Could we have bought any of this stuff cheaper somewhere else? Well, I honestly don't know. Although I keep a price book to track the prices of various food items we buy regularly, most of the items shown here aren't in it. All the fresh produce items fluctuate so much in price that tracking them is more or less pointless, and a single can of tomato paste lasts us so long that it doesn't really qualify as a staple item. (The only reason we bought two this time is that Brian always assumes we have a can to spare, and when he unexpectedly discovered yesterday that we were clean out, he figured he'd better buy an extra. Of course, after we got them home, he discovered that he did in fact have a can in the pantry; it was just in the wrong place. But oh well, it's not like the stuff goes bad, and an extra 79 cents is hardly going to break our budget.)
The only item in this assortment that qualifies as a staple is the coffee. This is one particular item I've had a lot of struggles over in the past, trying to find a brand that meets my ethical and environmental standards at a price that isn't too ridiculous. I used to buy five pounds at a time from Dean's Beans; with shipping, this came to just under $10 a pound, which was a lot, but less than I could find anywhere else. I tried a house brand from Costco that was cheaper, but the flavor was awful, and it's no longer available anyway; for a while I was buying the stuff from IKEA, until they switched to a new brand that doesn't have a decaf option. Even Trader Joe's doesn't offer a decaf that bears any sort of sustainable certification.
However, just as I was about to switch back to buying in bulk online, I made a discovery: The store brand at Stop & Shop, my trusty neighborhood supermarket, is in fact UTZ-certified. And this isn't the fancy, high-end Nature's Promise brand, either; it's just the plain old house brand. The Nature's Promise coffee, which costs a bit more, is organic and Fair Trade certified, but as I discovered five years ago, that's not necessarily better.
So now, Stop & Shop's modest medium-roast decaf is my go-to coffee. And at $4.79 for a 12-ounce bag, or $6.38 per pound, it's about as cheap as the stuff I used to get from IKEA — for which I had to drive 45 minutes and pay four bucks in tolls each way — and significantly cheaper than any other brand I've ever favored. And I only have to travel ten minutes to get it — on foot.
So, basically, I know for a fact that I could not buy coffee, or at least coffee that's acceptable to me, at any other store for less than I pay at Stop & Shop. And as for the other things we bought, while some of them might in fact be cheaper somewhere else, they would also have required a separate trip that would almost certainly cancel out all of the savings.
Now, in the interest of full disclosure, I'll reveal that we deliberately skipped one item on our shopping list during this trip: eggs. We're currently down to our last two eggs, but the only eggs at Stop & Shop that are Certified Humane cost $5.70 per dozen, and that's more than we're prepared to pay. But even those could still be available locally at a more reasonable price; H-Mart, which is within my local shopping radius, carries several brands that are Certified Humane, and usually at least one of them is on sale. So we can typically find them there for no more than $3 per dozen.
In short, I'm now halfway through my local shopping experiment, and so far, I have only spent a total of $7 more than I would have shopping as cheaply as possible. In fact, if you count my BOGO bargain on Day One, I'm actually ahead for the week. Could it be that sticking to local businesses is actually, on the whole, the most frugal way to shop?
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