Supermarket Exercise #2

Shopping for a week’s worth of meals was exhausting enough for me to not even finish my list in around 2 hours (I had never been in Giant Eagle before though). I oftentimes get bogged down in cooking for myself and feeding just one person but feeding a family of four would be really difficult. The ingredients I did grab cost approximately $150 for the week and with everything would have probably been around $250. That’s a lot of money! That’s around $7,800 or $13,000 respectively for the whole year! That’s much more than many families even make – it’s around the poverty line even. This exercise made me start to realize how much privilege I have growing up middle class and being able to have food on the table every day.

I started to realize that I would need to buy less brand names and practically nothing local or organic. If my weekly meals cost around what some people make in a year I was going to have to find some ways to cut back. Cutting back from these products would reduce the quality of my meals but it would also lessen the burden on my wallet. With 26 substitutions I found nearly $42 in savings per week or about $6/day. This works out to almost $2,200/year for my items with around $3,700 in savings equated for a $250 week. That brings our total down to $5,600/year on food which is a bit more reasonable but still shocking if some families bring only $15,000 total (over 1/3 of their total).

Prices were an interesting thing because I never really thought I was prone to “sale deals” or to “one-time” offers but as I started to shop for cheaper items I realized that they had a much bigger impact on me. I also realized that the most products on sale were Giant Eagle ones. Driving me to look at their options more and more – probably increasing their likelihood that I’d buy them. Placement was big here too because if something I needed was placed next to something else that I needed and they were both cheap I was much more likely to just grab them both and forget about the choice. There are also so many choices that oftentimes you go for what you’re familiar with (for college kids that’s what our parents bought) and if were worried about money we’d look for whatever’s cheapest and not worry about the actual product. The current system of choices creates a system to confuse people so that they’ll do what you want them to do, buy the cheapest – if they’re struggling.

The system we have in place pushes people with less many (often the majority) to buying major grocery stores, like Walmart and Giant Eagle’s, products because on the surface they are less expensive. But it’s a negative feedback loop – if you buy items that aren’t produced locally but are bought in bulk from mass producing farms and industrial factories then sent to a packaging and distributing hub such as Pittsburgh with Giant then you rack up the miles it takes your food to get to your door. All those “middlemen” take a toll and are why our food system pushes poor people in particular into buying products that are lower quality and are from farther away. This system probably started due to capitalism and United States citizens wanting products that aren’t in season all the time such as tomatoes or oranges.