Ok you got me, I was trying to keep it a secret but I just can’t contain myself anymore. My favourite time of the week is when I do my grocery shopping …… in my pajamas! No I am not one of those crazy people who walk around the supermarket aisles in their slippers, I do my shopping from the comfort of my own home using the internet which is possibly one of the greatest things to ever be invented!
How times change the way you live. It wasn’t always like this you know. There was a time before mySupermarket and the wonders of online shopping. In the 1980’s I would head out to the local supermarket with my mum. We kept the shopping trolley down our alleyway and took it with us to the supermarket. We filled it up then brought it back along the streets to our house where we kept it for another week (I’m sure that wasn’t allowed). Back then we didn’t have a car so the local supermarket was the only choice of supermarket we had. Not very good for bargain hunting I must say. If there’s only 1 shop, they can charge what they like and as long as it’s reasonable you’ll pay the price.
Nowadays I can order my shop sitting on my sofa and I can order as much as I like because a big van will bring it instead of a wonky trolley. I don’t need to worry about getting anywhere. It’s so easy and you really can shop around without leaving your house. You can often find the best bargains this way, bargains that you could miss if you shopped in store. Online shopping using the right tools can do wonders for your monthly budget. Take my new favourite tool for example. It’s called Savvy Buys and it shows you offers that are 30% below the yearly average price. There’s no supermarket nonsense here, it’s a tool for bargain hunting at its best. You can even see the price graph over the past year to you know you really are getting a good deal. I’ve just used it to stock up on Kellogg’s Nutri-Grain breakfast biscuits. The kids love them, I love them and at £1.00 a box you can’t go wrong really.
Spotting the bargains
In the 1980′s the only way we would know that bread was on offer at a different shop was if Mrs Bloggs told us so when she leaned over the fence, and that was only if she happened to have shopped there. If mum did travel a bit further to go to a different supermarket she may well have seen that her Christmas biscuits were quite a lot cheaper there as well as her turkey and her brussell sprouts. There was no way of knowing exactly where would be the cheapest place for what you needed, there was just snippets of conversation or an advert here or there. Nowadays I easily compare prices online, fill my basket and see exactly how much the same items would cost in other supermarkets before deciding where to finally shop from.
Overall, some things were better in the 80′s (legwarmers/George Micheal/Dynasty/my eyesight) but I do believe supermarket shopping has definitely changed for the better.
