Brian and I just hit Shop-Rite's annual "Can Can" sale, where all manner of canned goods (and some other products as well) are available dirt cheap. Since this year marks the 40th anniversary of the Can Can sale, several items were on sale for 40 cents, including beans, tomatoes, and pasta. We loaded up to the limit on these products, then got them home and were faced with the problem of how to cram them all into our woefully small pantry. Eventually we concluded that some items would have to go into overflow storage downstairs, so we started sorting through the entire contents of the pantry to figure out what should go where. The biggest problem was making sure that the stuff downstairs didn't become a case of "out of sight, out of mind" and get restocked prematurely, so we hit on a solution that I have dubbed the "canventory."
The canventory is simply a list of all the canned goods and all the pasta boxes we have, sorted by type. It shows the size of each package, the number of packages we have, and where they are stored. A typical entry looks like this:
Beans, kidney, dark 15.5 oz. 2 cans 2 upstairs 0 downstairs
I've entered the full list into an Excel spreadsheet, which can be easily updated on an ongoing basis and will automatically re-tally the number of cans or boxes we have left. So now all I have to do is pull up the list to see at a glance how many we have of any given item, so that we don't buy too many or too few of anything (like the big 20-quart box of powdered milk we just brought home from the Shop-Rite, not remembering that we already had an unopened box stored away in the pantry).
So how is this system ecofrugal? Simply put, it allows us to make better use of three available resources: space, time, and money. We use space more effectively by storing the foodstuffs we're most likely to need where they'll be most accessible, and keeping everything else in reserve. We save time because we don't have to hunt through two different storage areas to see what we've already got. And we save money because we can take better advantage of massive sales like today's without fear of overloading on any particular product. (In fact, after a moment's consideration, I've just added a new column to the canventory: "Last price paid." That column will show how much we paid for a particular product last time it went on sale, so we can evaluate future sales to see just how good a deal they really are.)
I'm hoping this same system will prove useful later in the year to help us keep track of our (I hope) abundant garden produce. For that purpose, I'll probably have to add another column to the inventory—expected shelf life—to make sure everything we grow gets eaten while the eating is good. But of course, that particular point is moot until I figure out what I'm actually planting this year, and where—about which, more in a future entry.
I thought of you at the grocery store the other day. As you enter the produce section, there's a display of onions and sweet potatoes. There are white and yellow PEELED(!) onions for $2.49 EACH. There are sweet onions for $1.29 a pound, I think. Now, if you keep moving and go to the next part of the produce section, there's a display - facing away from the peeled onions, so you can't see it when you are confronted with PEELED onions - of yellow and white onions in whatever-pound bags. For much cheaper. Are people really so ignorant about onions that they won't buy them if there are loose skins on them?!?
ReplyDeleteComing home, M and I figured we could safely store bags of onions in the garage for most of the year, so that's how we'll go until the weather gets too hot.
Perhaps it's laziness rather than ignorance. After all, people will pay extra to buy ready-chopped vegetables or pre-washed salad greens to save themselves the work of washing and chopping, without even considering how much they're paying to have someone do that tiny job for them. (Some ignorance is probably involved there too, since Consumer Reports says that bagged greens often contain unsafe levels of bacteria and should be washed anyway). Shredded cheese in bags is also often (though not invariably) more expensive than block cheese, and it doesn't last as long in the fridge (though it can be frozen). There are all kinds of ways in which being lazy can cost you money. (In fact...hmm, that gives me an idea for a week's worth of entries for Thrift Week next week.)
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