Tag Archives: grocery shopping

Meijer Is My Frenemy

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I love Meijer. I hate Meijer. Call me conflicted. I’m so conflicted, in fact, I’ll probably give my brain whiplash.

On the one hand, Meijer is great. I particularly like this terrific thing called Flash Food. (I imagine other stores have it, too, but I learned about it through Meijer.) It’s grocery shopping for useless people. There’s an app that lets me survey the food that’s near, but not past, its expiration date. (There are always lots of baked goods available, so I have muffins for breakfast nearly every morning.) I think last year I saved nearly $1000 in food costs, plus the food didn’t go to waste.

(I used to work for a company that occasionally gave cocktail parties at business conventions, and there were always assorted hors d’oeuvres. They were never all eaten, and I worried some about the food waste. I learned, however, that if you signed a release form, the leftovers would be donated to a local shelter. I always liked to think of the homeless people being treated to mini-quiches and tiny beef Wellington amuse-bouches. But I digress.)

Meijer is also located within a mile and a half of our house, which is super-convenient, especially since my husband works there and doesn’t have a long commute. (His is still longer than mine, which consists of commuting from the bedroom upstairs to my study downstairs. It’s a quick trek, and I’ve never needed snow tires. But I digress again.)

I also love that Meijer gives him a regular paycheck, which is necessary to maintain our essential supply of cat food. It’s also handy that he works there, since he can do all the shopping and pick up the Flash Food and I don’t have to ha ha ha ha ha!

On the other hand, Meijer pisses me off. First, I object on principle to stores where you can buy both milk and lawn furniture. It’s simply wrong. The store is too large as well, and they keep rearranging it. I’m afraid that I’ll wander for hours through the freezer section and die of exposure. When Dan and I shop together, we need to use our cell phones to keep track of each other. “I’m in the pet section. Where are you?” “Cheap meat.”

(I do like the cheap meat section. Once when we were shopping, I ran into a mutual friend. I towed him over to where Dan was mulling over the varieties of pudding available. “Look what I found in cheap meat!” I said. But I digress yet again.)

I don’t love Dan’s schedule. He has Sundays and Mondays off, which is okay. He can join me on bank-and-post-office-type errands that have to be done on a weekday. But he has to be at work several days a week at 6:00 a.m. Until my sleep habits went wonky this winter, I couldn’t get up to have tea with Dan in the mornings. But wonky waking means that now I get up at the same (way too early) time Dan does, and I can have my muffins and tea while he eats his hard-boiled eggs and toaster waffles.

All in all, though, I can’t stay mad at Meijer. What we thought would be a short chapter in our lives has turned into a ten-year narrative. What might to some seem like a lowly job as a greeter has meant for Dan an ideal antidote to burnout and a position where he gets to smile and chat with people all day.

And what it means for me is whiplash. I’ll ask Dan to bring me home an icebag. And lemon muffins, while he’s at it.

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How the Pandemic Changed My Life

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The pandemic has changed lots of peoples’ lives. They’ve taken up new hobbies, learned new skills, and bonded more closely with family and friends. They’ve learned what things mean the most to them and what they miss the most. Some have lived in fear and others have found new strength.

Post-Pandemic

As for me, since the pandemic struck last spring, I have been working from home, on my Macintosh. Because of that I can – and do – spend most days as well as nights in my pajamas. I have not had my hair or nails done since March.

I no longer go out, except for vital appointments like visits to doctors. I have a mask (actually I have two – one leopard print and one camo) and I wear one or the other religiously whenever I do go out. In general, when I do go out or want to look even semi-respectable, I pull my hair back into the fortunate ‘do known as a messy bun – my favorite of all the recent fashion styles.

My husband takes care of most of the errands, such as grocery shopping. He’s not able to work from home, so most days are very quiet, allowing me to do my work and my writing.

Speaking of writing, I have had time to work on my mystery novel. It’s now in shape to where I can send queries to agents and start collecting rejection slips. (I’ve done this before and am used to them.) I haven’t taken up any other hobbies. I have resisted the allure of homemade bread and jam and homemade Christmas decorations as well.

I don’t really have pandemic panic. First of all, I have a third-degree black belt in social distancing. I have no aesthetic, medical, or political objection to masks. And I’ve mastered the art of creative procrastination.

My philosophy has for a long time been not to worry about things I can’t do anything about, and to postpone worrying until the looming whatever-it-is actually hits. So far the pandemic has not invaded our house (not to put a kinnehara on it). Since I have been taking all necessary precautions, I won’t worry about it until it does.

That said, I can’t really say that I miss my life before the pandemic. You see, it has changed almost not at all.

Pre-Pandemic

I’ve worked from home for a number of years, so that’s no challenge for me. And I can just sit down at my computer and work on my novel as I always have. My typical uniform has always been pajamas, or a nightshirt when the weather is pleasant. I never had much of a social life anyway, mostly conducted by phone and computer. For “formal” Zoom meetings, I could half-dress, which is still true.

I not only haven’t had my hair and nails done since March, I haven’t had them done in years. (Unless you count clipping my nails, which I do regularly, or biting them, which I do occasionally.) 

Also, pre-pandemic, it was rare for me to leave the house, except for doctor’s appointments. And when I did this before the pandemic, I didn’t wear a mask, of course, not even for Halloween or when robbing banks. (I wonder how bank personnel feel about having masked people coming into the branches that are open. It must be at least a little unnerving. But I digress.)

My husband has always done the grocery and most other shopping, as he works in a big box store that has a grocery section. He has worked third shift for years, so it’s always been quiet, both during the morning when he sleeps and at night when he works.

I still have all the things that are important to me – my husband, my home, my work, my novel, my cats, enough food, and my medications (which can be picked up at a drive-through). The pandemic so far has taken none of them away. There is almost nothing I miss.

Except going out for lunch. We’ve done take-out, but it’s just not the same. At home, the cats bug us shamelessly for little nibbles of whatever we’re having. Even if they don’t like the food, they can’t resist sticking their little noses in. At least in proper restaurants, there are no intrusive noses.

 

The Great Meal Kit Experiment

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We have had trouble with our meals.  Well, that’s not quite true. We’ve had trouble with our grocery budget. Actually, both those things are true.

The first part of the problem is shopping. My husband works in a store that sells, among other things, groceries. And he just can’t resist meats which, while on special, are still so expensive I’m tempted to take out a meat loan to get them. Plus, he’s unable to resist the Manager’s Special, Close-Out, and Day Old tables.

That might seem like frugal shopping, but it results in a variety of bizarre foods that we would never otherwise have purchased. Vanilla butter. Bourbon-apple salsa. Snacks that taste like sesame-flavored cardboard. And the “reduced” prices don’t mean they’re cheap. You should have seen the price tags the week the store cleared out the “Imported from Italy” section. Imported pesto isn’t cheap, let me tell you.

Our next problem is waste. We waste a lot of food. Our refrigerator is so unreliable that it regularly freezes any produce we buy and turns it into unidentifiable slimy green goo. This is good neither for our budget nor for our appetites. We are reduced to buying prepared deli salads – which are hideously expensive but can be eaten the same day – or getting bags of cole slaw mix that are hideously expensive but can be eaten with my special slaw dressing (mayonnaise and pickle juice) which my husband loves. That we devour in a day or two. Frozen peas and corn and canned tomatoes are the most vegetable-like things we can keep on hand. And sometime V-8 juice.

Anyway, our food expenditures are outrageous. I’ve tried setting a budget, but my husband does the shopping and is unable to understand the concept. I’ve tried splitting the shopping with him, but every night when he gets off work he picks up a few more (or even more) items that he seems psychologically unable to resist.

So, in the hope of reducing both the amount we spend and the amount we waste, I have decided to try an experiment. Those meal kits we hear so much about on TV and online promise solutions to budget, preparation, shopping, and variety of meals. They are said to provide good nutrition, reduce waste, and be ever so yummy.

So each week for the next six weeks, I am ordering one of those yuppie, home-delivered meal kits. I am taking advantage of special promotional deals, as there is no way that paying the full price would produce any actual savings. I am not receiving any freebies or reduced prices by promising to blog about any of them.

The services I have chosen for this experiment are:

Home Chef

Blue Apron

Hello Fresh

EveryPlate

SunBasket

and Dinnerly.

Each week will receive three recipes and sets of appropriate ingredients for the making thereof. My husband is dubious of this experiment, as he claims (rightly) that the portion sizes they will deliver will not match the portion sizes of meals that he prepares. I try to point out that this is not necessarily a bad thing and that we can always supplement with appetizers, yogurt, pretzels, or popcorn should we feel unsatisfied.

I am trying to select a range of meals that will be filling yet different from our usual fare, involving ingredients we don’t usually have on hand and international cuisines we don’t make at home.

For the rest of the meals for the week, hubby can shop for whatever he chooses, though I fervently hope he will stick to staples like chicken, ground beef, fish, rice, beans, canned tomatoes, mushrooms, frozen vegetables, potatoes, pasta, eggs, bread, and the like. He makes an awesome frittata, an amazing shepherd’s pie, and a killer deconstructed mac-n-cheeseburger.

At the end of this experiment, I will report back on the results. My goals are variety in cuisine, reduced waste, lower grocery bills, and fewer odd ingredients that go with nothing else.

Our first delivery is arriving on our doorstep Tuesday.

Wish us luck.

My Guy’s Grocery Games*

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I stared at the list. My mission: To see if anything was missing. My challenge: Deciphering what was already on the list.

“You can’t buy Google at the grocery, and even if you could we couldn’t afford it,” I said. “And what is this? Yom? Is it a Pennsylvania Dutch expression for yam?”

It was clear what was missing: legible writing.(1) I won’t say Dan’s writing is bad, but it does look like he could be a recent graduate of either a kindergarten or a medical school. Sometimes I think he channels a spirit who writes in Farsi.

“Google” turned out to be “goodie,” which is shorthand for anything on the quick sale bake table.(2)

“Yom” was really “UPM,” which is shorthand for “useless people meals.” These are frozen meals that we can nuke when both of us are too useless to do real cooking.(3) Dan buys whatever ones are on sale, so UPMs are also meal surprises, sort of like tomato surprises, only in a bag or a paper tray instead of a tomato. I always cross my fingers and hope for Stouffer’s mac-n-cheese, but it’s usually On-Cor salisbury steak(4) or the frozen burritos that impoverished college students subsist on.

After we settled on a revised list, I made the mistake of saying, “Try to keep it under $75.” Dan burst into hysterical laughter.

“You’re mocking me. I can tell,” I said, glaring. “I can tell by the mocking.”(5)

“Honey, everything on the list so far adds up to way more than $75.”

“I know. It’s a ritual phrase. I have to say it. Just like when you come back with $200 worth of groceries, you have to say, ‘OK, what do you want me to take back?'”

————–

On occasion I make the shopping trek with Dan,(6) which you would think would cut down on the cost, but doesn’t. We divide up the list. One of us starts at the back of the store and the other at the front. We keep each other posted with our cell phones. We meet somewhere near the middle, usually by the beer and wine, where we linger for a time in happy contemplation.

It’s not the stupidest shopping system ever.(7) We used to divide up the aisles into evens and odds, until we realized that meant both of us would have to navigate the entire length of the store, which is gargantuan, there and back again. The frozen food alone takes up four aisles and the pet food, two.

————–

Once our cart is as loaded as we will be later, it’s time to have fun with the cashiers. Once I bought an eggplant. The cashier held it up, pointed at it, and asked, “What is this?”

“It’s an eggplant,” I said. She rang it up.

I turned to Dan. “She believed me!” I exclaimed. “I could have told her anything! I could have said it was an avocado or a rutabaga or something really cheap!”(8)

I close my eyes when the total comes up and hand over a check for the automatic printing machine. I hope Dan makes sure the totals match, but by this time I am in complete denial. I keep muttering, “$75. Come on, $75.” It’s never $75, even if we only popped in for milk and bread.

I wonder if Guy Fieri and his wife have this much fun at the grocery?

—————-

*Guy Fieri has a TV game show on the Food Network called “Guy’s Grocery Games.” People run around in a supermarket and then cook. Guy is evil and springs surprises on them. He’s not as evil as Alton Brown on “Cutthroat Kitchen,” but entertaining nonetheless.
(1) Also fresh vegetables, fresh fruit, and toilet paper.
(2) I’ve asked Dan to buy only one goodie at a time, and that only once or twice a month. This time he came home with scones, sticky cinnamon rolls, and a whole carrot cake. He said he had to fight an old lady for the cake.
(3) This happens lots. We also have Useless People tableware, which I’m sure you’ll guess is not made from any kind of ceramic or metal or glass.
(4) Which I bet really pisses off the people of Salisbury.
(5) My other possible response is, “Laugh while you can, monkey boy!” Bonus points for getting that reference.
(6) I have a bad back, so I get to use one of the store’s scooters with the basket on the front. They don’t hold much, but they’re as much fun as a go-kart or maybe a bumper car. They zoom along and have a really annoying “audible signal” for backing up. Some day I shall achieve my goal of knocking over a display of canned chunky soup and a heap of cantaloupes, then escaping, merrily beeping in reverse, savoring the yelps of people fearing for their toes and the plaintive announcements of “Cleanup on aisle six. And twelve. And four.” (I would circle back for more canned goods.)
(7) The stupidest shopping system ever is the one my sister uses. She purchases items in the order they appear on her shopping list (which is not written with the contents of the aisles in mind). Her path through the store is reminiscent of a drunken chicken on a scavenger hunt for a magic bean somewhere in the barnyard. Of course I would never really make that comparison about my sister. She doesn’t drink.
(8) Young clerks are fun too. Once in a drugstore I asked, “If I were talcum powder, where would I be?” and received a blank stare. “I don’t know what that is. What’s it used for?” the clerk asked. I thought about telling her, “I put it under my boobs when I sweat and get heat rash” (i.e., the truth). But I restrained myself and said, “You know? Like Johnson’s baby powder.”