The price of groceries

[disneysteve]

I normally go grocery shopping for the week on Wednesday morning and do the one-stop shopping at Wegmans even though I've always known certain items were cheaper elsewhere. Now that prices have climbed so much, I'm finding it worth making additional trips to other stores. We've hit Aldi more. Today I did Wegmans in the morning and then after lunch we went to Walmart where we bought all of our produce. I didn't compare every price but for all of the ones that I know, which is most of them, Walmart was cheaper. We also bought several other items there that are cheaper, sometimes significantly. Lean Cuisine frozen meals are $3.99 at Wegmans and just $2.49 at Walmart, for example. Big difference.

[crazyliblady]

Story time. I was religious in another life and participated in a youth group mission put on by our local church. We spent all day handing out sack lunches in downtown Seattle and praying with any homeless people who would talk to us. Dinner time came around. Our leader said we weren't getting fed tonight, but gave each of us $1.50 and told us to find a way to eat using that money (early 2000's, btw, for timeframe). We were near Pike Place market, so many possibilities for food, but not on that budget.

Some of the kids...lol. How many pot stickers can I get for $1.50? I think he ended up getting..two. Not exactly a meal, they were small. Another kid found a vending machine and got a candy bar. I think one kid ended up with a soda (hey, kid, I don't wanna ruin adulthood, but you shouldn't drink your dinner! lol). At the end of it, there were a lot of hungry teenagers who were confused and frustrated. It was an exercise designed to introduce the youth to the challenge of finding food on the street using change, basically. It was a timed exercise, and some kids looked around for anything they could afford for $1.50 and accomplish purchasing a decent meal, and they ran out of time before they found anything meeting that description.

The adults, however...a little wiser. They bartered, pooled resources. They basically ended up with sandwiches and iced tea, not a horrible meal. Not a feast, either, but everyone got fed. There was no consolation prize or make-up meal. If you didn't eat that night, you waited until breakfast the next morning!

They could have gone to a grocery store and bought lunchmeat and bread and split it between them. It is not the most healthy thing, but I guess it beats starving.