Tales From The Past

I feel inspired to share some tales from the past to frame my attitude towards coupons, rebates, and thrifty shopping. Thus, the first in a series:

When I was in middle school, my "family" used to go grocery shopping every Sunday. (Shoppping on Sunday has since become taboo as it is the Lords' day. I'm sure I will make a post later about how shopping on Sunday is a pet peeve of mine and expand on the matter.) Nonetheless, we would go to the store without much of a plan, but on a set day each week. My "dad" would occasionally "plan" the meals while we were in the store. However, most of the time we would just buy stuff and figure it out what we would eat later. His primary concern was making sure we had plenty of meat and did try to an extent to buy it on sale and freeze it for later use. He would also pay attention to canned goods. Canned tomatoes seemed to be most commonly monitored canned food product and when it went on sale, we would buy a lot. However, for other canned products (or food items in general), whenever I could suggest buying the store brand of something because it was a few cents less, I would be told to just "buy what I want and like." I was more-or-less given the freedom to buy whatever I wanted. (Looking back now, it was great. I wish I could just go into a store now and buy whatever I wanted and liked.) I would always ask, "can we get this...", but it was more of a rhetorical question as the answer awas always "yes." The weekly bill for two bill was always about $100 and somethings even a bit higher. At this point, money wasn't really an issue and a budget wasn't really important. As well, prior to this point, I wasn't really involved in the shopping as my mom did it and while I can not really recall anything about the shopping dyamanics then, I know it was not the same.