The fact that the battle against spending lots of money on groceries is to spend even more money in groceries. I hate that you’re right and we’re doomed.
Right, this is the worst part. The people who most desperately need to get cheaper groceries can’t afford to save money on groceries by buying in bulk. It’s shitty and sad.
My prices have come down quite a bit over the past few months. It was a stretch to feed myself on $250 but now I’m ending the month with a few dollars left over
Bought instant noodles in bulk. I could have gotten the cheap, tasteless kind, but I prefer the more expensive Asian ones. Still ends up being much less expensive than groceries anyways. I have a good portion of the pantry filled with just different types of instant noodles, all of which were bought in bulk. I do buy groceries, but I avoid the more expensive foods as much as possible. Just stuff like milk, eggs, spinach, fruits, etc.
I don’t eat instant noodles every day, but if I don’t feel like cooking or if I’m running low on food, I can “supplement” the meal with instant noodles. Having instant noodles as “backup” helps takes a bit of the edge off with regards to grocery spending, although I do admit that I could take more drastic measures to save. Despite living in an area where the cost of living is absurd (one of the highest in the country), I feel somewhat well off in that I can get by with just supplementing my meals with instant noodles every now and then.
Pancakes can really go with anything, they’re basically a large flat biscuit. Not to mention they keep quite nicely if frozen or simply put in the fridge
I mostly buy ingredients and cook bulk batches of food. Before, we were splurging on instacart, but they got crazy expensive with their upcharges (MINIMUM 15% increase in item cost, + service charge, +delivery fee (or the annual delivery fee), +tip (it started to feel like 15% was too low, on top of the 15% grocery upcharge).
We stopped that and we actually spend less now even after this inflation.
I am lucky enough to have a yard, so grow leafy greens in most seasons and some other veg.
Other than that, what I noticed about the food inflation is that prices converged, whole foods were already expensive but their prices came down a little while our regular grocery and the cheaper place increased theirs a lot, regular grocery prices worse than whole foods in quite a lot of the things I actually buy so I just buy stuff at whole foods and local ethnic groceries now, not much from the chain grocery.
Dried beans and canned beans we use for near every meal but have always done, that’s not a change.
Housing here has increased way more than food. Rent and purchase prices went crazy and are now dropping so slowly.
I’ve been shopping at WinCo, it’s a further bike ride than Fred Meyer or Trader Joes but the prices are hard to beat. This year I’m looking at buying into a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture). The one I’m looking at is $400 for 12 boxes of food spread across 24 weeks. We’ll see if it’s a good deal. I’ll be planting a garden soon too. Hoping to get a 3 sisters plot or two as well as some potatoes in containers
For the past month I’m paying around 30% more than I was in July 2022, and 10% more than I was in April 2022. (I just picked two random months from where I wasn’t yet either too lazy or busy to track everything I bought on the computer. Really need to catch up on that tbh because I haven’t updated the file for more than a year.)
The amount of stupid bullshit such as energy drinks I buy varies so to get any actually usable stats I’d have to average it over a longer time frame but it seems fine to me.
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