How I Became a Costco Member.

Can a family of 4 shrink their monthly grocery spending from $600 to $400 and live to tell the tale?!

Stay tuned.

I have no idea where I got $400 from. I pulled it out of thin air. Actually that’s not entirely true. Here’s what happened.

We’re fans of the huge price club stores. Way back in the day we used to have a Sams Club membership and used it mostly to buy paper towels, toilet paper, disposable diapers (before I stumbled into the world of Cloth Diapers), and baby formula (my son was formula fed, my daughter was breastfed until her 2nd birthday. Side note: They’re both healthy, happy, appropriately attached children with similar brain function and immune system capabilities. If you’re reading this and are one of the people who made me feel like a rotten scoundrel for failing at breastfeeding my son…thanks a lot for the unnecessary anxiety.)

Anyway, those are the things we typically bought at Sam’s Club. Once we switched to cloth diapers and ditched the formula, we let the membership expire and started using Kroger 100% for grocery shopping. Sweet little Kroger, home of the expensive hormonal GMO meat. Birthplace of the football-sized chicken breast. Everytime I took one of these massive things out of its package I imagined the poor chicken as she lived, constant back pain from her enormous bosom, can’t find a decent bra, you know how it is when you’ve been genetically modified with growth hormone. I felt guilty for participating in her sad outcome.

Sure, Kroger has their Simple Truth organic meat, but it is astronomical in price. Which makes me crazy. Oh yeah, let’s make it completely unaffordable to eat real, clean foods and then wonder why America’s getting heavier and sicker every year. I actually don’t know the statistics on America’s progression as far as being heavy and sick, but it sounds right to say things are getting worse. This isn’t one of those blogs where I do research and present you with sound content.

Anyway, there I was, trying to go for the Simple Truth meats whenever I could, but sometimes slipping and grabbing the dirty meat because, well frankly, there were times I just wasn’t in the mood to pay eight dollars for a pound of ground beef. Considering $8 can get you 3 sacks full of ready to eat Taco Bell…again I ask why wouldn’t 74.1% of America be overweight?? (Oh yeah, I looked it up on Wikipedia! Nailed it.)

It’s from Wikipedia, so it’s true.

So I started limiting the amount of meat I would buy. I went from making some kind of meaty dinner 4 times a week, to 2 or maybe 3. I have a fair amount of good vegetarian recipes, so I simply added more of those into my dinner rotation. That worked pretty well for us, but I still couldn’t shake the feeling that I was overpaying for my meats. 

If you know me, you might be thinking that now’s about the time time my BFF Michelle should step in and stop this madness. Well that’s exactly what happened. She let me tag along with her on a random Costco trip (she definitely was NOT letting me purchase things for my son’s birthday party on her Costco card and then letting me pay her back later. That would be wrong, and against Costco’s policy. Wink!) So anyway, on that purely sightseeing trip to Costco, I witnessed Michelle buying all this organic meat in bulk; ground beef, pork, chicken, oh my! Dividing it out by pound, I realized it was cheaper than Kroger. Quite a bit cheaper. Oh wow. Even when we were members of Sam’s Club it never dawned on me that I could be buying meats there.

So that was months ago. My husband (do I call him “husband” in every blog post? I think I do. It’s Tyson. Blog audience, meet Tyson, if you haven’t already). Tyson and I have known for a while now that they’re building a Costco right by our house that will be open at the end of 2014, so we decided that while it made sense to get a Costco membership, it also made sense to wait for the close one to be built. The existing one is 40 minutes away from our house. So we tried to wait. I continued to do my shopping at Kroger, but cringed everytine I bought meat. Then recently I started looking for ways to cut our grocery budget. I was pretty convinced we were overspending in this column, and decided restructuring it would be my new project. After days of brainstorming, I had the plan.

Step one: get a Costco membership

Step two: shop at Costco for meat and other bulk items.

It’s a pretty simple plan.

So we went to Costco and laid down $55 for a year membership. Then we all ate a hot dog lunch for $6.49 total.

Three hours later we emerged, sporting that special family dynamic that can only be brought on by hours of lollipop bribery and 30 trips to the bathroom. It was exhilarating.

Now here’s how I arrived at the $400/month grocery budget.

We spent $213.94 at Costco that day getting basically everything we buy throughout the month all at once. From laundry detergent to PB&J to our beloved HBO. Minusing out the pack of Sofia the First panties I got for my daughter, and a shirt for Tyson, it was ballpark $200. Meat wise I got 3 pounds of ground beef, 3 pounds of chicken breast, 4 pounds of pork sirloin tip roast, and 2 pounds of salmon. I plugged the meats into a month long dinner list, evenly spaced so that we are having two meats and one fish per week. I had also picked up a bunch of pasta in bulk so I plugged that in too, one pasta dish per week. Our whole family is wild about breakfast (really, who isn’t?), so we’ll also have a breakfast for dinner once a week. PS-serving breakfast for dinner makes your family think you’re the coolest.

So, let’s cut to the chase. Here’s what my month long dinner list looks like:

The whole thing won’t fit on one page without scrolling (keep rockin’, Google Keep!), but you get the idea. You might see there are some dinners I haven’t completely fleshed out yet. I’ve gotten part of the ingredients from Costco on my monthly run, but will still need more to make it. That’s where the other $200 of the monthly budget comes in. Every Monday (grocery day), I’ll go to Kroger and get what I need to complete that week’s meals. I’ve done this two times already and both times it’s cost me around $50. Do that 4 times a month, and it should be $200 Hence, I should be able to put this show on for $400 a month.

There you go. Stay where you are now (on the edge of your seat) and I’ll let you know if I’m able to keep this up and stay in budget.

I leave you with a glorious picture of frozen meat:

Treat yo’ self…to organic meats.

xoxo