So, What Is Strategic Shopping. #fritz

Steaming hot, falling off the bone. Salad dressing lasts for months, celery a week or ten days.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

#fritz

So, what is strategic shopping?

Well, I mean, it involves thinking ahead…

Strategic shopping is when you’re not just thinking of lunch, or dinner, you’re not just thinking of tomorrow or this week. Let’s be honest, you’re not going to eat a whole jar of mayo, or horseradish sauce, or barbecue sauce, all in one day, or one week, or maybe even a month if you’re a scruffy old man like me.

The real fucking challenge is when you're shopping with a twenty dollar bill all the time, now that takes some thinking, ladies and gentlemen. 

Yesterday the lean ground beef in a plastic tube was six dollars, down from seven dollars. The meat section at Walmart looked all right--last time, there was a big gap where the Buttig sandwich meat would normally be. The frozen foods had some big gaps, which might be supply chain disruption or even a staffing problem. Maybe they just hadn't gotten around to it, but that is not like Walmart. Oh, and I spent less than twenty bucks... #snork

You can kiss a duck's tail, but you have to be quick. That is my last potato, incidentally...

A truckload of stuff might have gotten hung up somewhere. I got a rack of ribs, about three dollars off. Eight dollars for Lou’s Barbecue pork back ribs. These are (or were), the sweet samurai flavour. The cheaper brand that are the same price are clearly an inferior product, when I roasted them for 22 minutes they literally fell apart halfway through when I tried to turn them over. Yeah, these ones are better, and I note from the website the product can be frozen. I still have half a rack left, (uncooked as yet), in other words, and I might just do that.
 

The tomatoes will be gone in a week. The cheese a lot longer, right?

***

The cheap hamburger buns were absent. I had to buy a more expensive brand, bigger buns and all, but still a dollar more. There's a big difference between different price-points. For example, cheap hot-dog buns from the dollar store are an inch shorter than a better brand from a gas-bar! I doubt if you're saving much. It's more a matter of producing a product, whether in terms of size, packaging or quality, that fits the retail model of the typical dollar-store retailer. Sometimes you don't have four or five bucks for instant coffee, and there is that tiny little jar at Dollarama for $1.50 or whatever...

***

What with one steamer at $3.27, (beef merlot), I got five items for twenty-two dollars and some cents.

I came home with a toonie and a few nickels and dimes. Oh, yeah. Beer.

#fritz #shopping

 

I got mushrooms as well.

***

Okay, now it’s the next day, today rather than yesterday.

I had exactly $24.95 and a list of six items, carefully considered. I went to Food Basics where I know where everything is.

 

With mayo, one can make tuna salad...

The chicken was an impulse, but bearing in mind plenty of fresh buns, lettuce, tomato, mayo, it fits in well enough with the plan: cheeseburgers, perhaps a pot of chili, sandwiches, salads, the occasional meaty meal, and it's all healthy and nutritious food, with some personal engagement in its preparation. I saved $1.30 on tomatoes on the vine, for the only real savings today. Total of $22.25 and I have a toonie and a few small coins left.

 

#fritz #shopping

 

I could do spaghetti sauce...

The best revenge is in living well, ladies and gentlemen, and part of living well involves some kind of lunch once a day or so.

Right?

So, I have half a roast chicken breast left over, as well as two-thirds of a baked potato. All part of #strategic shopping and #leftovers planning. That will make a pretty nice sandwich, and of course for that we have fresh buns, lettuce, tomato…onion, mayo, (right?) and even Monterrey Jack cheese as well as the package of processed American cheese we picked up this morning for $2.99.

Spices, pasta noodles, sugar, salt, flour... a few staples.

 

#fritz

 

So, as you can see by the photos, I have a few staples, a few fresh things, meat, vegetables, beer, all that sort of thing. Oh—with mayo and onion and such like that, buns, in a pinch we can always do good old tuna sandwiches.

 

One can only speculate as to what I might buy tomorrow.

Freezer: One sausage, two wieners, seven meat patties, one chicken breast, one steamer, four or five fish cakes, a few frozen fries and some frozen red and yellow pepper. A bit of tomato sauce and possibly a bit of frozen peas and a frozen dough-ball in the door. Even then, we can scrape up wieners and beans, make chili or spaghetti sauce, get rid of the old French fries, which have been in there a while. Bake bread, or get more ingredients for pizza, etc.

 

END

 

Poor old Louis (he means #fritz – ed.) has books and stories on Amazon.

See his works at Fine Art America.

 

Thank you for reading.

 

 

 

Life During Wartime. #Louis

 

Seven measly items for $20.45 including the price of a plastic bag...

 

 

 

 

#Louis

Life during wartime—whoever would have thunk it.

Truth is, we’ve been kind of spoiled around here, and some of us who aren’t used to a little hardship once in a while, might just want to re-examine some of our thinking processes. Some of those lazy little habits that we simply take for granted.

Prices are going crazy, food is up, fuels and energy are up, housing and rent is up, pretty much anything you can think of is going up, except of course for ODSP disability pensions and OW, (welfare), here in the Province of Ontario, and that’s probably true in most jurisdictions. Life is about to get a whole lot tougher for some of us, no doubt about it.

Okay. The small tubs of coleslaw, potato or noodle salad, that used to sell for $1.79, are now a ludicrous $3.69. That has more than doubled in price, beginning early in the pandemic, and now fucking skyrocketing along with everything else.

So, what in the hell you gonna do about it?

I have a plan, and it’s fairly simple. It’s also pro-active and forward-looking. It accepts reality, ah, which is surprisingly important in any plan.

Home-made beef soup, fresh #superdough bread.

I’m going to keep gas in the car. 

I'm going to keep food in the fridge, beer in the fridge and a carton of smokes in the fridge...simple little things like that. You might even extend that to include new toothbrushes, soap, shampoo and razors.

You might want to look after yourself, otherwise the world might just get you down a little bit.

Today, gas was $1.87.9 + in town, but I got mine for $1.57.6 on the rez. When I leave this apartment, I cut through the subdivision, on a street which angles and curves a bit and probably shaves off half a k or more of driving—and I’m going to need that half a k tomorrow. I connect to Indian Road at the Eastland Plaza, where there’s a little store where I can get rolling papers for $2.50, saving a buck compared to some other store, and Food Basics is right there across the street. The gas station is perhaps three k further south, and I put $20.00 in today, bringing her up to three-quarters of a tank…by the time this war is over, I’ll have her jammed right to the tits, ladies and gentlemen.

“But Louis, Canada is not at war with Russia,” you might say.

“No, but I am.”

You can do whatever the hell you want—that’s your fucking problem.

Let’s just say I’m a bit ahead of the curve on this one, and that might just be a good thing sometimes…I have as much right as Mr. Poutine, that is for sure.

To turn around and go home, that’s a 12-k round trip right there. However, I tack on a few other kilometres, picked up smokes at $2.50/20-pack, whereas government smokes are an idiotic twelve or thirteen dollars a pack in any corner store. I save almost a hundred bucks by buying one carton off-license. Truth is, I should be selling them around the building and the neighbourhood…they’d be knocking on the door at all hours of the day and night and I just don’t want that…don’t need the money that bad, maybe.

Instead of getting two grams of pot in a licensed bud shop, I get four grams on the rez for the same twenty-dollar bill.

The truth is, I should not be buying twenty dollars’ worth of groceries. I should be buying forty, or fifty or sixty; I should be buying two or three cartons of smokes at a time. I should be buying half-bags of the five-dollar buds, and I should be picking up cases of beer rather than buying six-packs.

Truth is, our distributor had 50-lb. sacks of potatoes last month, and we bought one—this month I see ten-lb. boxes of breaded chicken breasts, and the Boss says go ahead. We’re going to try them, for what, about $32.50 or thereabouts. At 3.5-oz. per breast, that’s forty-five chicken breasts.

We are going to take every possible advantage and leverage the hell out of it.

What would Zelensky do?

Just ask yourself that.

As for myself, I might even have a little fun along the way.

And I'm damned if I'm going to starve.

***

So, what about morale, and mental health? Well, for a scruffy old man, you might want to shave once in a while. Trim them fingernails, toenails, the hair, the beard, the fucking nose hairs and them eyebrows once in a while…you are not Leonid Brezhnev, after all.

You might want to have a good pair of boots…clean socks, and a shiny, sharp little jack-knife, right?

Stand up straight, look people in the eye, when in doubt say sir, and ma’am, please and thank you, you might be surprised how that works sometimes…right, ladies and gentlemen???

So far, I have been holding off calling people my dear, although the temptation is very strong sometimes.

You might want to try and keep your head screwed on straight, and maybe get off the internet, get out of the house once in a while, and maybe go for a walk once in a while.

My dear.

Assuming I could get ahead on laying in supplies, in what is starting to look like some kind of siege mentality, there would soon come a day off, when I didn’t need to keep running out for a tub of margarine or whatever, no fucking errands, plenty of fuel and that might be a good day to get out there and stumble around in the woods for a while.

Spring is just around the corner, or so they say. I have a place to live, a small pension and a part time job. It could be worse.

Eat a salad once in a while... # tips

***
 

Okay, by reading the flyers, and by having a few other things already in stock, I saved $7.95 on a measly seven items, more if one considers no-name brands, including a big bag of chips for a dollar. The vegetable cocktail was $2.79. It’s no-name, but it’s a bigger jug of juice—and the name brand was on sale, for $3.49.

Add in the savings on pot, smokes, gas. It turns out to be quite a lot of money. So; read the flyers, use your head, be a bit flexible, and keep your wits, or even just a sense of humour about you.

 

END

 

Louis has books and stories on Amazon.

See his works on ArtPal.

 

Thank you for reading.