The Grocery Game

So we're a typical family of 2, but I still end up spending insane amount of money on groceries, I'm not even going to say because it's incredibly embarrassing how much money we spend...and honestly the figure only went up when we moved to Ann Arbor (can you blame us!) I also enjoy cooking, and I don't mind grocery shopping either, it's just that the effort of planning the meals, the grocery list, and getting to the store on a regular basis can be stressful for somebody like me...I can't even imagine how much stress this would be if I had kids! Not to mention actually making the meals I plan. I plan great meals, but I don't always have the energy to make everything I plan, and I have to keep in mind that on days I work in the evening, Alex will be making that meal, so it has to be something he can handle if I'm not there. For as much as Alex and I love to plan things out, if we're not in the mood to make an elaborate meal (especially on the weekends), then we won't. We need options.

The premise of The Grocery Game though is this:

I'm not completely unfamiliar with shopping this way, my mom does it and she's such a natural at it too. I think my mom has one of them deal radars though, I think she can walk into any store and just know where all the great deals are without much effort. She also works at Kroger so she's entitled to deals on top of deals. There are also methods of tracking the sales by creating your own databases or lists. I've tried these, but they're all too time consuming for me, plus if they're time consuming for me, I can't imagine how it would be for a family of 4 or 5.

I was mostly curious, so I signed up. It does cost money, but it's quite cheap, $10 for every 8 weeks for a subscription to one store's list. Plus you need a Sunday paper, I bought a subscription to the Ann Arbor News, which I also try to read (I figure I should know more about my community than I do), but really I got it for the coupons, that's $1.50 per week (plus the little tip I tacked on for the paper person I've never met). So it costs me roughly $3 per week to do this. I don't even clip coupons anymore either, I found a more efficient method of keeping track of them using, this site. I pull them out of the paper and mark the sections with that week's date and file them in a folder on my desk. The list on the Grocery Game site lets you know which paper and what section the coupon comes from so you don't need to store them any other way.

I guess I wouldn't be posting about this if I didn't see a drop in our grocery bill every week. It was truly a significant amount of money that's remained at a consistent 30% since we started doing this. I think additionally I've also seen a change in how I handle the whole way I plan meals and do the shopping. I get most of my meal ideas from magazines, my favorites are All You, Real Simple, and Cooking Light. I prefer magazines because they're usually seasonal and trying new things all the time has made me pretty decent at cooking in general. Once a month when I read the magazines I start keeping a list of the recipes I would like to make in a tab I have designated in Microsoft OneNote (which is a pretty neat program). Underneath the recipe I list the major ingredients (or things I think I'm likely to buy), then I don't worry about it until later. Once a week, based on the kind of meat I already have stocked up in the freezer, I decide on three recipes that I'll be making the next week, if I only made two the previous week then I just decide on 2 (so I always have 3 options on hand). I try to plan around ingredients I already know I have, the idea behind the list is that you're stocked up on the basics already so your actual grocery list for the week is minimal (it does take a little while to get to that point though). I use the list on Grocery Game to determine what we'll be having for breakfast and lunch, and get ideas for future dinners. I subscribe to the Kroger list, they always have awesome meat specials so I tend to stock up on meat in advance.

The way this process has changed how I do things is pretty cool, instead of picking my recipes from the magazines and buying exactly what I need for the week, I tend to either plan from my pool of recipes based on what I have, or even modify the recipes to accommodate what I already have. I spend only a few hours on a grocery list, and it's usually before we leave to go grocery shopping (usually on Saturday or Sunday and Alex joins me now). A few hours is minimal compared to how I did it before, I would create elaborate calendars and try to plan every last detail of every meal. This failed the whole flexibility thing of course, especially if we decide to go out to eat one evening, or leave town for a weekend. I'd try to plan meals a month ahead of time, but this usually ended up in frustration by the end of the month, and almost always lost any efficiency when creating a grocery list week to week. The planning and grocery list probably equated to about a day's worth of work, which usually amounted to nothing by the end of the month...there would be times when I was so lost about what I'd be making for dinner that I would give up and put together a crazy meal using scraps of things in the fridge and in our cabinets (not my most shining moments I must add).

The monetary results of this is staggering though, like I mentioned, I now save an average of 30%, but what has shocked me from the very beginning is the dollar amount this equals. Kroger tells you how much you save on their receipts (a lovely service I may add), and I generally don't buy anything that's not on sale anymore. Using my Kroger card my savings have amounted from $90 to $20. My total savings have never gone below $20, and to imagine that a year ago, when I was shopping at Farmer Jack in Monroe, I would get excited when I saved $20 on a grocery bill, now I average a $50 to $60 savings per shopping trip! The $90 was one of the first, my jaw dropped to the floor when I got the receipt back. We were beginning the whole stock up process though, we bought lots of meat to keep in the freezer (buy 1 get 1 free stuff). I think the next week I saved around $40 and the week after I saved around $75. Kroger also tells you what your year to date savings are, so I guess we've been doing this for about 3 months (started in January) and our year to date savings have equaled $304.02 (that's January to now). If we can keep up this consistency we'll have saved over $1000 on groceries by the end of the year!

My overall point though is that in this case, technology actually helps make the process of keeping food in the apartment less daunting. There are plenty of examples of how technology has the opposite effect (I know I've tried them all, hoping for magic to happen I suppose), but this truly works. Let somebody else track the sales, I just want to have food in the apartment, and not have to worry about spending a lot of money on it either. And to be honest, it does feel like a game when I get that receipt back from the cashier every week. Alex and I are both eager to see how much money we saved that week...

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