I finally did some in-person grocery shopping this past week

It had been a month since I set foot into a store. Then we ran out of milk. So it was time to do another grocery shopping.

In the last two years, there have been many times that I timed my shopping trip in efforts to avoid large groups of people. This week, I timed my shopping to hopefully score some markdowns. What I've learned with our local Fred Meyer is that if I shop too early in the day, the workers haven't had the opportunity to mark down items. And if I shop too late in the morning, approaching noon, all of the markdowns have been scooped up. Although I was up very early, I waited until I thought I might just be in the Goldlilocks time range. Almost 10 AM exactly I grabbed my list, phone, and purse and hopped into the car. At about 10:02 AM exactly, I turned around and got the shopping bags that I'd left on the counter. At 8 cents per bag, I hate to have to buy new bags because I forgot to bring my own.

In through the double doors at FM, I grabbed myself a mini-cart and raced to the milk coolers. Okay, so maybe I wasn't racing so fast I knocked anyone down, but I didn't waste any time on my way to check for milk markdowns. Milk has gotten expensive. If I can find some short-dated containers, I can save a bundle of money. My family doesn't mind if I freeze the milk. So this can be a terrific way for me to shave a little off the final shopping total. I got to the coolers and SCORE! I found four 1% gallons marked down to $1.69 each. I needed five gallons of drinking milk for my family and one gallon of whole milk for yogurt. I bought the 4 marked down milks and added 1 regular priced 2% and 1 regular priced whole milk. I prefer 2% milk for my family, but I know they're not picky and will drink skim, 1%, 2% or whole milk. Often when I'm looking for marked down milk, it's the skim or 1% that's marked down, practically never the 2% or whole milk.

My next urgent stop at Fred Meyer was the clearance aisle. They've moved their clearance section to a set of shelves in the beauty care aisles. Go figure. And they have much less in the clearance section than ever before. But I check anyway, as I have found some great deals on dented cans of vegetables and some boxes of tissues. This week, I found a single 8-ct box of granola bars for 49cents. My family would be happy to have something commercially quasi-junky. I grabbed the box then headed to the egg section. Yes, I could've just walked straight down the path from the milk cooler to the egg fridge. But I might miss the clearance deals by being so logical. I zig and zag all around the grocery store so I can check all of the clearance spots right away. The egg section does sometimes have repackaged eggs marked down quite a lot. These are eggs that previously belonged to other cartons, ones where an egg or two or three have broken and made a yolk-y mess. So eggs from several different cartons are put together in a new carton. But by law they have to be marked as repackaged, and in doing so, the store realizes they have to mark it down to get customers interested in buying those cartons. But these egg deals are few and far between these days. Hence I prioritized the main clearance aisle over the eggs. The website had the price listed all wrong on the eggs, which benefitted me greatly. instead of 5-dozen cases costing in the neighborhood of $10, they were $7.89. I picked a box and added it to my cart. next stop the produce markdown shelf. on my way, I spotted a sale on 64-oz jugs of orange and orange-pineapple juice for 99 cents. I bought 2 of those. I made it to the produce section and found absolutely nothing on the marked down shelf. I bought 14 bananas at the regular price of 59 cents/lb.

Backtracking a bit, I next hit the meat department. The markdowns were items like steak originally priced at $13/lb now marked down to $10/lb. No thank you. They also had some marked down pre-seasoned chicken breast for $5/lb. Again, a big no thank you. I didn't buy any meat. But we're still stocked in that area. After the meat section I decided to check the cheese. We've been down to just a block of mozzarella cheese that I save for our Friday pizza nights. I knew my family would love to have some cheddar for lunches, etc. As luck would have it, store brand cheese had a digital coupon available, bringing the price of cheddar and mozzarella down to $4.99 for a 2-lb package ($2.50/lb). The digital coupon could be used up to 5 times in a single transaction, so I bought 3 blocks of cheddar and 2 bags of shredded mozzarella.

My last stop was to buy a couple more bags of potting soil for my winter indoor greens garden. While I'd been quite lucky on this shopping trip in other areas, with the potting soil my luck had run out. They were completely sold out of the bargain brand of potting soil and only had the pricier brands in small bags left. Oh well. I'll have to check some place else for this item.

At this point, my mini-cart was full. So I headed to the check out. I used my shopping bags, so no extra charges there. My total came to $51.55. I know that sounds very low considering I haven't grocery shopped in-person in a month. However, I've been ordering groceries online for the pantry to be shipped over the past month, stocking up on coffee, peanut butter, vegetable oil, peanuts, cocoa powder, vinegar, and all-purpose flour. Our pantry is quite full of dry goods, and our freezers are full of meat, vegetables, butter, and now berries. With all of that plus a garden in full production, we've only been needing eggs, milk, and cheese. When I go for those basic three items, I also check for other markdowns and pick up some bananas for smoothies.

I've grown accustomed to not shopping as often. Yes, I miss out on some deals. But I like using my time to do other things, such as grow food so I don't have to shop as often or spend as much money. Still, I'm spending far more than I used to. That's part price increases. But also, I've been buying some foods that were rare treats previously (like whole peanuts or almonds). My family appreciates these treats and that makes the expense worth it. 

How about you? Has your shopping changed in the last two years? When you're on the hunt for markdowns, do you zig zag all over the store to hit markdown territory first, or do you shop in an orderly fashion and wait to find markdowns as you come to them?

A Confirming Observation

For the last several months, I've been working hard to waste less of our food, both the purchased and garden-grown. I've been trimming less off of vegetables and fruits, skipped the peeling of carrots and potatoes, used all but the thin papery skin and the actual root fibers/threads on onions, cut closer to the cores on apples, and basically trying to find ways to use all of the safe to eat portions of the fruits and vegetables that come into my kitchen. I'm also saving meat fat, and some of our cooking liquids, such as the starchy pasta cooking water, liquid from canned vegetables and drained frozen fruit, cooking liquid from veggies, and the liquid in which fruits, vegetables, and pickles are canned. 

Despite doing all of the above, I wasn't sure if my efforts would be measurable.

So here's the interesting thing. On Sunday, my husband looked into the kitchen compost bucket and said that we're not putting as much into the bucket as we used to. He normally takes the kitchen bucket out to the composter in the backyard once per week. On Sunday, he commented that the bucket was only half full and could go another 4 to 6 days before needing to be dumped. He also said that it's been like this all summer. I take this as confirmation that we are indeed wasting less food in our house.

I have dual motives for my goal of wasting less food in my house. One, we want to offset the price increases and shrinking packages of purchased food. And secondly, if, as many experts have been warning, there is to be a food shortage coming, wasting less food spares more to go around for all of us.

Anyway, I just wanted to share. How about you? Are you trying to waste less in order to compensate for higher grocery or other costs?