On Saturday morning, with coffee and the green notebook open to two pages side by side, I did something I should have done last fall. I lined up our grocery spending for January through April of 2024 next to the same four months of 2025.
The weekly average in 2024 was $214. This year it's $146. That's $68 a week, or a little over $3,500 a year, which sounds wonderful until you remember that last year we fed three people a lot of the time and this year we feed two.
Josh was at UC in the spring of 2024, but he came home most weekends with a laundry bag and an appetite, and he left on Sunday nights with containers. Since he moved into his apartment full time last August, it's just Greg and me. If our groceries had dropped in proportion to the people, I'd expect a lot more than $68. So I went through the receipts to see where the money actually went.
Where the $68 came from
I sorted the old and new receipts into rough piles. It's not exact, since Kroger receipts don't sort themselves, but it's close:
- Meat: down about $22 a week. Josh could eat a pound of ground beef by himself.
- Snacks and drinks: down $17. Chips, frozen pizza rolls, Gatorade and the big bag of pretzels.
- Frozen foods: down $8. Mostly pizza and breakfast sandwiches.
- Dairy: down $9. We went from two gallons of milk a week to a half gallon.
- Cereal and breakfast: down $7.
- Bread and lunch meat: down $5.
That adds up to $68. What didn't drop much is the boring stuff: coffee, produce, cheese, paper towels, dish soap. Two people use almost as much coffee as three. Eggs went the other way. We paid about $2.89 a dozen last spring and $5.99 at Kroger in March, so that one line ate some of the savings by itself.
The things I still buy for a teenager
This was the embarrassing part. Going line by line, I found habits that only made sense when Josh lived here.
I still buy the two-pound block of cheddar because it's cheaper per ounce. Half of it goes moldy in the back of the drawer before we finish it. A one-pound block costs a little more per ounce and none of it gets thrown out.
I still buy the family-size bag of tortilla chips. Greg and I eat chips maybe twice a week. The bag goes stale.
I still buy a full loaf of sandwich bread every week, even though we don't pack lunches the way we used to. Now it goes in the freezer as soon as I get home.
And I still buy a three-pound bag of apples because that's what you do in the fall and winter. We eat maybe five of them. The rest turn soft in the bottom of the bowl, and I tell myself I'll make applesauce. I don't.
Greg's contribution to this audit was to point out that I also still buy the cereal Josh likes. He's not wrong. I bought a box in March. Neither of us eats it. It's still in the cupboard, unopened, like a little shrine.
What we're doing about it
None of this is complicated. I'm making a list before I go, which I used to skip because I knew the house by heart. The house I knew had three people in it. I'm buying the smaller sizes when the waste outweighs the unit price, and I'm checking the fridge on Thursday night so I know what needs eating before the weekend shopping.
My goal is $130 a week by the end of summer. That would be another $16 a week, about $830 a year, without anyone going hungry. I finish at the school in less than a month, and once my paycheck stops, that $830 will matter more than it does today.
I'll report back. And if anyone wants a box of unopened cereal, I know where to find one.
