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Grocery shopping is making me resentful and the pandemic is making us weird-JAWM


teachermom2834
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So, speaking only to the OP's primary complaint, it's okay to say "There are three adults in this household, I will no longer make more than three breakfasts and three dinners a week, and I expect everybody to handle their own lunches" and "I'm so done with groceries, done, done, DONE, I cannot TAKE it anymore, I will take on some other chore but DH, you need to step up and do groceries for a while" and then just stick with it.

I mean, it sucks that the pandemic and life in general has made eating and cooking and food fraught, and that's nobody's fault, but there's no reason it should keep being this whole thing.

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18 hours ago, Garga said:

This is partly why I started the threads about if it’s safe to eat through our covid hoard and asking people where they store their extra food.

I’ve always hated the whole shopping thing, but now that I have a hoard of food to rotate through, it’s just awful. I can spend an hour after a grocery run rotating the old food to the front and putting the new food in the back and stuffing things in the 2 fridges and chest freezer (oh, the chest freezer is a bear sometimes...things slip down to the bottom). 

I calculated everything, and making the grocery list, checking for what we already have on hand, ordering the food online, going to pick it up and putting it away is 5 hours of work.  And when I do the shopping myself instead of ordering it online, it’s 7 hours of work.  And now there’s the extra hour of rotating and stuffing things into the freezer.

And heaven forbid if you want to get out the hamburger patties that are at the very bottom of the stuffed chest freezer. 

 

My family is the same as yours: there’s nothing to eat. Yet everything is overflowing.

 

Regarding rotating, I do that less formally.  

Maybe this would be helpful.  It’s kind of like ‘do the next thing’ vs. ‘scheduling’ in homeschooling.

What I do is I line up the multiples from front to back of the shelves, basically, or in stacks.  So, for instance, canned minced clams are something we use a lot, and I stack them in two stacks.  When I get new ones, I just put them on the top of the stack, but as I use them I grab the one at the bottom of the stack.  Same with a peanut butter—I stuff the new into the front of the line of old ones, but am conscious that it’s best to pick the one at the back of that row when I pull out one to open.  If the row or stack is getting small, that item goes onto a shopping list for next time, but rarely requires a run to the store because there is margin built in.  So if I’m down to only 2 cans of minced clams, I definitely buy more the next time I’m out, but we never run out completely.

In general it doesn’t matter all that much how old these things are, so I extend grace.  I’ve never bugged my husband about taking the clams off the bottom of the stack, because if something is used a bit out of order, it doesn’t really matter that much.  What matters is that someone, who cooks a lot more than most, is loosely and mostly using the older packages and cans ahead of the newer ones, and loosely making sure that we never run out.  This is much easier and just as effective in our world as spending a lot of time rotating stock.  YMMV.

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33 minutes ago, Carol in Cal. said:

Regarding rotating, I do that less formally.  

Maybe this would be helpful.  It’s kind of like ‘do the next thing’ vs. ‘scheduling’ in homeschooling.

What I do is I line up the multiples from front to back of the shelves, basically, or in stacks.  So, for instance, canned minced clams are something we use a lot, and I stack them in two stacks.  When I get new ones, I just put them on the top of the stack, but as I use them I grab the one at the bottom of the stack.  Same with a peanut butter—I stuff the new into the front of the line of old ones, but am conscious that it’s best to pick the one at the back of that row when I pull out one to open.  If the row or stack is getting small, that item goes onto a shopping list for next time, but rarely requires a run to the store because there is margin built in.  So if I’m down to only 2 cans of minced clams, I definitely buy more the next time I’m out, but we never run out completely.

In general it doesn’t matter all that much how old these things are, so I extend grace.  I’ve never bugged my husband about taking the clams off the bottom of the stack, because if something is used a bit out of order, it doesn’t really matter that much.  What matters is that someone, who cooks a lot more than most, is loosely and mostly using the older packages and cans ahead of the newer ones, and loosely making sure that we never run out.  This is much easier and just as effective in our world as spending a lot of time rotating stock.  YMMV.

Oh my goodness! Brilliant! And so obvious! Instead of rotating it all at once and having to pull everything out (the food is all stuffed in some very tight quarters), I can do it throughout the week as I need the items. Just grab the one on the bottom, or in the back. 

Thank you!

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On 2/28/2021 at 9:18 PM, teachermom2834 said:

One thing we have always done to keep expenses in check is for me to plan meals carefully and use up leftovers and we only get takeout or eat out for a special occasion. So it really is every single meal that is being managed and on a budget. I think this has made it harder and having some room in the budget to grab takeout a couple times a week or to let some leftovers go unused without feeling guilty for wasting food would help tremendously. We could do that. It would be money well spent at this point I think. 

We've been doing takeout more often (pre-Covid it was almost never) and have also found more frozen prepared foods we like. Cheaper than takeout and still gives us a sense of novelty and a break from so much prep and cleanup.

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8 minutes ago, Acadie said:

We've been doing takeout more often (pre-Covid it was almost never) and have also found more frozen prepared foods we like. Cheaper than takeout and still gives us a sense of novelty and a break from so much prep and cleanup.

I actually was going to start a thread a couple weeks ago here about prepared foods that people have found actually taste good. Having some things that can just go from a box or bag into the oven and come out tasty is very helpful. 

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