Walking on eggs
What’s up with the price of eggs lately? Well, besides the actual price of eggs, which is way up over what it was this past summer. It wasn’t too long ago that the stores regularly had eggs sale priced at 2 dozen for a dollar – sometime 3 dozen for a dollar. How times have changed. Recently, I saw a loss-leader sale on eggs – 4 dozen for five dollars. That’s what drew my attention to the price of eggs, and led to this conversation with myself, “eggs are on sale this week – hey, wait a minute, that’s $1.25 a dozen. That’s a SALE??”
We’ve been using a lot fewer eggs lately.
A week or two ago, there actually was a relatively good sale on eggs at one of the grocery chains around here. 69¢ a dozen. Of course, they put a limit on it. You could only buy one dozen per trip. Now, right before this, I swore if I found a decent price on eggs, I was stocking up and freezing some. (Freezing eggs is a relatively new concept for me.) Okay, here was my opportunity. Fortunately, I work less than a mile from one of these stores, and it’s a nice little walk at lunch to visit and cherry pick the sales – I do it regularly. Surprisingly, the weather cooperated. Well, at least it wasn’t subzero. It is, after all, January. But there were no blizzards, freezing rain, or Arctic blasts to deter me. I spent four lunch hours that week egg shopping. And the deal was even better than I thought. The previous weekend, there had been coupons for Special K Protein water – one bottle free. I had four of those – one from my paper, one from my mom’s paper, and two that friends had given me. My first shopping trip, I picked up my dozen eggs and bottle of water. The cashier rang them up, then said “42¢”. This gave me pause, since I knew the eggs were 69¢, so I asked her how that could be. Turns out, the water was discounted when I used my shoppers club card – but the coupon deducted the regular price. Sweet! As I said, I made three more trips that week for water and eggs. Now the price of eggs really was comparable to some of the best sale prices of this past summer.
I kept two dozen to use fresh, and froze two dozen. I had made my first attempt to freeze eggs this past summer. I’d break two into a bowl, beat ‘em up, dump them into a Ziploc bag, and toss into the freezer. It seemed a bit messy, but it worked. That is, it worked until my two year old refrigerator died while we were out of town for a week, during a heat wave, of course. (Something you never, EVER want to come home from vacation to is that smell. Trust me on this one.) We lost a lot of food, including my previously frozen – but now rotten – eggs. I decided to build a better mousetrap – er, find a better way to freeze eggs. This time, instead of dumping the two eggs right into a Ziploc, I poured them into a little Tupperware dish and popped that into the freezer. When they were frozen solid, I popped them out and put it in a Ziploc. Now I was able to fit a whole dozen eggs into one quart-sized bag. Woo-hoo, even greater savings! They look like yellow hockey pucks, but believe me, they’re far less messy this way. Six gold hockey pucks went into each bag.
Eggs are back to their new/old price this week – meaning over a dollar a dozen – and some
places, WELL over. But my house is well stocked with very cheap eggs. We’re eating the 42¢ eggs and ignoring the $1.25+ eggs in the stores. Oh, yeah, I do love a good deal! And I love stocking up on those good deals!
Sue
Evolution of a frugal shopper
I’m going to start with a brief introduction for my first ever blogging attempt – at least, I’ll try to keep it brief. I’ve been known to ramble on and get a bit sidetracked.
My name is Sue, although I go by “Suzannah” online. I’m 49 years old, married, and have a 25 year old son who lives clear across the state, making me most definitely an empty-nester. I work outside the home, full-time. And, very important to the shopping nature of this blog – for all intents and purposes, I live in an area that does not have double coupons. (I’ve heard there are places that have triple, and occasionally even QUADRUPLE coupons. I’ll visit you in my dreams, oh enchanted shopping kingdoms. Quadruple coupons. I honestly can’t imagine that.) I think one chain here allows a few double coupons once a week, but they are severely limited, and the loss leaders are usually not anything that there are decent coupons for.
For much of my adult life, my shopping habits paralleled those of my mom. Decide what we want to eat during the week, buy all the necessary ingredients, buy anything else I may think we need, and buy it all at one store. That includes dish and laundry soap, paper products, personal care products. If they happened to be on sale when I needed them – BONUS! Otherwise, I bought them anyway. As a result, I remember that back when my son was five years old, I was spending sound $600 a month on all those necessities.
Today, I spend around $250 a month. Of course, there are only two of us now, not three. The last year my son lived with us, I spent on average $350 a month. Strangely enough, he eats even more now than he did when he lived at home, and I probably would be spending $400 a month if he still lived with us. At least. Still – isn’t that better than $600 a month (and that was 20 years ago…excuse me a moment while I reflect on prices 20 years ago. Sigh.)
The difference between what I spend now and what I used to spend is a result of trying to get the lowest possible prices on everything I buy. There are a lot of ways I do this, which should come out as I blog. I’m not always successful at getting the lowest price – I’ve made some pretty embarrassing mistakes (it’s annoying to come home after purchasing a package of cocoa mix on sale and realize that I had a dollar off coupon FOR THE SAME BRAND right in my wallet. Smack me upside the head, that cocoa would have been FREE!) But I’ve been diligent enough to be very happy with what today’s spending is compared to that of my not so distant past. I mean – we’re talking between $3000 and $4000 less spent per year!
I’d like to say that I have been banking the difference all these years, and have a huge amount socked away in a special fund, that I can point to and say “Look! All this money was saved by changing my buying habits.” I’d like to say that, but it’s not true. I’m still a frugal work in progress.
By Sue