find the topic of food acquisition and consumption good for amusing blogging from time to time, and when I write about it, the updates end up here.

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November 18, 2002

Today's topic: Grocery shopping and the societal condemnation it brings forth.

I do my grocery shopping at four stores.

Price Club, AKA CostCo, where I get huge stuff in bulk.  Corn chips in a 3 pound bag, 12 packs of canned corn (4 or 5 at a time) mostly for rat food, 20 pound bags of baking potatoes, canisters of Gatorade mix, two-packs of bread, 2 pound bottles of salsa, etc.  Warehouse food type stuff, in large quantities for very cheap.  I go there maybe every two weeks and stock up on non-perishable stuff and usually fall victim to one or two things I have no need for, like 5lbs bags of pecans. It's ridiculously-easy to blow $150 on half a cart full of stuff at CostCo.  Impulse purchases there will live to haunt you like the 6.7 remaining pounds of the 7 pound bag of frozen cod fillets you bought 4 months ago.

Boney's, AKA Henry's, a small local chain of markets that are sort of small supermarkets, with great produce.  I get mostly produce there, every type, and they also have pasta for cheap, as well as bins of food like oats and cereal and peanut butter filled pretzels.  It's very cheap, I'll often get 5 or 6 grocery bags full of stuff, mostly produce, for like $17.

Trader Joe's, a gloriously-cool store with tons of weird items, mostly of their own goofy brand names.  There I get all types of cheese, rice milk, pasta sauce, raspberry preserves, cold cereal, eggs, sour cream, candles, nuts, fresh salsa, etc.

All three of these are relatively healthy to this point.  Nothing in my cart/basket I'd too ashamed of buying, though the Price Club cashiers almost never fail to make some pointless comment about how much I must like corn.  Shut up and scan prices; if I wanted to talk to you about my purchases I'd strike up the conversation myself.  I hate when cashiers have to talk.

The fourth store is Ralph's, a regular supermarket. I used to shop at Lucky's, which was probably the dumbest name ever for a supermarket, but they had the lowest prices (which they touted endlessly in their TV ads) and biggest selection.  Unfortunately they were bought out by Albertson's (why is every market a possessive name?), an out of state grocery chain a couple of years ago.  Albertson's was cheap for about a month while they moved out all the remaining Lucky merchandise and tried to get customers to keep coming back.  Then their prices crept up steadily, and are now far higher than Lucky's were.  None of the local supermarkets ever run ads saying anything about low prices anymore, since none of them make any effort to offer such things.  The only prices resembling "low" are their club card stuff, where if you sign up and give them your name and address and such, you get a little card and are entered into their computer system, which tracks your ever purchase whenever you buy anything on club card sale.

On top of Lucky's superior quality and lower prices vanishing, them being low acted as an anchor on prices for their competitors, where the others didn't want to appear too overpriced.  Now no one mentions low prices at any time, so it's pretty much like gas stations; they all have similar prices and all make obscene profits, and no one makes any effort to really cut prices to add more market share.  Funny how some businesses are cut throat in their competitiveness, while others are just back-scratchers.

Ralph's is the only supermarket that's anywhere near cheap at this point, and they aren't cheap, they're just less expensive.  The only things I get there are things that I can't get elsewhere, or can't get the type I want elsewhere. CostCo has frozen pizza, but only supreme or pepperoni.  I get cheese or chicken/spinach/mushroom.  CostCo has refried beans, but only the normal lard-fried type.  I get vegetarian or no-fat.  CostCo has soup, but only the most common types like Campbell's chicken noodle or beef flavor Ramen.  I get Campbell's Vegetarian Vegetable, and shrimp or oriental flavor Ramen.  Etc.

The problem is that all I get at Ralph's is crap like that, and since I'm only there twice a month at most, I get a bunch of it if it's on sale.

My last visit there they had all flavors of Ramen at 8 for $1.  $12.5 cents.  Lucky used to have them for $.15 all the time, and would put them on sale at 15 or even 20 for $1.  Those days are gone though, so I got 8 each of oriental and shrimp flavor.  That much Ramen will last me until next summer, since I have a pack a week at most, but it was almost half price, so what the hell.

They also had the kind of frozen pizza I like on sale for $5 a pie, when it's usually $8 or so (which I refuse to pay).  So I got six of those, which will probably last me through New Year's.  They also had biscuits on sale, so I got 4 cans, which will last me forever (Or until I remember there are still two cans in the back of the fridge and throw them away before they explode.  Again.) They had the huge cans of vegetarian refried beans on sale too, so I got four of those.

The net result of this is that I'm checking out with a cart full of the most unhealthy, unbalanced diet crap you can imagine.  Well, not that bad, I mean I don't buy soda or beer or potato chips or Hostess cakes or other such crap as most people do, but my cart so screams, "non-cooking bachelor" that I'm ashamed to be pushing it.

So of course as I turn the corner to the frozen pizza aisle, there are two cute college looking girls there, browsing.  I was tired and scruffy so didn't bother eyeing them much, but I had to practically push past them to pick out my six frozen pizzas.  Which joined the litter of instant ramen and cans of refried beans.

Then at the check out a young couple is behind me, and they've got nothing but produce, frozen chicken breasts, etc.  Healthy stuff, and they're discussing recipes, low cholesterol, etc, while in line.  While eyeing my piles of garbage.

I then came home and put that stuff away, and made shrimp pasta stir fry.  Sliced red and green bell peppers, half a purple onion, lots of fresh sliced mushrooms, halved black olives, and half a pound of thawed frozen shrimp.  I throw that all into a wok and stir fry it in light olive oil with lots of spices until it's browning nicely, at which time I pour in half a jar of Alfredo sauce and stir well, while the water is boiling for pasta and I make some garlic bread with melted Jack cheese. It's amazingly good, but I only make it once in a while since it's a lot of ingredients and labor, it doesn't make that much sauce since it's so thick you eat a lot of it with the pasta, and the Alfredo sauce and shrimp are expensive.

The point is that I cook almost all of my meals, usually pretty good stuff, very healthy ingredients, yet at the grocery store I appear to be the most cooking illiterate lazy guy alive.  Since I pay no attention to what other people buy, didn't look at any of the other people there closely enough to recognize them again, and could care less what any of them think, it's unclear why this bothers me.  And yet it does.

I feel the same way at work sometimes; when a guy a decade younger than me is sitting there with his wife and kid(s) and buying the crap I'm selling.  Crap I would never buy (since it's crap, but also expensive crap), but meanwhile I look like some loser who needs to work at a ridiculous teenager job since I'm too much of a troll to get a real job.  That's essentially true, but see I'm much more clever than your average no-money non-teenaged loser.  And I only work there since I make $150+ for 3-4 hours work, because I'm the best at vending that crap that there's ever been.

Which is true, but even that isn't exactly a point of great pride.  I'm sure there's some guy in a 7/11 somewhere who's the fastest ever at restocking shelves with mini-bags of Fritos, but if he's still doing that when he's thir... twenty-eight, especially if he has marketable skills doing web design/maintenance or textbook editing, or could potentially have written half a dozen best sellers by now, if he just applied himself to it, would that raise your opinion of him much?

This is all hypothetical, you understand.

August 5, 2002

Buying groceries gets more complicated all the time.

That's almost entirely my fault, I'll admit.  When I was 20 I'd just go to one supermarket, usually Lucky, and get everything I needed.  I would occasionally go to Price Club for bulk stuff at low prices, but that was the same crap I got at the regular Supermarket; just more of it.

I now require four stores for my grocery routine, and it's partially due to my making much better stuff to eat, and requiring a wider-variety of ingredients.  However it's mostly just me being picky and saving money.  I go to the nearby Boney's for most of my produce, since they have a great selection and far lower than supermarket prices.  I also get odd Mexican brand tortillas and chips and such there, that aren't sold anywhere else I know of.  The tortillas are huge white ones, literally the size of a medium pizza, and very dry. They make awesome quesadillas.

I get other food at Trader Joe's, mostly stuff like salsa, rice milk, nuts, popcorn, and cheese. All because they either have their own brands that are the best, or the cheapest.

I still go to Price Club, but don't get much of the crap I did there when I was 20.  Back then I'd get super packs of cookies and turkey dogs and soda and chicken pot pies.  I don't really eat any of that stuff anymore, other than some soda, so now I get veggie burgers there, or dry Gatorade, or 20 lbs bag of baking potatoes.  And lots of canned veggies, mostly corn, mostly for the rodents.

Lastly I still go to the supermarket, and I'm glad there's not some cute cashier there I'm trying to impress, since she'd think I had the worst diet.  I only get a few canned goods or semi-bulk foods there, or else cheese pizzas.  I'd look like a weirdly-selective junk food eater if anyone there paid attention to what I buy.  Today I got 3 frozen pizzas, all Fresciata four-cheese, 4 1lbs bags of egg noodles, 4 giant cans of vegetarian refried beans, and 2 cans of biscuits.  I never get any produce there since it's much lower quality/higher prices than the fresh stuff at Boney's.  I used to at least get Newman's Own pasta sauce at the supermarket, but I've been doing my own from semi-scratch the last few months, and I just buy big cans of marinara or pureed tomatoes at Trader Joe's, which I think stir from a bunch of veggies and mix in with.

The prices on things are funny, since I'll get 4 or 5 bags worth of stuff at Boney's, and it will cost me $14.52.  Then one bag at the supermarket will run me $22.70, and weigh a damn lot more to carry out.  Of course that pales beside Price Club, where you can drop $200 in 15 minutes, $150 of it on things you had no intention of even considering for purchase when you first walked into the hanger-style edifice, and at least $50 of which will never be used at all.

The net result of all that Sunday shopping (which included everything but a Price Club visit) was about 8 bags of food, which I put away, and then ate reheated lasagna from yesterday, as well as some purple grapes. I'm not good at buying food and letting it go to waste, other than bananas, but I'm very good at buying a ton of stuff and having no energy/interest in turning it into an edible meal the day I purchase it.

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