Sunday, June 1, 2008

Summer Savings Idea

Gina Conroy at Portrait of a Writer…Interrupted has instituted a new Summer Savings ideas share on her blog. The idea is to go to her blog and post a link to your summer savings idea post. Here is mine. My mom and I were just discussing it this morning as we trekked into town to get our groceries. We live in a rural area with only one very small grocery mart, so we travel to the nearest town to do our big shopping runs about once a week. Because of that we came up with the idea of starting a neighborhood grocery buying co-op. This idea is ideal for our rural neighborhood, but with the rising cost of gasoline and groceries it would work just as well in a town or city neighborhood. The idea is that once a week everyone turns in their grocery lists to the ‘designated buyer’ for that week. Then that person drives to town, buys everyone’s lists and brings them home. One thing that we are also going to take advantage of in this co-op is our Costco membership. We will be able to save a ton by splitting our Costco purchases between multiple households. Just this morning we compared Del Monte cans of corn - $0.88 a piece at Wal-Mart or $0.48 a piece at Costco. One household might not want a case of corn, but two or more can split it and save $0.40 a can! The grocery savings, coupled with the gas savings of only having to drive to the stores every few weeks instead of every week combine to make a real money saving idea. The other aspect I like of this plan is that instead of dragging my two year old out for an all day shopping trip every week, we will only have to go every few weeks, so the aggravation factor drops tremendously as well.

1 comment:

Gina Conroy said...

Great idea! We once belonged to a Milk co-op. We'd drive out to the dairy once every six weeks, but I didn't like having to pick up my milk every week at someone's house. Thinking about doing it again.

We live two minutes from Sam's, two miles from Walmart, Target, etc. We could even walk there if we wanted to and didn't have so much to buy.

Thanks so much for spreading the word and helping us save $$ this summer!