Weeekend Rambling

Online grocery shopping

I ordered our big grocery shop online this month. Dear Husband (DH) is working really weird schedule for the next week or so and it was too much for me to walk home as I don’t drive over here yet. This lead to a number of interesting observations:


1. It is amazing how few items your get for £62.56. Once the driver has unloaded everything it really just seems like you should have more for that price. The single most expensive item was 4.69 and the average spend per item was 2.09

2. I have plastic bags and I am not sure what to do with them. When I first moved over here I would buy one or two reusable canvas shopping bags every month and now we have enough that when we do the shopping we don’t have to use the plastic ones anymore. I almost always have my backpack with me so even small trips to the grocery store just get thrown in my backpack instead of a plastic bag. I guess I will use these to line the bathroom trash can until they are gone. I am sort of peeved because I ticked the box at check out that said not to use plastic bags if possible but everything still showed up in plastic bags. This brought to my mind that a BBC journalist is doing a month without plastic challenge http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7508321.stm please jump over and take a look I know that it might be impossible to entirely cut out plastic in our lives but any small change we make has a ripple effect. The plastic bag issue alone probably means I will hesitate from ordering groceries online again.

3. Have I truly become completely disconnected with the food I eat if I no longer even take the time to go into the grocery store and pick it out myself? This was truly a one off as DH was working so no one to drive to grocery store but it makes you wonder when you can jump online, throw some items on a shopping list, book a delivery spot, and have them show up at your doorstep sometime in your chosen two hour time slot. I only purchased staples such as toiletries and pantry items I will still stop off at local grocery store to pick up fruit and veg(sorry I just can’t degrade to the point that I allow someone else to choose fresh produce for me) or whatever items I did not think we needed for a particular meal.

4. This particular shopping trip also made me realize that my DH and I needed to sit down and have a discussion about semantics and word choice. While making the grocery list this month he mentioned that we NEEDED two particular items, which in my mind meant we had enough to get through for the rest of the week but were running low. I realized through out the week at inopportune times that the reason we NEEDED these particular items was because we were OUT of them. One such inopportune time was also socially awkward as I had offered my Mother in Law a cup of tea only to realize we had not one single tea bag. This was particularly embarrassing as while it might be true that I am not the best person at keeping my house I don’t necessarily want my Mother in Law to know this.

So now that I have single handedly ruined the world buy receiving my grocery shopping in plastic bags I am going to go use them to line my bathroom garbage cans.