A New Way to Shop

Lately I've been using my limited computer time, without a lap baby, to shop.  My husband and I sat down and budgeted our household purchases and noticed that we were spending lots of time, money, and gasoline to purchase everyday items.  I spent about 15 dollars per month just driving to the store to buy things.  This doesn't include my time actually buying them, or the pain and suffering I go through to shop with four children, or the incidentals that I have to buy to keep said children from killing each other.  As we all know, no mother in human history has entered a Target with the intention of purchasing what is on her list and actually walked out with only what is on her list.  It's humanly impossible to do, and if you can do it once, impossible to repeat.  With these considerations in mind I started looking at options for obtaining things that we use frequently without leaving my house.  I'd done this a few years ago when I was on partial bed rest with my second pregnancy and I found that there weren't many options, everything required huge quantities and the cost of shipping was crazy and I gave up.  I wasn't hopeful this time around, but I thought that maybe times had changed so I started looking with hope.  I came across Amazon Save and Subscribe.  I'm sure that I am way behind the times and that most people have probably looked into this before me as I am not very tech savvy.  Here's what I found.  I'm sure everyone would see slightly different results because no one buys exactly what I buy but the prices were either slightly more, the same, or WAY less than I pay at the store.  The selection of brands and quantities was much better and I found what I used to go to three different stores for in one location.  We started our save and subscribe last month and here's why I'm going to keep doing it.

1. It saves me money.  I have to pay the $80/year Amazon prime fee but I didn't drive to the store, that's a savings of $8 per month.

2.  I don't have to hold my children by the hair while I read labels.

3.  No need to wear clean jeans, I can shop in my pj's with a nice cup of tea.

4.  There are more brands than two available for an item.

5.  The UPS guy delivered my toilet paper to my front door, I didn't have to put it on my cart, put it in my car, and take it to my house.

6.  Things come in really big boxes that my children love to play in and then I recycled.  It's actually less packaging than if I made more trips to the store and had all those shopping bags.

7.  My children can't talk me into buying anything because they don't know I'm shopping.

8.  I don't have to talk to people.  Yes, I might be slightly anti-social to strangers, they sometimes touch me or my children.  I am not ok with that.

9.  There are no free samples of food items that I would never actually let my children eat if they couldn't see them.

10.  Did I mention that the Amazon website is open all the time, I don't have to waste daylight hours shopping.

All of this took some time to set up and you have to figure out your recurring schedule, that might need adjusting later, but it was worth it.  The no shopping for the last few weeks let me spend time keeping my house cleaner and I actually managed to go two days without doing laundry.  Also I heard an awesome joke from my second...

Where do cows live?

wait for it,

in Cowafornia!

So, in order to stay sane I'm having most of my groceries, non-perishables of course, delivered to my house by the nice UPS man. My children think it's great, they get new boxes with every delivery.  Now to see if I can get rid of some of their other toys...