I found my new favorite place to grocery shop: Walmart Neighborhood Market. The ambiance is like a high-end grocery store such as the local Tom Thumb, but with the exact same prices as Walmart SuperCenter. LOVE. No seriously, if you can be in love with a Walmart, I am. This seemingly very minor discovery totally changes my world when it comes to grocery shopping because I hate grocery shopping.
I actually love shopping in general, and I don't particularly mind cooking. I do hate spending money, especially when there is the issue of fluctuating grocery prices and determining what a good price is on a gazillion products in a grocery store. This is a potentially stressful process for a frugal woman like myself. A frugal woman who has a teeny-tiny grocery budget to stick to. When I say teeny, I mean less than $50 a week (and our eating-out budget is even smaller, FYI).
Enter EMEALZ. Since cooking isn't my favorite thing to do, meal planning feels like homework. I dread it. I put it off. I don't mind scouring the internet (ie. Pinterest) and cookbooks for fun things to make or even for food to make for special events, but for weekly meals? Yuck. Not on this budget. It's no fun for me. Emealz takes care of this for me. I've been using Emealz for almost a year now, and we've absolutely loved like 90% of the meals we've made with it. The 10% we didn't love were mostly because we aren't big fish eaters, but you can swap the fish out for chicken in just about every instance. It is so worth the $1.25 a week if you are like me and hate meal planning. TOTALLY.
BUT, I still dreaded grocery shopping. We're on the Walmart plan (because overall it's cheaper than the others) with Emealz, but I've never been able to enjoy the shopping. It's the overall experience that I hate. It is generally better if I have a drink with me, but the overcrowded aisles, the ridiculously long check-out lines, the hike to and from the parking lot, and even the ultra-bright white fluorescent lighting in the store make it a miserable experience. This Walmart Neighborhood Market is a grocery store only. It's much smaller than even a basic Walmart. The parking lot is smaller. It's the middle of a mostly residential area, which means the store is less congested. The lighting in it is more subdued and indirect. This week, I spent less money on a week's worth of groceries than I normally would and was in and out of the store in record time. I have been shopping there for several weeks, and now I look forward to grocery shopping. What a difference shopping in a decent store makes!
This post probably doesn't interest anyone too much, but it was too exciting for me not to share!
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