Paralysis in the grocery aisle

In the aftershock of the job-cuts news at the office, I found myself wandering around the grocery store on my way home from work this weekend, knowing I needed to pick up a few things and seeing the deals I would ordinarily put together -- the “plays I would make,” to put it in the ex-athlete’s sports terms I find myself frequently using in my head -- but somehow not being able to pull the trigger, so to speak. It was like my whole carefully constructed routine was falling down, and my little mind games I play with our grocery budget suddenly seemed silly. Irrelevant.

I made about five laps around the beverage aisle and the frozen foods section one aisle over, unable to decide whether to pay full price for a big package of chicken tenders or knock two dollars off by piling nine 2-liter bottles of pop into a cart. I needed the chicken for a Super Bowl party. It was the pop that was causing my walking paralysis. If I bought the whole ensemble, I‘d be getting our two mainstays -- Diet Pepsi for Bob and I, whose drug of choice in middle age is caffeine, and Mountain Dew for the kids, when they have friends over -- for just 79 cents a bottle. But in a crisis, the only beverage you only really need is water.

Was this a crisis? I couldn’t decide.

We don’t rely on my paycheck for our day-to-day living expenses. Our grocery budget isn’t threatened -- at least not yet. That’s what I kept telling myself as I circled the aisles, while in another part of my brain, my imagination was generating all sorts of creepy sideshows. Finally the message got through, and I “made the play.”

I paid for the bag of chicken with our grocery money, and bought the pop with another fund I call our Grocery Holding Company. That way we get the good deal, without having to sandbag this week’s budget. When we use the pop, I’ll pay the GHC, as I call it, $1 a bottle -- a good price, my target price, as a shopper. But the GHC will make a profit. And eventually those profits will help fund a weekend getaway.

Is that a silly little game? It doesn’t feel irrelevant to me.

Emerging New Year’s resolutions

I didn’t make any official New Year’s resolutions this year, but as January wears on I find some emerging. I guess that’s better than the usual pattern, whereby I would’ve already abandoned my good intentions by now.

The first one is this: Buying all my clothes at Goodwill or Salvation Army this year. (I would make an exception for socks and undergarments). I haven’t actually taken any action on this yet, but then neither have I broken this unspoken resolution. I just haven’t bought any clothes, period. But it seems like a workable and interesting experiment. So we’ll see.

The second emerging resolution has to do with a project I call the grocery holding company. The basic idea was to set aside some money to buy extremely discounted groceries, hold onto them until needed, and then pay the “holding company” a price that allowed it to make a profit, yet saved us money on our family’s grocery budget. I’ve been experimenting with this for over a year now, and it’s proved trickier than I expected. But I’m intrigued to see if we could fund some of our limited and inexpensive weekend getaways with this enterprise. Again, we’ll see.

Finally, in my ongoing attempt to develop a generous nature I apparently wasn’t born with, I’m working on how I contribute time as well as money. Up until reading “The Power of Flow,” by Harlene Belitz and Meg Lundstrom, I had been feeling pretty good about ramping up our charitable giving last year despite pay cuts and increased costs elsewhere in the budget. But then I picked up this book, which informed me that if you really want to get in on the generosity feedback loop that seems to be built into the physics of the universe, you’ve got to give up your time as well as your money.

This really made me wince, because I’m not really a people person. Most days I would rather read a book than have a conversation with almost anyone, even people I like and love. But it’s with this in mind that I consented to accompany my mom to Weight Watchers this week. (Which is actually an example of being generous with both time and money, since we can’t really afford it.)

Naturally I can’t help wondering: How do I get my $40 monthly fee back from the universal feedback loop? If I quit overeating, we would save that much money on our grocery bill? I guess it’s possible. A worthwhile experiment -- more worthwhile than trying to boil eggs in a dishwasher, anyway.