It’s not that grocery shopping is so hard, it’s just that you have to keep doing it. Especially when you run out of cat food.
I’d generally avoid the big grocery shop which meant frequently stopping at Safeway on the way home from work, hungry for dinner, unwise choices hankering to be made. That was the best case scenario: worst was grabbing take out on the way home.
Then I met SPUD. I’d heard of it for a while — a grocery delivery company with a focus on local, organic foods and cute little trucks wandering the city. Think Whole Foods on wheels. Problem is I don’t shop Whole Foods, don’t care much about organic, try to care somewhat about local but do care about price, and it didn’t seem like a great fit for me. Plus there was the concept that grocery shopping isn’t that hard. How pathetic would it be to outsource?
But as life piled up, that kind of pathetic beat out the other kinds of pathetic that found me at Safeway making hunger-based choices. Now every Wednesday I come home thrilled to find a blue box of goodness in front of my suite door, sometimes with a bouquet of flowers on top (SPUD loves me too! Oh wait, I order them. Never mind.)
Every week I make considered choices about the week’s menus and fill my online cart with things like chicken breasts, salmon, produce, some prepared meals like Aussie pies and salmon & dill quiches, snacks, yogurt, and that all-important cat food. Sometimes I even eat all the produce.
Though the individual items are sometimes (though not always) more expensive than what I’d pay at Superstore if I ever psyched myself up enough to go there, or even Safeway, the total without the plethora of prepared foods and hasty choices is less than I was paying for food previously.
There are items I won’t get through SPUD. My weakness is cherries. The short growing season gives me such anxiety that I have to buy all the cherries while I can, and they’re expensive enough without the organic delivered premium.
I won’t often pay for the local, grassfed, yogic, college-educated beef and whatnot either, but I’m more a chickenarian anyway.
Another downside is my inability to visualise what, say, a pound of grapes looks like, so that I end up thinking “I spent how much on this handful?!”
But overall, SPUD not only takes away the burden (don’t roll your eyes) of going grocery shopping and curbs some unnecessary spending, it forces me to plan meals ahead. Now I just have to get better about bringing some of those meals to work for lunch.
If you want to try it out, my SPUD code will get you $20 off your first order (and I think I get the same discount). You earn points with orders and it doesn’t take long to accumulate enough to get $10 off.
If it doesn’t sound like it’s for you, enjoy this Stompin’ Tom Connors song: