I did very little grocery shopping this week, but did get a few good steals (with only store sales & coupons).

The above items were from Stop & Shop.  The honey bear was only $1.49 after stacking store coupons and discounts.  The mustard did even better – $0.21 to me – after coupons and discounts!  I also got two cans of beans for $0.19 which I left in the food pantry bin at the store.

I admit I didn’t do too much grocery shopping last week.  I made a trip to BJs.

I purchased a few items, mostly on sale, at Stop & Shop.

I also made it to the farm stand for local strawberries and a few other, less local items.

I also took two of the boys to the Strawberry Festival this past weekend and tried all sorts of strawberry goodies – chocolate covered strawberries, strawberry shortcake, spinach salad with strawberries, and strawberry smoothies.  There were other options, but those were what we were interested in.

Well.  Last week was super uneventful shopping wise.  I made one visit to Wegman’s.

Even it wasn’t super exciting.  The boys have been eating a lot of granola bars lately so you’ve seen them go buy a bunch.  I won’t be at BJs until Tuesday so I grabbed a gallon of milk to tide me over (same price so there’s no real worry).  I did buy two slices of cheesecake just because it looked good (and I was standing around waiting for the rooster to come out of the barn to entertain the 2 year-old).

I had a number of errands to run yesterday during preschool hours.  After making it through the first few with no issues, I arrived at Star Market to discover they (along with a fairly good sized chunk of town) had lost power.  I’m guessing it was within 15 minutes of my arrival because while some perishables had been covered/moved they were still in scramble mode to deal with the rest.  And, according to at least one person, were looking at two hours before the power came back on.

I only needed a small number of items – mostly perishables actually – which they were probably happy I took off their hands.  So, I gathered my things wondering why the store wasn’t actually closed; what was going on at checkout.  To my surprise the registers were working.  I learned that they had a one hour backup each so by dividing up the registers they could stay open for a while.

On the one had I found it very odd that the registers were working and yet there didn’t seem to be a backup for all the freezer/refrigerator cases.  On the other hand, I realize it would be expensive to install generators at every store.  I don’t envy the managers who were making decisions about what to move to the rear deep freezes, which presumably would stay cold longest vs what to hope would be ok for a power outage of unknown duration.  I still remember when we had a week long power outage a few years back seeing the trucks in front of the grocery store to take away the loads and loads of spoiled food and the week or so it took for them to restock.

Well, things got a bit crazy last week.  I suppose that’s to be expected.  We’re all rather worn out from sports seasons and longer term the school year.  Sports finish up in the next ten days; school by the end of the month.  Then we move on to summer vacation!

I was at BJs on Tuesday.  This was a small visit by our standards, mostly staples.

Wednesday I went to Wegman’s and Stop & Shop.

On Wednesday I also stopped at Trader Joe’s for three boxes of cereal bars (didn’t take a picture of them).  And, I went to the local produce place.  There I got strawberries, tomatoes, and peaches.  They buy from all over so none of these are actually local yet.  The local produce here now is limited to greens, but strawberries are expected in 1-2 weeks.  Yippee!