Hibernating is cheap

With a long weekend upon us and the beginning of my Spring Break, we found ourselves with no plans to head south, to a spa or a ski hill instead we opted to stick close to home and just relax. Other than one grocery shop and a couple little excursions, we managed to be entertained and entertain rather simply. The result – a really fun and restorative weekend that didn't cost much. And to top it off, we barely got out of our pjs!  

Food continues to eat up the bulk of my spending and since this experiment grew rather quickly and organically without a proper plan of action or budget in place I thought I'd start actually trying to find ways to whittle down my food costs a bit more. I like to bake and since the beginning of this month my supplies had been dwindling to the point I actually ran out of all the staples: flour, sugar, baking powder, etc. I had been avoiding making extra purchases until I finally ran out and decided I would make a trip to the bulk store and stock up in a spend thrift manner. I figured I would document the additional savings to be had by buying in bulk and present a cost comparison here. Well, I'm glad I did because the results were actually surprising to me.

	Bulk Barn		Grocery Store
	price/100g	cost	price/100g	cost
flour (2.5kg)	$0.21	$5.23	$0.24	$5.99*
brown sugar (1kg)	$0.19	$1.88	$0.23	$2.29
baking powder (225g)	$0.66	$1.48	$1.00	$2.29
baking soda (454g)	$0.22	$0.89	$0.20	$0.99
coffee (454g)	$2.56	$11.40	$2.63	$11.95*
vanilla (artificial 43ml)		$3.29		$2.39
TOTAL		$24.17		$25.90

So after going out of my way to shop at this store, I saved a Grand Total of under $2 and actually ended up with lesser quality and a bad taste in my mouth. Two of the big ticket items for me were coffee and flour. I've mentioned my coffee habits previously. I tend to buy premium fair trade organic roasts but decided to go bulk to be prudent only to discover for 50 cents more I could have had bought the higher end coffee because it was on sale at the grocery store. The other remarkable thing was flour - organic name brand flour at the grocery store (regular price) was less than a dollar more than the no name all purpose in bulk. And the kicker, vanilla. The exact brand and bottle – $1 more! 

My feeling is these stores are cashing in on the fact that people wrongfully assume because there is less packaging, and you buy by weight not standard sizes, there is great savings. It doesn't quite appear so. The benefit is the flexibility of making smaller purchases if necessary and there is the eco-bonus of no extra packaging but for me not worth it.

Ever the optimist though, I'm not going to totally write bulk off as I discovered after this trip (unfortunately) that there's a newer bulk store near my kids' school that stocks better quality product at 'good' prices. So, once I manage to bake my way through all these ingredients, I'll give it a go.  

Friday Spent: $0
Saturday Spent: $27.75 (bulk store)
Sunday Spent: $10.50 (transit)
Monday Spent: $0