Just got back from my Saturday morning run to King Soopers; $27 in gas and $111.70 ($93.43 after coupons) in groceries.
Gas was $0.50 off thanks to grocery points, so a mere $3.60 a gallon for the good stuff – and I burned a bit more than I usually do with the extra trip to MicroCenter with my CFO… He’s also a car guy, so any chance we get to leave work in one of our cars is generally taken and it tends to not be very casual once we get on the highway. 😀
He’s got a resto-mod 67 Camaro SS that’s pretty nice, but my 300 demolishes it. So, because I can’t have the fastest car in the company, he has money down on a new Lotus Emira that will arrive “someday”…
I’m betting the 300 will demolish the Emira too… Well, maybe not in a corner…
Anyway, I also spent a bit more than usual on groceries hoping that I can front-load some costs and in turn save some money in the longer term – because I have a fridge in my office at work now…
Story time!
My company owns the entire building we’re in, but we don’t use all of it, so various spaces on the first and second floors are rented out – and as a small perk for renting from us you get ‘as available’ IT support from my company… We supply wifi on our building-wide Meraki mesh setup with a VLAN’d SSID for your business, VOIP phones if needed, and we can help out with small computer or network issues on an as-available basis.
Until recently we had a lawyer’s office on the second floor… Said lawyer decided that with everything going to shit now was a good time to close his practice, retire, and head for a more sane state. And when he moved out, as a thank you for all the tech support over the years, he gave us some of his office stuff; a couple of all in one printer/scanners, some computers, some furniture, and a dorm-sized refrigerator.
I’ve since moved that fridge into my office on the third floor…
We have a pretty nice break-room at work with couches, huge TV, game consoles, foosball and arcade machines, a couple of microwaves and refrigerators, a snack vending machine and soda machine. And my CFO offsets 50% of the cost of stuff in the snack / soda machines, so up until 2020 everything in either machine was a quarter.
Well, now we live in different times and the snack machine is full of tiny $1 bags of junkfood and the soda machine is always empty because it’s just not feasible for the snack company to sell sodas for even a buck anymore.
But now I have my own fridge in my office, which is locked when I’m not there – so last month I bought three 12-packs of Coke Zero on sale and that lasted me all month. And today 12-packs were on sale again, so I bought another three 12-packs for next month for $15. On sale, each soda works out to about 42 cents, which I can live with.
King Soopers also has a new Kroger store-brand breakfast bowl that’s actually quite good, and they come as a 5-pack for $14 – if you can find them. As mentioned, they’re pretty good, and Kroger can’t seem to make them fast enough to keep up with demand… This morning they had a few available, so I got two 5-packs which is breakfasts for two weeks – at a dollar less per breakfast than the Jimmy Dean bowls I usually get.
I also buy pints of Kroger ‘nuclear milk’, which cost a bit more ($1.29/pt), but the shelf life is insane – the three pints I bought today expire November 17th, for example…. Honestly, I’m not sure if the milk is actually irradiated, but whatever it is they are doing makes it so I don’t have to toss out expired milk because I didn’t get around to using it quick enough… So I spend a little more for less waste.
I also splurged a bit today and bought a deli chef salad ($6) because cheap food generally doesn’t have any real greenery and – man – I just need a salad on occasion.
Listening to "Boardwalk '82" by Android Automatic