Spend Report #11: Another slow shopping week

It was another fairly slow shopping week and mostly full of chain stores. (Still no Wal-Mart though.)

I sent my husband out to do the big grocery shop since I was still sick in bed. He got to use my grocery list template, which I created in one of my rare Stepford wife moments.

I wanted to improve my efficiency at grocery shopping. My usual procedure was to make a list in any old order, then go up and down each aisle, scanning the list to see which items were in that aisle. That meant I went up and down each aisle, whether I needed anything from it or not. So I made a template organized by aisle. The template includes the most common items I buy in that aisle. When I make my list, I just need to delete the items I don't need that week and print it out. Then I know exactly which aisles I need to visit and which ones I can skip.

My husband was fairly stunned when I told him about the grocery list template. He's used to my lackadaisical (and somewhat contemptuous) attitude to housekeeping and the housewifely arts. Example: when the topic of ironing came up early in our marriage, I paraphrased the line from the English Patient: "A woman should never learn to iron and if she can she shouldn't admit to it." (In the movie, the statement was applied to sewing, which works for me too.)

From Nov. 12 to 18, I spent about $310 in New Westminster on:

Groceries
Pulled pork sandwich at Graze in Sapperton
Starbucks
Taco Del Mar
Advent calendar at the Lindt store in Queensborough – only $6!
A baby gift at Carter's/OshKosh B'gosh in Queensborough