Do you hate grocery shopping? There are lots of reasons to dislike buying groceries: it takes time…oh so much time, it takes an effort to write down the list and then physically go pick out all the groceries, it spends tons of your money, and it is never ending……you will never be able to stop grocery shopping.
Everyone hates it for different reasons, I hate it for all of the above. This is how I came across one of those major discoveries in life that happens when you are actually trying to be as lazy as possible, and minimize exposure to something you just don’t like doing. In my effort to avoid going to the store I started grocery shopping once a month.
What happened when I started grocery shopping once a month was nothing short of a miracle in my life. Gone were the days of arguing with my husband about who was going to run to the store mid-week to pick up odds and ends we needed for our meal we hadn’t planned on making. Gone were the times I was trying to maintain patience with the hours of my life spent waiting in supermarket checkout lanes.
No more scrambling to come up with meal ideas for the next week and shopping for them during the weekend would I would rather be relaxing with my family. No more going over budget on groceries because those 20 small trips to the store were ignored until the end of the month.
It was glorious.
I’m sure there are some naysayers out there who are totally against grocery shopping once a month, but I’m telling you, it will be a game-changer for your life.
If you are tired of feeling like you spend 50% of your life in a freaking grocery store reading the tabloids while standing in line (I do love a good tabloid), you need to be grocery shopping once a month.
1. It saves you time.
When you plan to get groceries once a month, you seriously only go to the grocery store once. That’s it. Depending on the size of your family, grocery shopping could take you a total of 2-3 hours. For our family of four (I have this down to a science), the whole venture only takes me an hour, then I’m done!
Now, 2-3 hours may seem like a huge chunk of time to set aside for groceries, but it really isn’t. Think back over the past month. How many trips to the store did your household make? How much overall time did that take up driving to the store, doing the shopping, waiting in line, and driving home? I bet you have done at least double, if not triple, more investment of your time in groceries than if you shopped once a month.
When you grocery shop once a month, you cut down on driving time to the store, checkout time standing in line and overall shopping time. The one block of time you set aside for the month to complete all of your shopping will be well worth it to save what you would have been doing the rest of the month.
2. It saves you effort.
You are probably thinking, “How the heck do you shop once a month? What if you forget something? What about produce?” Those are all really good questions. The answer to this is very simple.
Meal planning. Don’t run away! Meal planning is seen as this thing that takes so much effort that only super organized people or people with way too much time on their hands can do. Wrong! I have two kids under two, my husband and I work full time, I blog as a part-time job and I still find time to meal plan.
Want to know the secret? The benefits of meal planning totally outweigh the cost of the effort put in. Once you have a month of meals laid out, you really don’t have to put much effort into your meal plan moving forward. It truly becomes a “plug and chug” game after your first month (any other math nerds in here?).
Related Posts:
What’s for Dinner? How to Easily Plan a Month of Meals
The Life-Saving 12 Week Rotating Meal Plan
Monthly Meal Plan on a Budget: Less Than $100 For Dinners For a Family of 4
When you do your grocery shopping once a month, you are going to have to have a plan. If you really aren’t going to the store for the rest of the month, you need to know how you are going to make it through the whole month on one trip.
Meal planning will:
- take care of your dinner plans for the month to avoid eating out,
- help you determine when you will eat what produce,
- help you only buy what you need, and
- keep your costs down when you stick to your list.
There is a bit of effort initially to work out your first month of meals, but after that, all you have to do is change out a few meals here and there for the next month.
Shopping once a month only requires you to make a list once, drive to the store once, physically pick out the food once, check out once, and unpack them once. That’s it.
3. It saves you money.
I feel like this one is almost self-explanatory, but still, I know there are some who will disagree. I know, without a doubt (because this is what happened to me), grocery shopping once a month will save you money. To pull this off, you are going to have a meal plan, you are going to stick to it and that alone will save you money.
When you meal plan and follow it, you aren’t in the drive-thru anymore. No more impromptu trips to McDonald’s or Taco Bell. You have food at home for a purpose. It is just waiting to be whipped into that meal you were planning on making.
Only shopping once a month means you aren’t at the store picking up odds and ends and other stuff you didn’t actually need. Fewer trips to the store equal fewer temptations to buy things you don’t need! Grocery stores are designed to sell things to you. They are strategically set up to get you to buy lots of things. The outside perimeter is where they get you. Ever wonder why the bakery is near the back?…they want that smell to lure you all the way through the store to get to the baker. Because they know you will find other things to buy on your way!
Staying out of the store will save you money! Period.
Do I spend $250 when I go get groceries? Absolutely! But then……nothing. I spend nothing the rest of the month. No little charges scattered throughout my weeks for $12 here, $27 there. Just one charge. I have no other opportunity to blow my grocery budget. I am setting myself up for success.
4. It saves your sanity.
Do you realize when you shop every week or even multiple times a week, you are performing the same action over and over with no end in sight?
You are in this constant frazzled state of:
- Figuring out what to have for dinner
- Checking ingredients at home to see if you have the right stuff
- Making impromptu lists throughout your day of things you should probably pick up
- Running into the store super fast after work to get everything you need
- Scrambling to get home to put stuff away, get settled and get dinner started.
Wait, who am I kidding, you will make the meal tomorrow, tonight it’s fast food. The shopping at the end of the workday just completely drained you for the day.
Then you feel guilty at the end of the month when you spent $600 on food and you have no idea how that happened. You resign to do better next month but feel defeated before you even start.
Any of this sound familiar?
Stop feeling crazy, overwhelmed and exhausted! Take back your sanity!
What if you sat down for 30 minutes at the end of every month (that’s even less time for me now that I have been meal planning for a while) to decide what meals you wanted to have. You made a grocery list and picked a day to go to the store? On the day you decided to do your shopping, you get it all done in 2 hours and everything is put away and you are done for the month.
It’s the first week of the month and you can completely, mentally check out when it comes to food. You have a plan for the month, you don’t have to worry about having all the right ingredients and you don’t have to go to the store for 30 days! Seriously!
Total FREEDOM. You get a month-long break from even having to think about groceries. Who wouldn’t want that?!
Do you have kids in the house that eat tons of food? When you start shopping once a month, they will begin to understand when the snacks run out and it is only the 15th, they have to wait until next month to have more snacks. You no longer have to be at the mercy of the food supply in your home.
You can take back your sanity with once a month grocery shopping.
