2/3 of that turkey will go into the freezer for future use, to join the giant bag of frozen blueberries, and the rainy-day tamales, and the bags of frozen spinach... TONS. Last weekend I did a meat market run and walked out with six pounds of ground meats, four pounds of bacon, two cuts of pork shoulder, six pork chops, three pounds of stew meat, and 12 fresh brats. That's how I do my meat shopping, stopping in at the butcher's every few months and then piling it all into the freezer. I have subscriptions to pasta-of-the-month and beans-of-the-quarter clubs. Easily 70% of my CSA gets put into the pantry/freezer. And we get a lot of staples like sugar, rice, basic olive oil, etc from thrice-yearly Costco trips. Basically, my weekly grocery runs are just to spot-fill around the meal-planning. My grocery store sends weekly coupons that only kick in once you've spent over $50. I almost never qualify to use them. |
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Post by Not a real doctor on Oct 24, 2016 10:14:21 GMT -5
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Post by Liz n Dick on Oct 24, 2016 10:25:44 GMT -5
I took a class at a farm near my workplace a few years ago called "Eating From Your Local Foodshed"*, and I've relished calling it that ever since. It is, quite possibly, the single most annoying word EVER, isn't it? ::twirls handlebar mustache:: ::glances happily at pig-butchery tattoo on wrist:: ::straightens hornrim glasses:: ::IS THE WORST:: *Not a very informative class, to be honest. It was basically an hour-long lecture about how Whole Foods sits on a throne of lies. |
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Gumbercules
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Post by Gumbercules on Oct 25, 2016 6:35:18 GMT -5
So here's a question for y'all, how much do you have in "backstock" at any given time? Things like pasta, canned beans/veggies, rice, frozen veggies, etc.? Because I spent about $70 at the grocery store yesterday (that included some fresh brats, 3 lbs of ground turkey and deli turkey) but we have a ton of random freezer and pantry stuff - and about 2/3 of that turkey will go into the freezer for future use, to join the giant bag of frozen blueberries, and the rainy-day tamales, and the bags of frozen spinach... It varies, and certainly depends on what kind of pantry you have. On occasion I'll go to BJs with someone that has a membership and will load up on dry goods or canned beans. Pasta I've noticed is cheaper at supermarkets than buying bulk (at BJs), so I tend not to have much of that on hand anymore. I have 16 mason jars filled with grains and labeled, and overstock of those in ziplock bags outside of view. I have at least 5 containers of veggie stock at all times, and I have cans of tomatoes loaded up, in addition to all the frozen tomatoes I have saved up from summer. I prefer fresh veggies (except for green peas), so I usually don't stock canned or frozen veggies at all. I'll also have plenty of bread crumbs available, as well as other bottles like hot sauces, BBQ sauce, marmite, soy sauce, and other things that don't really expire. Then there's the jars of olives, canned tuna, anchovies, etc. Usually one of those visits to BJs will run me around $200-$300, but that's a once or twice a year visit, plus that usually includes booze buying as well. |
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Post by 🔪 silly buns on Oct 25, 2016 19:52:51 GMT -5
I have a bit of rice, beans, and pasta. Do to a crappy glass jar I just had to throw away my sugar (don't want to swallow any glass). I did freeze some tomatoes after suggestions from my store bought sauce thread.
I do have access to a BJs account, but I think I use it to buy more paper and cleaning products than food. I buy way to many cleaning products.
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Post by Some Kind of Munster on Oct 26, 2016 8:45:05 GMT -5
I try not to think too much about my grocery budget but we probably spend about $50-60 per week, per person. As others have said, it varies quite a bit from week to week, depending on whether or not we need to replenish any of the individual expensive things like some of the household cleaning items or pharmacy crap.
We only buy meat when it’s on sale but when it is, we stock the fuck up so some weeks it’s a crazy expensive trip but we’re filling up our upright freezer in the basement with enough meat to last us a couple of months. Our week-to-week necessities are mostly your standard eggs, milk, fresh fruit and veggies and some bread (I bake my own bread but my wife and daughter prefer store-bought) so if we can get away with just getting the staples we get out of there pretty cheaply. My goal is usually to avoid the regular grocery aisles as much as possible and get everything we need around the periphery of the store which tends to cut down on the cost (and presumably send us home with a healthier load of food).
One thing that I find adds a lot to our budget is packing lunches for my daughter – her school has two small lunch breaks per day so we have to send her with a wide range of healthy-ish snacks so we end up buying a lot of out of season fruits just because we need something, anything that she’ll actually eat.
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Post by Pedantic Editor Type on Oct 26, 2016 9:01:11 GMT -5
I kind of love grocery stores (I'm such a weirdo) so I keep thinking of new angles. Chicago has a plethora of small-chain independent produce-focused grocery stores. We're really lucky that way. While we do have our big-chain stores (namely Jewel, owned by Albertsons; a regional chain, Mariano's, was just purchased by Kroger), we also have places like Tony's Finer Food and Caputo's and Cermak Produce and Pete's Fresh Market. And all of them buy their produce at one of Chicago's wholesale markets, enormous climate-controlled seas of fruits and vegetables... www.wbez.org/shows/curious-city/a-tale-of-resale-how-big-chains-produce-ends-up-in-local-grocery-stores/8c4d6023-50ea-4977-b09d-b611904b9189 |
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Post by Liz n Dick on Oct 26, 2016 9:17:08 GMT -5
I kind of love grocery stores (I'm such a weirdo) so I keep thinking of new angles. Chicago has a plethora of small-chain independent produce-focused grocery stores. We're really lucky that way. While we do have our big-chain stores (namely Jewel, owned by Albertsons; a regional chain, Mariano's, was just purchased by Kroger), we also have places like Tony's Finer Food and Caputo's and Cermak Produce and Pete's Fresh Market. And all of them buy their produce at one of Chicago's wholesale markets, enormous climate-controlled seas of fruits and vegetables... www.wbez.org/shows/curious-city/a-tale-of-resale-how-big-chains-produce-ends-up-in-local-grocery-stores/8c4d6023-50ea-4977-b09d-b611904b9189After reading the big Tampa Bay Times expose of farmers markets and farm-to-table restaurants, it sounds like everyone gets their produce from those wholesale markets. And I also love grocery stores!  We have a ridiculous number of them in my small town, considering how small the town is -- the skeezy Shop Rite, the enormous and gleaming Stop N Shop, and then the mom & pop "[Name of town] Quality Market". The Shop Rite and Stop N Shop are both on the other side of the snarly traffic circle, though, so I won't drive to them myself. Shop Rite always seemed to me a fairly reliable chain, but the skeezy one here has the kind of vibe that everything on the shelves is way past its expiry date. The Stop N Shop is like some kind of futuristic grocery wonderland, with unimaginable varieties of packaged food... and a really uninspiring periphery of fresh food. So I don't think I'm missing much. Of course, the [Name]QM store, while giving a warm-and-fuzzy community feeling, has high prices, shitty produce, and fairly meager dairy selections. This might explain my eagerness to do so much out-of-grocery-store grocery shopping. (Further afield we have a Whole Foods, another mom & pop store in the next town over that's SUPER swanky and awesome, and another giant space-age big-chain one. But those are all an extra ten minutes away, so fuck them.) |
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Post by Pedantic Editor Type on Oct 26, 2016 9:26:07 GMT -5
Liz n Dick one strange quirk of our particular suburb is we only have two proper supermarkets. One of them is Jewel, which has stupid high prices on most things and isn't all that inspiring, and the other option is a vast array of dysfunction, dumb employees, lousy produce and bad design and I refuse to shop there. The surrounding suburbs, thankfully, have options ranging from Aldi & Trader Joe's to the aforementioned produce-focused supermarkets. But I do have to drive 10-15 minutes every week for groceries. (There's a Target close by but that's only good for like, dry goods and milk.) I was thrilled, THRILLED when the long-vacant Kmart about a mile from us finally got knocked down and within ~15 months we should have our very own shiny huge Mariano's which I am a huge fan of. But in the meantime I continue to drive. (I shouldn't complain too much, we did get the local pop-up summer farmers/produce market across the street from the entrance to our subdivision and that was very handy for buying produce and fresh-made donuts.)
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Post by The Sensational She-Hulk on Oct 26, 2016 9:50:40 GMT -5
I'm ridiculously spoiled by my choices in supermarkets. If I drive 5 minutes south, I can go to Redner's, which is plain and cheap and has tons of good staples. If I drive 5 minutes north, I can go to either Giant or Wegmans - it depends on my mood, really. Giant is where I go when I want to go in and out quickly and don't need any specialty ingredients. It's great because I know where everything is, and their produce section is really quite good. The parking lot sucks, though, and it tends to get overrun by clueless elderly people at times. Wegmans is where I go when it isn't a weekend or evening, because it's literally always a shitshow, and their produce section is good for unusual stuff but weirdly not too good for things like fresh herbs (I've gone in there to get basil more than once and they haven't had any at all), but their prepared foods and deli and cheese sections are great; plus, they have a fantastic line of store-brand food (their Thai peanut sauce is delicious) and a ton of imported/ethnic stuff, like japchae noodles and weird British condiments and 20-pound sacks of jasmine rice.
And if I drive 10 minutes north, there's a Shop-Rite and a Weis. I try to avoid Weis because their parking lot also sucks and their selections aren't always great, plus my dad works in the pharmacy of a nearby store and the pharmacist always wants to have really long conversations with me. Shop-Rite has the best bakery in the area, hands down. Their bread is just so, so good. And the desserts, too, even though I'm not hugely into sweets!
My only real complaint is that Trader Joe's is 25 minutes away and a huge pain in the ass to get in and out of, but maybe that's better for my wallet.
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Post by ganews on Oct 26, 2016 10:03:49 GMT -5
I care not at all for shopping but for two odd exceptions: groceries and houses. I don't clip coupons or visit multiple stores to get slightly better deals on identical items, but I love prowling the supermarket aisles to pick out deals. I suppose this comes from shopping for myself for seven years before Wifemate moved in, and truthfully I still prefer to buy groceries without her so that no one can question my brand choices or whatever. Then I want the pantry and cabinets to be stocked just so.
My college apartment was essentially right next to a Winn-Dixie, and I loved being able to walk back from the store carrying everything by myself with no cart. In more recent years I have been known to bike home from the store balancing a ham and a bag of potatoes on opposite handlebars, making it extremely difficult to steer and therefore more rewarding.
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We have a ridiculous number of them in my small town, considering how small the town is -- the skeezy Shop Rite, the enormous and gleaming Stop N Shop, and then the mom & pop "[Name of town] Quality Market". The Shop Rite and Stop N Shop are both on the other side of the snarly traffic circle, though, so I won't drive to them myself. Shop Rite always seemed to me a fairly reliable chain, but the skeezy one here has the kind of vibe that everything on the shelves is way past its expiry date. The Stop N Shop is like some kind of futuristic grocery wonderland, with unimaginable varieties of packaged food... and a really uninspiring periphery of fresh food. So I don't think I'm missing much. Of course, the [Name]QM store, while giving a warm-and-fuzzy community feeling, has high prices, shitty produce, and fairly meager dairy selections. This might explain my eagerness to do so much out-of-grocery-store grocery shopping. (Further afield we have a Whole Foods, another mom & pop store in the next town over that's SUPER swanky and awesome, and another giant space-age big-chain one. But those are all an extra ten minutes away, so fuck them.)