ENVS 607: Food Challenge (Fall 2015)

graduate student food challenge experiences

SNAP for Students: Day 2 and Grocery Shopping

On Tuesday morning, I set my alarm early in order to walk to the grocery store and spend my remaining $17.11 as effectively as possible. In order to make sure that I had enough time to walk there and back, shop, and finish some homework I left my house first thing in the morning. I still had some reading to do for my classes, and I considered putting of the trip to the store again. Of course, after spending more than I had anticipated that first day, I knew that I would not have enough money if I tried to eat out again instead of going to the grocery store to buy food for the rest of the week. Normally, I carpool with my roommates to go grocery shopping at WinCo. One of the conditions of this challenge was to account for issues of transportation so I WalmartStorelimited myself only to supermarkets within walking distance of my house. I don’t usually like to support Walmart but it was that or Safeway, and I figured that my money would stretch a little further.  And so, I headed out into early morning drizzle and walked over to the Walmart Neighborhood Market across the street from my neighborhood.

I thought that it would take much longer, so I was relieved to find that the walk only took me about 20 minutes. I figured that I would be in and out of the store in no time and that I’d have plenty of time to prepare for my classes for the day. Unfortunately, my lack of planning would be my downfall  once again.That isn’t to say that I didn’t try to plan, I just was not very successful. For example, on Monday night I spent about 40 minutes figuring out what time Walmart was open and clipping coupons from the Walmart website in preparation for my shopping trip. When I went to print these coupons I was prompted to download special coupon-printing software so I did. Although I was sucessfully able to download the software it never allowed me to print, and so I had wasted almost an hour with nothing to show for it.  Frustrated and disappointed, I decided to give up and go to bed.

Without the coupons helping me decide what to buy, I had no plan, no grocery list, and no food in my stomach when I entered the store so I had a very difficult time deciding what to put in my cart. This wouldn’t be so different from my normal grocery shopping experience except for the fact that I was crunching numbers on a much smaller scale than I am used to. Although I am typically very aware of prices and always look for the best deal, I have never had to decide whether or not to buy something because it cost $0.40 more than something else. I also have never been able to recall the prices of so many different as accurately as I was able to that morning as I tried to turn my $17.11 into as much food for the week as possible. (Even days later the numbers come back to me surprisingly quickly.) I knew how limited my budget was, and I couldn’t stop doing math as I wheeled from row to row. I went back and forth on dozens of items, placing them in my cart, walking away, and then coming back to return the item to the shelf.

After about 25 minutes of this aimless wandering, I finally decided it would be better to just put things in my cart and figure out what to put back once I was at the register. This did not go very well either. I chose to check out through the self-service section, but after scanning everything realized I was way over my budget. I attempted to cancel some items, but then was prompted to ask for assistance. This was almost worse than if I had just gone to the normal cashier! I had to stand by and watch while an employee canceled my purchases one by one. (The coffee was especially hard to say goodbye to!)  Eventually, I got my bill down to $21.52. This would have been fine for my weekly allotment except I had regrettably already spent $4.89 on my first day’s meager food purchases, putting me $4.41 over my intended SNAP-inspired budget. In other words, I had required an additional day’s worth of food dollars in order to buy these groceries for the rest of my 5-day week. I justified it because I knew that if I’d come to the store on the first day that I would have been able to get buy with the food purchased later at Walmart. However, this was still a very blatant violation of the rules I’d set out to follow. This only reinforced the importance of planning, timing, and eating groceries spread throughout the week rather than eating out on the go. Although I was satisfied with the purchases I ended up with, I felt very anxious about the thought of having to deduct an additional $4.41 from my final purchases if I truly had been confined to the $22 budget I’d started off with. I knew that it would not have been enough for the week and that I would have needed even more time to reconfigure my shopping car. Regardless, by the time I finally paid and walked back to my house, I’d spent an hour and a half grocery shopping. This left me very little time to prepare for class and I barely made it to campus on time. I was fortunate that I was able to drive to campus from my house. If I had needed to take the bus to school, I would have missed the one I needed to get to class on time.


Grocery

Here are the final items I ended up with:

1 bag spinach greens

1 bag mini peppers

3 apples

1/2 gallon of 2% milk

1 can soupWalmart

1 can corn

1 jar tomato sauce

I package of whole wheat spaghetti

1 jar of Peanut Butter

1 jar of grape jelly

1 loaf of bread

1 box of cereal

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