Evaluating our grocery budget again
Nov 4, 2009 The Story of My Life
I’m making banana waffles for the kids right now and clearing out my work inbox at the same time. (That’s why waffles are nicer than pancakes when you’re multitasking — more downtime between waffle rounds.) Our kitchen is well-stocked even though we’re only a few days away from the end of our fortnightly grocery trips.
Before we joined Costo I went all around the web to read up from the more frugal than I. There are definitely downsides to Costco starting with the fifty buck join fee. Also everything comes in size extra extra large huge so you have to have storage. (We have a half-chest freezer — I could use a full one, honestly but since we don’t buy sides of pigs or cows it’s not a need thing.) Our kitchen isn’t small but we don’t have a pantry or anything so we had to think on that, too. Then we do a lot of shopping at Aldi’s, which is already dirt cheap (and if you steer clear of the processed foods, the quality is high, too). So before we did anything, we took a surveillance trip and I wrote down the per serving costs of the food we regularly buy and then we went to Aldi’s for our shopping and did a price comparison. (We make up the difference at Kroger because Aldi’s is great for cans of diced tomatoes and their cheese prices are swell but you can’t get hominy there and their produce is wildly unpredictable.) Then we went back to Costco.
The frugal types will tell you that in order to negate the fifty dollar sign-on fee you need to save at least $.70/week. But if you want to save money, you’ve got to save a lot more than that.
Now I can drive myself crazy shopping for best prices so there’s a place where I just make myself stop. That place is driving around to various stores to get the best prices on loss leaders while managing a complex coupon system (partially because I don’t have the time and partially because saving 75% on slice-and-bake cookies is no bargain if you would otherwise not buy slice-and-bake cookies). Mind you I am tempted by these things because the shiny promises of savings tempt cheapskates like me. I have to wrench my mind away from those slice-and-bake cookies and remind myself that they taste (to me) like aluminum anyway.
My grocery goals then are two-fold: Save money. Save time. Because both of those things feed the greater goal that powers all of my days and nights: Save sanity. (I’m not always on the winning end of that.)
Anyway, back to Costco! These are the deals that we’ve found so far that will make it worth it.
- Multi-grain, unbleached flour for $.25/lb. I bake something three or four (or more) times a week. Waffles, muffins and/or cookies and/or quick breads (at least once a week I make something for the kids to snack on), pizza crusts, hamburger buns, drop biscuits, etc. etc. I remember the heady days of bulk unbleached flour at Wild Oats for only a quarter a pound with nostalgic fondness, thinking I’d never see its likes again. My joy at finding high-quality, healthier flour there at Costco cannot be exaggerated. Yes, we had to buy twenty pounds but half of that went into the freezer and we are happily dipping into the other 10 lb bag to make our weekly treats. Life is good. These waffles are delicious and cheap, which makes them taste even better.
- 12.5 lbs of popcorn for nine bucks. We eat popcorn all the ding dang time here. We have no microwave (because I am loathe to give up the counter space) so we make it on the stovetop. We make it sweet. We make it salty. We make it dripping with butter and healthfully in olive oil with a dash of kosher salt. I make a big giant bowl of it every week for the role playing game meeting because it’s also a cheap, healthy way to feed a load of kids and most of ‘em like it. At Kroger’s, a pound of popcorn is something like $1.79 so right there we’ve made our $.70 a week savings. Boom! Fifty dollar membership card bought and paid for!
- 12 lbs of organic brown rice for (I want to say — not quite sure) twelve bucks. Maybe it was fourteen. Either way it’s a good deal.
- Gorgeous bags of plain organic frozen broccoli florets. I can’t remember the price but it was about what you’d pay for conventional. And they are delicious.
The turkey and chicken isn’t that much cheaper than at Aldi’s or at Kroger (when it’s on sale) but the quality is higher and meat is something I like buying in bulk. We also were happy to see the fancy-schmancy chicken sausage that we like at about a buck a pound cheaper than we get it at Giant Eagle or Trader Joe’s (and it’s nice that getting it doesn’t mean a special trip).Also coffee — that’s Brett’s domain. He buys fancy stuff a pound at a time and he was happy to find organic, shade-grown, etc. etc. for a fraction of what he was paying for conventional. (Then he broke his French Press and is currently being forced to make coffee in our Krups coffee maker and that pains him, let me tell you. Me, I can’t tell the difference.) And the HE laundry detergent was also way cheaper.
The other thing about buying in bulk is that it soothes the soul to know there’s more food than you need tucked away in the freezer. (It’s also good feng shui, Brett will have you know.) My struggle has always been getting ahead on the buying so that a missed grocery trip doesn’t mean disaster. Because we keep our budget pretty tight, usually at the end of our grocery cycles we feel like we’re scraping by even though my menu plan clearly states that there’s plenty of food left. Thing is, it’s food you have to fix and if something (like mom down with the flu for three weeks) hits you, then everything gets up-ended. Sure, Brett can cook but I’m serious when I say we keep things tight. So if Brett uses the cottage cheese as a lunch side dish then we’ve got to revisit the manicotti dinner that we had listed on the menu.
What Costco has given us is greater flexibility (i.e., enough room for Brett to get creative). It took some different thinking — we had to think on how to plan for two weeks while buying for four and still minding a budget that says right there on the excel sheet that there is only X amount to spend this pay period. We did it by stretching the budget to it’s largest amount (we have a flexible monthly amount but if we stretch it one pay period, we need to reign it back in the next) and deciding to keep the menu simple for the month while we stocked up on staples. (None of the extra kinds of recipes that require outside-our-typical like, say, fish paste.) We build out our pantry slowly but surely every month by investing in something that we won’t buy often but this time we were investing in larger amounts of stuff we buy all the time. Again, it just meant using a different mindset and more creative menu planning with an eye to a different budget and different terms.
Now certainly there are bargains at Costco that aren’t really bargains like the regular old cheese (the blocks of cheddar and shredded mozzarella) are no cheaper than at Aldi’s. Then again they aren’t more expensive either and it’s still cheaper than Kroger. Also if you bring Brett along, you have to give him the slice-and-bake cookie lecture when he becomes enamored of giant bags of snacks that are very expensive if you remember that we don’t buy those kinds of snacks, especially when you take into account the Costco factor, which is that if you buy a lot of something then certain people say, “Hey there’s a lot! I can have TWO BOWLS!” And then everything just gets pricier.
Finally the cereal was NOT a bargain. Brett was fooled and bought some when he ran out to get dog food but he was comparing the label prices and not the generic. Aldi’s has the same cereal under their generic label for cheap cheap cheap. $1.89/box for raisin brain, for example. You can’t beat that with a stick.
I have to tell you, I like grocery shopping even though the getting there can be kind of hard. (Another reason we wanted the flexibility that buying in bulk would give us is that if I don’t get out to shop on X day, we are screwed because my schedule is not very forgiving what with job/life/freelance responsibilities.)
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ABOUT ME: I live in Central Ohio with my two homeschooled kids and their internet-wary father and have been blogging our lives since 2001. My children are Noah (born to us in 1997) and Madison (born to her first mom, Pennie, in 2004 and brought to our family through a domestic, open adoption). My writing has appeared in Salon, Bitch, Greater Good and Brain Child (
Ha, just saw that I am one of your top commentors. Here’s another.
Thanks for breaking this down. I have been wondering whether a Costco membership would be worth it. The meat may be what makes the difference. We try to buy at Carfagna’s but it can be hard to get there when we’re already hitting Kroger/Target weekly and Trader Joe’s semi monthly.
If you want to make a visit with me sometime (because you’re supposed to go with a member although we snuck in on the weekend when it was really busy) let me know. Our routine was Aldis (on Sawmill — it’s the only one I can tolerate) than Kroger (on Bethel on the way back from Aldis) twice a month with runs to wherever for produce when we run out. Now we’ll add once a month Costco runs. I never get to Trader Joe’s anymore but maybe that’s for the best. The only place where I have trouble with impulse buys is Trader Joe’s!!
Oh also wanted to add that how I did my research on Costco was that I typed “costco ripoff” into google (and various other terms like that) to get an idea of the worst people had to say and the worst wasn’t that bad. Basically they said paper goods aren’t a deal there but that the meat is high quality and the cheese is excellent. The chicken breasts are gorgeous and the ground turkey is the price I aim for at the grocery but rarely get.
I am not a careful shopper at the moment, in part because my darling Lee considers buying in bulk to be “clutter” and has a tendency to THROW AWAY PERFECTLY GOOD FOODSTUFF THAT ANNOYS HER and then that makes me get all apoplectic and it’s a vicious cycle. So now I keep a tiny pantry partly stocked and even that bothers her. She used to go to Costco, though, so maybe that would work someday…. I’d have to sneak a freezer into the basement or something, I think.
I love reading about how people manage things like this, though. Because Lee also isn’t willing to go along with preplanned menus at this point in time (so we do something like 4 scheduled dinners a week and do the rest more spur-of-the-moment even though that isn’t as good for me) I’m just doing what I can to not spend crazy amounts of money but also enjoy what we have and eat tasty things. If we end up parenting, this will change a lot, though I hope we’ll still manage tasty.
Actually food and groceries and all of this are really messy mental topics for me and I should probably write about them more but don’t because of the messiness.
Me, too, actually, which is why I’m so focused on it. My mom never ate — she just didn’t eat. And then after the divorce when we were broke there wasn’t food in the house and what there was was very parceled out so like you could have one apple a day and that was it. The number one way to make me go totally hysterically insane is to let the cupboards go bare and have a kid tell me s/he is hungry. It sends me into a panic. I also have trouble not freaking out when people waste food (and Madison is a champion food waster — she likes variety for one and she likes to graze and her eyes are often bigger than her stomach).
This is probably worth its own blog post. I’ll do mine if you do yours!
You did this before, but, if you’re looking for a blog filler, I think an example weekly menu + how you plan it would be interesting. Especially in light of the new Costco trips.
I’m like Madison — want variety, even if it means eating only a quarter of a pear, an apple, and a banana. I’m notorious for abandoning half-eaten bananas (and I’m a grown up, so I don’t have Madison’s excuses). So I find your food management style interesting to read about (it’s so orthogonal to mine).
My mom was of the variety who would have died if a child said they were hungry and there was no food in the house. I’m very different, but I’ve inherited this from her — I even have panicky fears about having people at the house and running out of food.
For those desperate to avoid the joining fee, if someone buys you a Costco gift card if you can shop there without a membership (even above the amount on the gift card). We use that method to do stock-up trips about four times a year.
Not sure how far away you live from BJ’s Wholesale Club but I know that you get a better deal from them! I don’t say that only because I work there ;0) but because I’ve gone to Costco myself.
If you head to the store in the next month, you can get a free 60 day trial – no problem and no hidden fees (however it expires after that)! However, if you sign up, you get the membership for 14 months rather than the usual 12 – a $10 merchandise coupon and a coupon book with several free items already in it!! And the great part you ask?? It’s 100% guaranteed! If you choose that you no longer want the membership (up until the day before the 14th month) – you are able to return it and get your 45 back!!
I remember you posting about joining Costco – but am not sure where my head was in not convincing you into BJ’s!!
Take care,
Mandy
Wouldn’t be a better deal for me — the closest BJs is a couple of hours away and Costco is about ten minutes away. I checked!
oh god, we’ve had a CostCo membership for YEARS, but only shop for food there 3 or 4 times a year because it’s on the entire other side of town. We do go there for other things, though, like tires or electronics, so maybe we’ve made up the membership fee(s) on big ticket items. Who knows.
Also, I feel so guilty now that I’ve been shopping by the meal (3 or 4 times per week) at Whole Foods… I am so so disorganized
I don’t know if you do credit cards, but we got the Costco AmEx card for the rewards. The Costco membership means that there is no annual fee and we usually got about $100 back each year to spend at the store.
Around here, the butter is cheaper there, too.
“The other thing about buying in bulk is …(It’s also good feng shui, Brett will have you know.)”
Oh my god. We never have food and I never thought of the feng shui of it. This may revolutionize my life. I hate having lots of food around and I hate shopping for food– but I also hate bad feng shui.
It’ll be interesting to see who wins that tweedle-beetle battle in my head.
I’m confused! First you said that if you steer clear of processed food the quality at Aldi’s is high but then you said their produce was iffy. I’ve never shopped at Aldi’s but there’s one nearish my house and I’d like to try it at some point.
Costco has been great for buying paper towels/toliet paper etc/tissue etc so that way I can go a long time between trips. I try not to buy too many food items from them since it’s just me and my husband at home and
Ack! I’m using processed wrong! I mean the snacks. Crackers, cookies, fruit roll up type stuff — I don’t buy any of that there. Also none of their frozen meals. But the cheese is good and very inexpensive. Milk is BGH-free and $1.66/gallon here and I love the frozen fruit there. I also buy canned goods there (that’s where I mis-used processed since canned goods are processed), especially recipe ready tomatoes and canned beans. And until we joined Costco I bought the frozen chicken parts (breasts & thighs) and ground turkey. Some of the Aldi’s around here are crowded, dirty and picked through so there’s only one I’ll go to so if you don’t like the one buy you, look around and you may find a better one.
First of all, I just want to say that I recently found your blog, and I don’t know how I’ve been missing such a brilliant local writer for so long! Wow! You are good!
I wanted to weigh in on the reason that I joined Costco, and forgive me if it sounds like a bit of an advertisement (I can assure you I don’t work for them). I’m married but childless, so there’s only two of us, and in our current situation, we simply don’t have enough room for most of Costco’s bulk stuff. However, we bought a membership to have access to a few thing–one is the bulk stuff like generic Tylenol; I really don’t think you can find it cheaper, but then, I haven’t done an exhaustive study.
But the real reason was access to their vision department. I spent about a year working in the optical industry and Costco has a good reputation for producing a quality product at significantly cheaper prices than you will find at many optical locations. Also, I believe their work is all done domestically. Their pricing on contact lenses (although I don’t wear them) is extremely low. My husband I both wear glasses, and so the membership is worth it just to get our prescriptions filled there. We easily save the $50, no doubt. As a point of comparison, I have a $140 pair of glasses from Costco that I am totally happy with, and are equal in quality to a $300-odd pair I have from a place in the Short North. And actually, the place in the Short North is great and I’ll continue going there for my eye exams, but I just can’t justify paying that much for glasses.
For those who may be wondering, you can see the doctor at Costco Optical without a membership, but you cannot buy products at their pricing without a membership.
Yes, I forgot we got my son’s glasses at CostCo! Now I’m *sure* we’ve made up the membership fees all these years
[...] I ought to write about how that impacts how I deal with food and grocery-shopping, as prompted by Dawn’s recent post. Really, Lee and I are both pretty hard-headed about things around the house and it does cause a [...]
I LOVE Costco and enjoyed someone being MORE meticulous about their groceries than even I am.
And completely tangential to this post: what the heck is the role play game? This some like something I need in my life!
Minority opinion here, I joined Costco and was disappointed. There are only three of us living here now, and I don’t buy anything in bulk. There are a couple of things I like there, like their frozen burritos, but for me the ugliness and inconvenience of the place cancels out the small savings.
I hate grocery shopping but if I must do it prefer a familiar smallish supermarket where I know where everything is and am not treated like a criminal and not even given bags to take the stuff home in.
Oh yeah, definitely if you don’t buy in bulk, Costco wouldn’t be worth it (although I’m thinking about those glasses now and also Brett was impressed with the tire prices). And yes, the store itself is — ARGH. I don’t like that either. But coming home and toting up my savings makes it up for me because I am just that cheap!!
So let me get this straight: you *enjoy* making waffles? The waffle iron thing works for you? Seriously, they don’t get stuck, one half on top and one on the bottom, and then break apart and then you cry?
Leslie, I am MAGIC. Actually I want a new waffle iron because mine only cooks one waffle at a time so that leaves me making waffles FOREVER. I want a bigger one.
You are, you are.
I’m not cheap (my husband is) and never add stuff up as I am very bad at math. Grocery shopping, like anything related to housework, is just something to be endured and got over. I am an admitted lazy slob:-)