Spend less: Go bagless
Obviously when you’re talking about consumerism and overconsuming, there are certain things that you can eliminate from your spending habits and some things that you really can’t. For example, when I decided not to buy clothes for a year, even if it seems drastic, it was a pretty logical decision for me since I just have no need for a single other piece of clothing in my closet. For the past month, however, I’ve unintentionally stopped buying groceries. It turns out, I’m really hungry and that’s not really one of those things you can cut out of the weekly budget.
So today was my first time back in the grocery stores and I thought I’d try Aldi since I’d heard it was a lot cheaper than Wegmans or Tops, the favorites of Ithaca. I should have done my research because I was totally unprepared.
Aldi has the right idea - they cut costs by keeping their spaces small and more energy efficient, eliminating store displays (the aisles are formed by simple shelves and the actual stacks of food) and making you pay a quarter for shopping carts and 5 cents for shopping bags.
Okay, I’m not so cheap that I wouldn’t have paid 5 cents for a shopping bag, but since everyone at the store had brought their own reusable bags, I just felt like sort of an idiot and didn’t bother to ask if there were any for sale. I really didn’t save that much money price-wise (when I compared the prices of the items I’d bought to the prices at Wegmans I found they were basically the same) BUT I did end up buying a WHOLE lot less groceries since I could only take what I could carry.
So there’s one idea for you. Go bagless, buy less.
Categories: Economy, Living on less, Shopping, Student Finance
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Feed for Two Cents
You are wrong about having to pay for shopping carts. You insert 25cents when you take it and get the same 25cents back when you return it. This is to give an incentive to return the cart so that they don’t have to employ 10 guys for collecting shopping carts from all over the place like Wegmans does. I do most my shopping at Aldi and I pay much less than I do at Wegmans - but that’s probably because once I am at Wegmans I can’t resist buying their yummy olives.