Saving money by reducing inventory

Today is Wednesday. Today I saved over a hundred dollars instantly simply by making the decision to reduce the inventory in my cupboard. For the past four years, I’ve done the grocery shopping on Wednesdays out of sheer convenience since my child takes a year-round hour-long extracurricular class 2 minutes from the discount chain grocery store. This has always been a happy medium, saving gas, time and money, since for me grocery shopping is a real chore and an hour of it is about all that I can stand. When my time is up, I leave whether I have everything or not. “Too bad, I’ll get it next week” is how I approach it. My husband used to do the shopping but I felt bad about him having to do it especially when his daily 4 hour commute started to take its toll. He still helps out but now I’m the main shopper.

Well, today I did not shop except to pick up some perishables at a produce mini-market. The realities of the rising cost of food and fuel has made me pause before I buy anything these days. When I actually stopped to take inventory, I realized that I really did not need anything. The lure of buying discount food and paper goods ushered in by the Costco’s, BJs and gigantic supermarket super-centers of the world has most of us middle class dwellers buying and storing more food and paper goods in inventory than we actually need. In fact, every single week I buy multiples of whatever is on sale because it is on sale, lug it home and do the storage shuffle. Like every one else I complain that my kitchen storage is inadequate. Perhaps our kitchen storage is inadequate because we are buying too much stuff - hundreds of dollars worth of food and goods perennially sitting on a shelf; hundreds of dollars that can be used for something else like buying gas for instance. Going forward, I plan to keep my inventory at a reduced level. Now I’m not saying that I’m going to give up my habit of having a backup of most items, but I’ll stick to 1 or 2 not 6.