Essential Groceries - Part 1

Will does most of the grocery shopping for our household, a fact for which I am grateful. I have always openly disliked doing dishes (ever since I was cruelly forced to wash them as an elementary school girl), so I was happy that Will took on that task early in our marriage. But it was fairly recently that I realized my reticence toward shopping for food and supplies.

Set me loose in a thrift store, and it feels like a treasure hunt—fun! But choosing groceries is a burdensome chore in my view. The main reason, I think, is that I struggle to make decisions. There are so many factors to consider: price, quantity, quality, visual appeal, likelihood of consumption (especially acute for perishables), environmental conscientiousness (organic vs. non, recyclable packaging), ETC.!

As a child, I witnessed my mother’s long grocery outings with a mixture of fascination and frustration. As a traditional homemaker of the 1970s, she tackled shopping preparation and administration as an essential function of her job. And I do mean tackled! Retrieving the wad of fliers from the Sunday newspaper was, to my mom, like accepting a weekly bonus. She spent many hours poring over the pages, scissors in hand, “The Box” nearby.

The Box was Mom’s organizational system for keeping coupons according to product types. There were at least two dozen categories of couponable items filed in there, including a section in front, marked “Urgent,” containing soon-to-expire coupons. Coupons that were eligible to be doubled or tripled in value—a promotion offered by certain stores—were kept in the front part of their filing areas.

The Box was serious business, protected almost as fiercely as The Purse. The Box was plain brown, double-wide shoebox-sized, cardboard. No lid (crazy, I know—the open top resulted in tragic dumping too-many times). If The Box was missing, our household was a-harmonious. The Box was in constant need of purging and refreshing. It was almost like a family pet—but a creature loved and nurtured solely by my mother. The rest of us considered it a constant nuisance. In truth, The Box—and its proprietor—likely saved us thousands of dollars, per year, in grocery money.

As I write, I’m beginning to understand the source of my angst: I mean, when I do step foot in the store, I’ll go for the Shopper’s Club savings, but how could I ever possibly measure up to the legacy of The Box?

In the next installation of “Essential Groceries,” I’ll write about what I intended to in the first place (before the coupons commandeered my memories): Will’s quirky shopping habits, like buying imitation bacon bits on every third grocery run, even when we already have five containers of the imperishable items in the household and he’s the only one who ever dares consume them. (Things that make me go, “Hmmm…”) Perhaps in writing on that topic, I will discover the meaning behind that mystery as well.