Buying in bulk wastes money and food?

[Ultralight]

Check out this article. It explains how buying in bulk actually wastes tons of money and food.

http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2015/07/stop-buying-bulk

Thoughts?

[lessisbest]

For people who don't have a clue about bulk purchases, proper food storage, and food rotation, I can see how this article has some valid points. But for those of us who can PROVE the savings of buying in bulk, it doesn't really hold much water. YES, wasted food = wasted money. I'll also point out that happens when people don't have a plan and a system for organizing and using stored/bulk food.

On my $125/month food budget, I buy food at the lowest possible price, and I buy enough ahead for at least one year, and I purchase a large percentage of it in bulk amounts, but I have a plan I use, and I use what I store.

I'm going to edit this by sharing how I will be trying something new concerning food. I normally only go shopping every other month, with the exception of food, which I purchase each week. Starting in August (a no-shopping month), I'm also not going to the store for food. This will be a good test for me and my home food storage plan.

[Ultralight]

lessisbest:

Very intriguing. I would like to hear more about your system and how you developed it.

For a couple months (May and June of this year) I lived in a neighborhood where I could walk to the grocery store. So I figured, why not get a work out and just walk to the store whenever I needed a few things. So during these two months I walked to the store 3 times a week. I noticed I saved money and wasted almost nothing! I thought: "Wow, this goes against the conventional wisdom of grocery shopping no more than once a week and that stocking up saves money."

Then this morning I read the article and thought it made sense, at least for me and the above experience I mentioned.

Here is a question though: Do you factor in the time needed to plan, organize, maintain, rotate, and store your food? To me that seems costly in time usage and would take up a lot of my brain space. But if you enjoy that, then obviously you would not worry about time usage and brain space.

[pinkytoe]

I've never understood the Costco mentality of families buying huge amounts of everything. I guess if you live out in the sticks, don't get into town much and have a large vehicle to haul it home in, then it makes sense. Or have a lot of people in your household. The people I know who shop there are suburbanites in large homes who make bi-weekly trips and fill up the back of their SUVs with whatever strikes their fancy along with huge packages of toilet paper, etc. We shop once a week as our grocery is two blocks away and carries most items. I do buy things like beans, rice, nuts in bulk at a different store and keep them in the freezer since I know we will use those. I don't think many Americans ever stop to think where all this food comes from and how grossly abundant our supply has become. We expect it now. It would be interesting to ask simple livers here what foods they end up throwing away. For me, it is usually something like cilantro that gets slimy before I can use it up.

[Ultralight]

pinkytoe:

Please make a post about which foods SLers are likely to waste. I will chime in, for sure!

I was a Costco member for one year. I tried it out because I thought I could save money on things like rice and peanut butter. Ya know, bulky non-perishables. But what I found was that I would go there and buy more stuff than I need and lots of stuff that was not on my list! haha

So I started rethinking my Costco membership. One thing at Costco that I did save money on was dog food! My sister and BIL are members so when they go I give them the money to buy a couple Costco-sized bags of dog food.

My sis and BIL LOOOOOOOOOOOOVE Costco. They go about once per week and spend $200 or $300! But this is like date night for them. They love getting deals, buying things in bulk, trying new Kirkland brand foods, etc.

What happens often is that they try something, dislike it, and then take it back partially used. They also cannot finish things before they go bad and they say: "Jake! This is on you."

So I get some free foods and such this way. haha

But I let my membership lapse. It was not worth it to me to be a member of Costco anymore.

[lessisbest]

"My system" is a well known system developed first by all people of the world where they stored their harvest to provide food for the winter. It's the old story of the "Grasshopper and the Ant." It's storing up grain in the Bible Story, during years of plenty, so you have food when things don't go "right". Growing up on a farm, we stored our potatoes and home-canned fruits and vegetables in a concrete "cave" (storm shelter), this was just a fact of life. We lived in the middle of nowhere, so it was important to have food for emergencies. We have friends today who have gone 2-weeks before they were able to get out of their home due to road conditions. The process I follow today is one basically taught by the LDS Church (information easily found on the Internet). I've tweaked it to meet our personal needs, but the basics are still the same.

1. Plan what you need.
2. Purchase what you need.
3. Use what you purchase.

The reason we plan and store ahead:
-Natural or man-made disasters
-Loss of revenue or income (job loss or due to unexpected illness)
-Even the potential of interrupted food supplies (stores only have approximately 3-days of food in them - while I have a year - or more)

Because we have implemented this plan, I have been able to keep our food expenses extremely low. For us, it's an efficient frugal activity that nets us significant savings with a small time investment.

[Ultralight]

lessisbest:

Nice! :)

Thanks for sharing.

[ashem37]

Costco is great for households with 4+ people, but you have to be so careful. It's taken me a year to figure out what's a good deal and what isn't.
Olive Oil, honey, maple syrup, oats, brown rice, Matteo's salsa (worth the drive alone), smoked salmon, wild frozen salmon, pomegranate juice, coconut oil, peanut butter, almond butter, Genova tuna, Alpine Valley multigrain bread - these items make it worth the drive for me. If I take my kids with me, they try talking me into $8 worth of seaweed or $20 worth of Clif bars. I recently bought 24 frozen juice bars for the kids because they were on sale $7.49 instead of $9.99. I realized later that I would have never purchased them at a grocery store at that price, but $7.49 seemed cheap at Costco, where everything is $10-$20 per item. Fooled again.

I'm really more smitten with Aldi at the moment, but we will keep going to Costco every couple of months for the items mentioned above.

[Ultralight]

Tell me what smites you about Aldi. There is one about 2 miles from my house.

[ashem37]

Mostly snacks and lunch items for my kids, especially since it's summer vacation and they eat CONSTANTLY - graham crackers 1.39, string cheese 2.79, dried fruit, nuts (wasabi almonds are fantastic, but not cheap), pretzels 1.29, cereal ($1.59-1.79/box), their sea salt pita chips are fantastic, vanilla/orange sherbet bars 12 for 1.99, German dark chocolate, canned goods are .59 each, shredded parmesan is 1.99, my husband bought beer there last week. It's a German company and they also own Trader Joe's - lots of the same items, but cheaper.

I don't buy meat or produce there. People don't seem impressed with the produce there and I have better options nearby.

Aldi is just plain smart about business - you need a quarter to get a shopping cart, but you get it back when you return the cart. Bring your own bags. They don't bag your groceries and you have to pay for their bags. They have bar codes on all sides of every item, so the lines move really quickly. They have custom boxes for their food, so nobody has to shelve items. You don't have to compare prices or figure out which item is the best price. There's just 1 option for each item. I love that.

[freshstart]

I used to live a few miles from BJs, much closer than any grocery. I've always split a membership with my dad, the cost of a full price card seems too high for the amount of money I saved. I used them for gas every time, glasses (when they could still make my weird prescriptions) for kids and me, and at that time, I did get a lot of my groceries there because it was close and I had storage for bulk purchases. I was able to blow past things I probably would've liked but knew were not worth the price. Meat was a good deal. I think their brand of paper products are cheaper, dog food, etc. And I think we got some good deals there when shopping for things like a tv.

Now I'm farther away and not in a traditonal 2 kids/2 parents lifestyle. My father loves it there and comes home with loads of food that while we may finish it, it was not frugal or healthy. Or small but still expensive spur of the moment things, like electronics. I think he is someone for whom BJs may not be the best place. But he loves it there so much and he can afford it so, no biggie.

I have to laugh, he comes home from there with a 12 pack of white socks so often it's crazy. I tried to tell him, do you really need a gross of white socks to go with your fake Birkenstocks? He did not laugh and he will die before he ever wears all these socks. It's funny how people get hooked on one thing.

[bae]

I pretty much buy everything in bulk because of my logistical circumstances. (The nearest Costco requires a day-long expedition to get to/from, and about $55 in tolls and gas for the voyage.) I have almost zero waste, which I know because I track the volume of our garbage/trash output, as getting rid of that requires some logistics as well. What food "waste" there is goes to compost, or chickens, or hogs, or crabs/eagles.

My meat, I buy on-the-hoof from local 4H kids and farmers, who raise the animals for me. Fish I get from local fishermen - either fresh in whole-fish form, which I then break down and freeze, or already-frozen from the guys who come down from Alaska. Soft goods I Amazon Prime. Veggies/fruit I get from farmers, or the farmer's market, or my CSA, or sometimes the local grocery store - these I *don't* buy in bulk. I buy wine and cider and beer in volume from the producers. Every 4-8 weeks, I participate in a group expedition to the mainland for supplies, usually this involves simply handing my order to someone and helping unpack the truck when they return.

The keys to making all this work are 1) being able to cook 2) being able to plan 3) having time 4) having space and storage technology.

It would cost me a small fortune to buy all my goods from our main grocery store here, especially in the summer time, when they carry only small sizes marked-up sky-high to sell to the influx of tourists.

[ToomuchStuff]

I think you see the article above is inaccurate with proper planning.
I didn't see anyone mention things like checking cost per size (sometimes the smaller sizes are cheaper), or something else I do (club memberships to two clubs, provided for by work), which is shopping for multiple people, NOT in the same household, where we can split purchases. (both bosses, my parents, myself and work)

Larger grocery stores have brought down prices, from the days when my house was built and I could go a block up to a butchers and two blocks down to a small grocery store the size of houses. (and either iceboxes or early refrigeration) I wish those were still around some days (cooking for a single person), but that is why one has to plan.