It dawned on me a few weeks ago, after getting comments about what we bought for our weeks purchases, that many people do not shop like us. One comment questioned what we actually cooked for our children. The week totals for our food shopping consisted of paper plates, bag of chicken, twizzlers, and a few other odds and ends like pickles and such. Poor Sarah became disheartened when she was told she didn’t feed her children proper food. And now looking back on our shopping trips on a per week basis, I can understand where the misconception about what we buy verses what we feed our children comes from. It is how we actually shop and use our food storage, not on a per week or even per month, it is based on a per year scenario. See many people we know shop for their groceries on either a per week basis, and some even shop daily for what they eat that day!
That’s fine if that is working for you. But in today’s economy and social habits, many people do not plan ahead. How many stock brokers do you know who actually buy and sell based on what the company is doing in the years to come, not many. Most decisions today are spur of the moment. We see a TV we like we buy it, based on want verses need. The economic trouble we are in nation wide is rooted in that very theory. We want it we get it, not thinking of if we can afford it, and not only that but can we afford it if something were to happen. The housing market crashed because a handful of problems came up and the credit we put out fell due to not being able to afford what we wanted verses what we actually could of got by with. If everyone would of saved, waited for the right time, not based on our wants but waited for the right time to get a good deal then we would not be where we are nationally today.
So how does this tie in with couponing you ask? Well we buy our food (about 95%) based on what we need for the year. Now we do not yet have a solid year supply of food, but we could live and survive on it for close to that. We still need to diversify our storage. More rice and flour, and a larger water supply. So those weekly updates on what we bought that week are only what we add to our existing food storage system. It is not what we plan on eating that week or even in most cases what we are going to consume that month even. When we first started this blog well over a year ago, there was a sale on soda, we still have much of that soda around. Last spring there was a sale on cereal, we just barely ran out of that cereal from back then, and not long ago there was another sale on cereal that we restocked with. Recently we bought a large 25 pound bag of sugar that we restocked our current containers of sugar with. That same week we bought 5 bags of graded cheese that we put in the freezer to use in future dishes. Most likely it will take 2-3 months to use up that cheese.
We plan ahead. We don’t need storage buckets right now, but when we were in Tillamook Oregon at the cheese factory we bought some. They have these cute little 3 gallon buckets with lids for only 50 cents each. We bought 10. They are a lot easier to handle, and fit in shelf’s much better then the large 5 gallon buckets
Now as a deal comes along on rice, sugar, salt, oatmeal, or what ever else we can save on we will put in these buckets. This way if we can not make it to the store due to an illness or even financially we will have food stored for a day that we need it.