01593: Managing Sietch Supplies

Ever since our primary grocery, Shopwise, implemented its 10x rewards points promotion every first Wednesday of the month, this led to us significantly restructuring how we manage the groceries here at the Sietch. Now we have one big grocery run at the start of the run with smaller runs throughout the month to handle resupplying fresh produce and such.

However in recent months, the mid-month grocery is where we seem to fail more and more and thus the second half of the month tends to include a lot more delivery orders than it should. Health implications aside, the added cost is certainly not a smart decision with regard to budget concerns. And it's not like we're eating ourselves out of house and home or anything silly like that - I just know that we could be saving a bit more money if we didn't eat out as much as we do now.

The challenge is when to do the supposed mid-month grocery runs. You know how it is - the rigors of "real life" just get away from you and suddenly you find yourself without as much time for grocery shopping on those odd weeks. And sometimes you're just lazy and not in the mood to cook and having limited supplies to work with becomes that last push to send you down to the fast food delivery menu instead of rolling up your sleeves to cook. It's quite the vicious cycle - one that the working world only encourages more and more.

So I find myself needing to re-think our grocery plans and maybe go as far as more precisely planning out meals before the grocery run. Admittedly I start off with a few options in mind and then I just shop on the fly. The end result is that between the meals I mapped out and the ones Tobie had in mind, we're good for the first half of the month. Then towards the end one needs to be more creative as we figure out what to do with what's left. And this is where we could use a little process improvement with regard to groceries.

And there is no perfect one-grocery-only plan possible given our fridge isn't exactly all that big. Thus an effective meal plan will factor in the mid-month run and yet will still try to take advantage of the big grocery run at the beginning of the month.

In some ways this may all sound rather silly to think about, what more blog about in public. But writing things down helps me process things and of course I'm more than open to other ideas in terms of how to address this little challenge. I've already started factoring in some recipe mixes into our cooking in order to better balance between the desire to eat home-cooked meals while reducing the amount of work needed after a stressful day at the office. I'm sure there are other things to try experimenting with as well.

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