Eat Well.
Something that annoys me the most, and makes me the most homesick, about living in a new city is not being familiar with the grocery stores. I miss Market Basket, Stop & Shop, Hannaford's, hell, even Shaw's (even though my family was always a Market Basket family, if you know you know). Suddenly being thrust into the land of Krogers and Publixs feels very out of sorts. So I tried all of them.
I went to Aldi for a very long time, because well, I mean, its so cheap, and I could walk there in 10 minutes, 5 if I bike. I was amazed that I could still buy organic and spend so little. Then, like anything, it started to get routine. I started noticing more and more people shopping at Aldi (a sign of the times, perhaps). Then I started noticing that the 4lb bag of oranges I was regularly buying was growing mold and rotting before I got half way through. The Italian meatballs I tried on a whim made me sick. The green peppers just tasted off. I'm not sure what I even meant by that, they just tasted kind of bland. A half gallon of milk that wasn't expired yet went sour weeks before the expiry date. I started to wonder if I had been shopping at the right place, and didn't feel like I was getting the quality food that I was used to, and its important to eat well, obviously.
I ventured back to Publix, as that was the one store I felt had high quality groceries (also Teddy peanut butter, which is now possible to find outside of Massachusetts!). I decided to save my receipts and put every thing on my shopping list into a spreadsheet, to follow by making a hypothetical list of the Aldi equivalents, complete with adding in roughly what the tax would equate to. I wanted to see if I was really saving all that much shopping at Aldi.
Here's the kicker.
I wasn't.
According to my rudimentary comparisons, based of the last two shopping trips at Publix, I was saving only $20 by shopping at Aldi. I still think this is unbelievable. I always would get suckered into going back to Aldi because of their huge billboards, claiming they have the lowest prices of any grocery store, but are they really that low? In some cases, yes. A half gallon of organic whole milk costs about $4 and change at Aldi. The brand name Horizon organic whole milk is about $6 and change everywhere. However, the Publix Greenwise house brand is also about $4. A slice of salmon is $9.49 a lb at Aldi, at Publix, they were $6.99. Aldi ground beef, $11.38 for a lb and a half, not organic. I got a similar amount of all natural ground beef for $10.24 at Publix.
I've felt better, and have enjoyed eating, the food I've gotten recently at Publix. I couldn't get my beloved Italian canned tomatoes, that my grandmother swore by, or pecorino romano cheese or good parmesan. Coming from a very typical Irish-Italian household on the north shore of Boston, these were huge things to miss. I also found a local butcher shop that actually has many prices at or less than the larger grocery stores, and they've done that somehow without sacrificing quality and still sourcing only local meats.
These stores may not be what I've been used to, but they're getting to be more comfortable the longer I'm here. Making these spreadsheets and comparing them very closely helped me a lot to really figure out how best to spend the money I have, without sacrificing quality.