Have you ever given any thought about how many hours that you have spent grocery shopping in your lifetime? How about all of the thoughts and energy that are focused on one of the main events of your life?
It’s not just the actual walking into a supermarket with a complicated list of all of the products you need, in your hand. It’s the process of making the weekly list. You may also have a monthly list, and even more often, a list of the products you would buy if they were on sale or you had a coupon.
It’s the time spent being a coupon clipper, the hours checking on the specials to see which store has the best price. Maybe you go to one store for meat, another for produce, and a third for most everything else.
It’s the time you spend making sure you have all of the necessary ingredients for 21 meals a week in your house. And it is a known fact that everyone doesn’t always want the same food to eat. It is all of the decisions you make as you look at the weights of the packages, thinking that larger isn’t always cheaper.
It is also the thought that you want your family to eat reasonably balanced meals, and you feel that it is your job to help that along.
So let us agree on one thing. Grocery shopping and all of the hours that proceed it have an important place in our lives. As we get older it seems to get a lot easier with practice. But for young people first setting up a household it is definitely a learning experience. And once children are added to the mix it becomes a whole new ball game. I still remember standing in a checkout line, one child screaming in the cart, and another rummaging in the articles tempting them on the shelves. Disaster City!
We solved it by my husband watching the three others at home. Each week one different boy would go with me, and he always got to choose one thing for himself. Even more important he got a lot of close knit attention from his mother with no one else around.
So grocery shopping can have its blessings if you look for them. Now that we are retired my husband goes right in the store with me. He is a great help loading and unloading, a new experience for him also. We can have quality time whenever we choose to.
So grocery shoppers, Unite. Now we know why we are such an important part of keeping our world on keel. We plan, we shop, and we execute, setting a good example for our families around us. We provide a terrific service, with love.