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Appreciation post: my grocery bill dropped to $47 a week for two people and I almost cried at the register
So I started tracking every single thing we ate back in August because money was getting tight after my girlfriend's hours got cut at the clinic. I made a spreadsheet, which sounds nerdy, but it showed me we were tossing about $60 of food every week, half eaten leftovers, sad spinach, the whole thing. I switched to shopping Sunday nights at the Lidl on the north side because that's when they mark down the meat, and I plan five dinners around whatever's cheap instead of whatever sounds good. Last Tuesday the cashier rang us up and it came to $47.12 for a full week, breakfast, lunch, and dinner for both of us, and I just stood there staring at the receipt. The big change was cooking one pot of beans and one pot of rice on Sunday and building meals off that all week instead of buying lunch at work every day. I'm not saying it's all gourmet, we ate a lot of beans and eggs, but we're not hungry and we're not wasting stuff anymore. Does anyone else shop the markdown hours at their store, and if so what day and time works best where you live?
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casey_harris26d ago
That spreadsheet move is what did it, most people never see how much they're actually tossing because it goes in the trash and you forget about it by Wednesday. I started doing the same thing and found out we were dumping almost half a loaf of bread every week, so now I freeze it the day I buy it and pull slices as needed. For markdown meat, my Kroger does it early morning around 7 or 8 on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, and the north side store near me clears out the 50% off stickers by 9am. The other trick that saved me real money is buying the family packs when they're marked down and splitting them into meal size bags before freezing, since the per pound price drops a lot that way.
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