by Hope
For the last 5-6 months, I have really been limited in what I ate. What I purchased. I’ve lived on sandwiches, eggs, bacon, and some fruit and veggies. This is not a complaint at all. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed my food. Chosen it as my staples of choice. I didn’t feel denied. And it’s really helped me keep my food spending under control.
But the last couple of weeks, I was craving cereal. (Yes, I know, not a healthy choice at all.) But just sometimes…well, I had my grocery budget for the month and with this week in Texas (where I am now,) I had a little room to splurge.
Another aspect of this is that I rarely go grocery shopping. I rarely go into stores anymore. I order my food for pick up for the most part. (No charge for pick up.) This means I’ve not had much exposure to how things had changed in the last couple of years.
After I picked up Beauty from work one evening, we ran to Walmart to pick up some groceries. And wow, it’s the cereal aisle that opened my eyes to how things have changed. With five kids, we always bought family size everything. It just made sense pricewise and quantity wise.
So when I went to pick up my treasured cereal, I was shocked to find that “Family Size” is now what regular size used to be, i.e. much, much smaller. And the price…still higher. That’s so crazy.
I’ve not been immune to the cost of food rising discussions, but since I went from buying for a family of 6 to 3 and now to 1 so rapidly, my food budget has gone down rapidly. I didn’t really notice the individual prices going up.
The visit to the cereal aisle was eye-opening in many ways.
These boxes of cereal will last me months. And I will thoroughly enjoy them. And I’m very grateful to have been able to “splurge” this month. But, I’m even more grateful that I am not a mom struggling to feed her 5 kids at this time.
Hope is a creative, solutions-focused business manager helping clients grow their business and work more efficiently by leveraging expertise in project management, digital marketing, & tech solutions. She’s recently become an empty nester as her 5 foster/adoptive kids have spread their wings. She lives with her 5 dogs in a small town in NE Georgia and prefers the mountains to the beaches any day. She struggles with the travel bug and is doing her best to help each of her kids as their finish schooling and become independent (but it’s hard!) She has run her own consulting company for almost twenty years! Hope began sharing her journey with the BAD community in the Spring of 2015 and feels like she has finally in a place to really focus on making wise financial decisions.
