Grocery Genius

Sample List at Peapod

Bamboo & I came up with the BEST way to tackle the market. Before coming up with this plan, we rarely made it to the grocery store. When we did go, we'd buy ingredients for one or two dinners and then a bunch of crap. We were constantly surprised at check-out of the staggering grand total and even more surprised when we seemingly had nothing in the house to eat...the very next day. We were pretty bad.

So Bamboo brought up the idea of checking out the Peapod grocery delivery service. I resisted the idea because we may be lazy but we're also broke. I also thought we hadn't put enough effort into making shopping a budgeted responsibility instead of a mad-dash run through Supermarket Sweep.

We compromised. Last night, we planned out dinners for the week. We compiled our shopping list in Peapod and adjusted the list to fit our self-imposed budget. Once the list was all figured out, we wrote it down, and headed off to the store. This might sound like nothing new but using the Peapod lists and totals really helped us visualize what we were spending. It's easy to toss a frozen pizza in your cart at the store, when it's staring at you from behind frosty glass, its sausagey bits begging for delicious freedom. It's even easier to add it to your virtual cart, notice that it costs $9, and hit DELETE.

Of course, we made some changes at the store due to the in-house bargains but, for the most part, we stayed on track. In fact, at check-out, we ended up coming in $3 less than our Peapod total! All this and we have an entire week's worth of dinners planned and ready to be cooked up.

I was so inspired by this turning over of a new spinach leaf that I even prepared myself a lunchtime Bento.

2-18-2008