I Survived the Grocery Store Today

I'm home after buying groceries....oh, my God!!  The prices!! I bought a few frozen dinners for work, bacon (on sale), ice cream bars (on sale), some bagged salad (on sale), and some yogurt (not on sale), and spent over $75!!! It's just me, and I spend about that every week. I call it my "going to buy $75 worth of nothing to eat" day.

Really, by the end of the week, there won't be much left of this. About the only thing that will last are the hot dogs and buns....why do weenies come in packs of 10 or 12, but buns come in 8's??? You do the math and see how many you would have to buy until you have a 1:1 ratio of weenies to buns. Another marketing ploy designed to separate us from our hard-earned money. You will either throw out stale, moldy buns or expired weenies, only to repeat the process next month.

When I was a kid, my mom would spend about $40 a week on groceries for our family of 3. The buggy would be mounded over and barely fit in the trunk. We had tons of meat, cereal, produce, snacks.....all kinds of things to make 3 meals a day, plus snacks. And we weren't standing in front of the pantry door scratching our heads thinking 'gee, I wish there was something to eat in here.' Bear in mind, this was when there were no microwaves, and frozen dinners consisted of nasty faux-fried chicken with English peas and carrots in tinfoil trays that you baked in the oven for about 45 minutes before you could eat them.

Now we have entire aisles of the grocery store devoted to 10,000 different kinds of cereal, most of which are laden with sugar and tie in to either a cartoon character or a children's TV show or some other scheme to sell us processed trash and wonder why we are so fat and becoming diabetic at younger ages. I'm working on my New Year's resolution to eat healthier, one meal at a time. Tonight I'll be nibbling watermelon and cantaloupe while I work on my Ebook on budgeting. It's a work-in-progress I hope to release in the next couple of months. I'm working hard to follow my own advice.

Now, go make something semi-healthy to eat, and take a walk around the block. And if you go to the grocery store tomorrow, practice taking just one item out of your buggy before you check out. You will not miss that bag of chips or box of crackers, I promise you. And with what food costs now, you'll also be $5 richer, so you can go buy yourself a teaspoon of gas.