Hello there, wise family and friends... I'm facing a potentially life-changing decision here, and I need advice.
Yea or Nay?Here are some factors that impact my decision:
- There are two Costcos relatively nearby, one is in St. Louis Park (5 mi/10 min away) and the other is in Maple Grove (11 mi/20 min away).
- We're pretty strict about our grocery budget, which is generous enough to let us eat deli turkey and red peppers (mmm), but not so generous that I shop at Whole Foods very often. So if I spend it all by the 18th, we're playing creative pantry until the next month (curses, January...)
- I'd be ok with the XL shopping carts, because somehow the boys have gotten into the pattern of running toward those FUN shopping carts with the car attached to the front at the grocery store. It's like driving a 2WD semi truck. That magnetically attracts random bottom-shelf grocery items throughout the store.
- I'm kind of choosy about food, and I'm wandering if Costco will have enough variety. Like, I like unsweetened applesauce, not-squishy whole-grain bread (but it has to be $2.50 or less), plain yogurt without junk (cornstarch, gelatin) in it, whole-wheat tortillas without preservatives (funny aftertaste, yuck), natural peanut butter... etc. I guess I could go browse the aisles with a checklist and see for myself on this one.
- We don't eat much meat, and that's one thing that most people love about Costco. We do eat 'meat analogs' regularly--does Costco sell tofu, veggie burgers & hot dogs, tempeh, seitan, etc? (Trader Joes has the market on cheap tofu. They offered to start delivering it directly to my house to save the step of shelving it and me unshelving it. I wish that weren't a lie.)
- We do eat a lot of produce, so the 4-lb bag of spinach is AOK with me. I have a hard time buying produce that's above the "benchmark" per pound prices I have in my brain, so I've been feeling kinda deprived this winter... (Why is winter squash $1/lb everywhere! If that's not in season, I don't know what is. Someone show me .29/lb; I'll even take .49. I could eat a butternut squash every day of my life for the rest of eternity. That's probably not normal, oh well.)
- I went through Costco once last fall, to scope out prices, and found them to be comparable to sale prices at other grocery stores. So, it would be more convenient to be able to get these prices all of the time, in one place. Then again, I don't mind waiting for sales and then stocking up when an opportunity arises. I'm totally that crazy lady buying 36 jars of Classico pasta sauce (3/$5 baby. We'll eventually use it). I love when the cashier or other customers point out that I really must like pasta sauce. (Probably not any more than they do, but I do hoard it in my basement, lined up pretty on shelves, which is only normal if you're Mormon.) Of course, shelf-stable items are one thing; the same tactic doesn't work for produce and other perishables.
- Have you noticed that Target is starting to sell Utah family-sized packages of home stuff? I haven't compared prices, but it's worth considering that Costco and Sam's Club don't have the monopoly on jumbo-jumbo sized packaged goods. (I do a lot of grocery shopping at Target, since their prices are competitive, Rainbow kind of bugs me [I can really only buy 1 gallon of milk at the sale price?? Gimicky], Cub foods is a little far away, and every time I go to Byerly's I come out with sushi too (mmmmmm), in addition to overpriced groceries--or sometimes just sushi. Boy is that wrecking my grocery budget. Curses, January... But that has nothing to do with anything.)
Another important consideration is whether Costco would really
save me money, or whether I would just end up buying huge-o boxes of stuff so that cost per item was lower, but total grocery bill, after getting a variety of items, is not?
And, at the heart of the matter--can I really be a Mormon Mom, in every sense of the word, and not have a Costco membership? (JK here, I'm a maverick. Look at the car we drive. Wait, that's cause we're cheap.)
What has your experience been? And what other things should I consider?
Last night I dreamt that I was Abigail Adams's friend and we were accompanying some of the Founding Fathers to England to petition the King and parliament to redress their cruelty toward America. I was sitting next to Ben Franklin, and I was wearing a sweet dress, kind of like this one:
The King didn't listen, but some people in parliament were sympathetic, and did our Boston Tea Party cheer with us. I remember feeling kind of scared that they were going to punish us for speaking up.