COVID 19 #28 FOOD SHOPPING

 Another week gone by  - and I am a day late, my apologies.  

We went on one of our Covid food shopping sprees yesterday.  The shopping took about 3 hours and then wiping down and storing the items another couple of hours when we got home.  We last went food shopping in mid January on a similar adventure.  We have been doing our food shopping trips to a Walmart Neighborhood Market.  The Walmart stores around here are much smaller than elsewhere and have only small food departments not the large supermarkets that Walmarts have in other area.  Walmart has among their other chains, one called Neighbor Market.  These stores are supermarkets and pharmacies and what is normally carried in stores such as this – not the big assortment of items carried in their regular stores.  This particular Neighborhood Market is their highest grossing in the US and has been turned into a “retail lab” to find out why – I could tell them why without all the work of making it someplace I really don't want to go, it is the only Walmart supermarket in the bi-county area! The Neighborhood Market is 2 miles along the road from the local regular Walmart near us (where we get our prescriptions) – so it is sort of an add on to the local regular Walmart.   We did fill in bread and some items once or twice between January and now at our local Walmart when we went to renew prescriptions or needed something right away.  

When we started doing these food runs last May (2020)we were not as organized as we thought and yesterday's trip was actually the most organized and relaxed of all our shopping trips since we started staying at home last March (2020).  I am guessing that I have written about our first trip – by the time we were done shopping husband felt so bad that he had to wait in the car for me while I checked out – we later figured out it was due to his blood sugar having fallen from the (negative) excitement, his panic, and the sheer amount of running around we had done.  

After our third shopping trip I figured out that what we needed to do was to make TWO shopping trips at the same time.  First we go into the store and buy all the items we need which do not have be kept cold – canned and jarred foods, boxed foods, bagged foods, cleaning supplies, OTC medications, soap if we need, any office supplies and such.  We then check out and bag all the items – we have to bring our bags or buy paper bags from the store due to a change in law which went into effect in the middle of the pandemic and the paper bags they have are small.  I bring A LOT of bags and pre double bag them.  We take the bags out to our car, in this case our van as our car is in for service for over a month as they cannot figure out what is wrong, and our van is better for this anyway as it holds a lot more.  We then locked the van and took our cart and more bags back into the store.  We then bought all of the cold items – refrigerated, meats, and frozen items and then checked out again.  We even remembered to use 2 coupons for several dollars each – sent to us by a manufacturer due to a problem with a product a few months ago.  By the time we were done we had 16 double bagged bags plus 2 (not really) “gallon” pails of ice cream.  Amazingly we were not exhausted and not yelling at either as we have been on these food runs in the past.  Two good is that I drink as little water as possible with lunch as I don't want to have to visit the ladies room in a store right now and – husband finally realized this – he has to eat enough for lunch before we go to have enough glucose in system for his blood sugar not to fall while we are out.  We also go around 2 pm so the stores have smaller crowds in them – people working, children coming home from school etc then – easier to move around and almost no line checking out – plus not as many people means more space between us and them right now.

When we come home we wipe down most items with alcohol on paper towel.  I say most items as some items are double packaged – such as dry cereal in a bag in a box or fruit bars which are individually packed in a box – with these items we open the outside packaging and dump out the inner packages instead of wiping down the outer package and toss the outer packages right away.  It is an exhausting process and I came up a way to make it a little less.  Since I don't have to worry about canned and jarred goods being out as they will not attract bugs or other vermin, I leave the cans and jars in their bags and set aside the bags until later in the evening.

This entire process took us about 5- 6 hours this week not including later wiping down and storing the cans/bottles.  But we won't need to food shop again, other than some fill ins for about 2 months.  Why do we do this?  Well, we don't want to go out more often than we need to.  Hopefully by the time we need to do a full shopping trip again – it will be safer for us to do so, especially as we should get our second vaccinations next week.  

THOUGHT OF THE WEEK -

How organized are your shopping trips, especially now?  Do you buy only items which are needed (to be honest we were doing that  before “stay at home” came into being and I did not like it)?   Do you plan ahead to make sure that you don't run out of things?  Do you make a list as you run low on food and related items so you will know what you need.  (Since we started doing these food runs I actually inventory everything we have and make a list in computer spreadsheet than sit with husband to decide what and how much we need to buy of items – also since stay at home, I sort the list by, more or less, which aisle in the store the items we need are in – and print out the list of what we need to buy and take it with us.)