Today was the perfect trifecta of crazy grocery shopping.
- Super Bowl Sunday is tomorrow.
- A winter storm that threatens to drop a foot of snow is barreling down on us.
- It is the weekend.
Since our refrigerator was nearly empty we used our 11 month old alarm clock to get to the store early and beat the crowds. You know it is going to be a busy day when they have boxes of shovels out in the aisles.
Grocery shopping tends to favor those that plan ahead. For instance, today Kroger had a buy 6 items save $3 special. In many cases that stacks on top of regular sale prices. If you go to the store to pick up one item, you’re not going to be able to take advantage of these sales. Doing one or two big stock ups in a month lets you really optimize your spending.
Growing up, I remember following my mom around the grocery store whenever she went. My memory isn’t that great but a few details still seem clear all these years later. I remember getting yelled at to stay out of the way. I remember being fascinated with a coffee grinder and subsequently getting ‘lost’ because while I was absorbed in looking at the machine my mother had moved to a different aisle. Lastly, I remember asking if we could buy something once and my mom looked at it, looked at me, and said, “no, we only buy things that are on sale”. To a five or six year old, or however old I was at the time, I interpreted that to mean that only a select few items in the store were classified as ‘on sale’ and those items never changed. Crushed that we were limited to only ever buying the 15-20 items that I had seen ‘on sale’ stickers for that day, I resigned myself to eating the same type of cereal for the rest of my life.
Yup, kids are dumb.
20ish years later and now I try to buy only on sale items. Today’s find was 88¢ veggie pasta.
