July Grocery Shopping

July has been a kind of strange month for grocery shopping. Between my challenge not to shop in the first week, being away for 5 days (so didn't do a regular shop that week either) and then sending DH to do a small shop for me last week, I only did 1 "normal" grocery shop.

The upside to not shopping has been we only spent $302.29 for the month of July. That was including the stock up shop I did at Gaganis Bros while we were away. Had I not done the Gaganis Bros shop, the total spend would have only been $219.19 for the month. I'm kind of surprised with this and yet also really happy. One of the things I didn't want to do when I started my $100 a week average spend challenge was to simply cut costs by using up what I had on hand. I wanted to be truly cutting our spending. I guess to get to the end of the 6 months and be able to cope through a month that way was proof to me that I was still keeping plenty of food on hand.

The downside to not shopping many times would have to be a gradually depleting stock of food. Not so much in the pantry but definitely noticable in the freezer. In fact, for the first time in my memory, we ran out of frozen peas! I usually keep several packets of frozen peas on hand so this is quite an unusual occurence. Of course, if DH had remembered to buy some last week when I asked him to, we wouldn't have run out. LOL. But that's okay. I do plan to use the $97.71 surplus from this months goal of $400 to restock the freezer as opportunities arise. So in reality my spending will still end up being around the $400 mark for the month.

When I was thinking about making this my topic for today, I wasn't due to shop until tomorrow. As things turned out I ended up shopping today (DH needed to go into town anyway) but given July is all but finished and the shop was really due tomorrow, I'm thinking I'll still count todays shop as an August shop.

It was an interesting experience doing the grocery shop today. I wanted to make sure I did a fairly decent shop rather than just a small, fill-in shop given the lack of shopping that had happened in recent weeks. I guess having not done much shopping during July, the difference in prices were particularly noticable to me. I actually felt ill as I went around the supermarket. Everything seems to have gone up in price!!! And even though it's only Tuesday, many of the specials I was hoping to get weren't available. :-(

I know they were predicting fruit and vegetable prices to increase but to actually see it was an interesting experience (to be honest I was really hoping they'd turn out to be wrong). $5.50 for a lettuce! $5.50 for a cauliflower. $9.99 kg for broccoli. $4.59 kg for mandarines. $7.99 kg for bananas Aaaaarhhhhh!!! Other than the bananas, we're talking IN SEASON fruit and veg here. Boy do I wish my vegetable garden was producing a little better. At least with the price of lettuces at the moment, I know I'm getting good savings from the lettuces I'm growing (although they are almost at the end of their life now).

I guess if this keeps up, the $75 we spent on a trailer load of compost today will be money well invested. One thing is for sure, my $100 challenge just got more challenging!!!