Family, Food, gardening, Uncategorized

Grocery Store Guilt

57 Comments

I am aware that being a “Reward Member” at my grocery store  isn’t just a way to sell me discounted gasoline and get me in on sales. It is a way to track what we purchase and get data on the buying trends of customers.

Husband and I probably  purchase of some of the more exotic items at the Cash Wise store here.  Who else buys all the celery root in the produce department two days running?  Cake yeast? I  have bought every pack the store had  each week for the past month.

There is a limit, though, on how much celery root and cake yeast a person can store. We tried to grow celery root in the garden last summer but it didn’t work. We use it in soups and stews and roast meats in place of celery.  I found 14 lovely celery roots at the grocery store last week and diced them, blanched them,  and froze them. We have enough now until next winter. The store hadn’t stocked them for ages, and I was delighted to find them. I also have enough cake yeast to last for months. Now I feel irrationally guilty and anxious.

I worry that  because of our exuberant purchasing,  the store will stock all sorts of celery root and cake yeast and it will all go bad because we don’t need to buy any.  That will make me feel guilty because I hate the thought of food going to waste.  I also worry  that due to poor sales of celery root and cake yeast, the store won’t stock them anymore after this, and when I need them I won’t be able to find them.

I realize as I type this just how ridiculous this is, how very little I really have to worry about, and what a lovely life I have. I guess that is the hallmark of anxiety-the irrationality of it all. I have baked for years using dry yeast, and I can always use regular old celery in a pinch.  I think the marketing people who track our purchases will find us hard to fathom.

What would someone tracking your purchases surmise about you?  Would it be an accurate reflection of who you are?

57 thoughts on “Grocery Store Guilt”

  1. That I feed a bunch of cats…and they’d be right. I feed six-seven barn cats.canned food twice a day plus always available dry food. For me, lots of kalimari olives…

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    2. What does kalimari mean…was I trying for kalimera? (Good morning in Greek) Yes, that’s the explanation…I believe.

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  2. My daughter shops for me. The stores don’t know that, so they probably think she lives on rotisserie chicken, wheat bread and Low Sodium V8.

    Only one store carries the wine I like, and they often sell out. When they have it, my daughter buys as much as she can fit in the cart. That store probably thinks she is a wino.

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  3. That I’m a clothes horse. Every time youngest daughter visits, I send her to the thrift store to buy clothes for me. I’ve also made several mail orders of brand-new clothing recently and am thinking of making another order soon.

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    1. On-line clothing shopping is a blessing to women our age. Nothing is less appealing than a fluorescent-lit changing rooom filled with mirrors. Spare me that.

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      1. I also have almost zero energy and know a clothes shopping trip would totally wipe me out. Heck, I don’t even have the energy to go to the library, much less clothes shopping.

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    2. I forgot to answer the second question. I never really cared about clothes that much before, comfort and casualness being the main criteria (also, cheap, I preferred to get my clothes from the thrift store). However, now that I have a “new” body and absolutely nothing I already owned fit, to the degree that things were literally falling off me, I have become more interested in clothes that fit halfway decently (and don’t fall off). And because of my low energy, ordering brand new clothes online is the way to go. So I’m still going for comfort and casualness, but not cheap.So, maybe I am a clothes horse….

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  4. Rise and Shine Baboons!

    Presently, the gods of data mining will think that someone in my house has severe digestive problems, given the amounts of Pepcid, generic and name brand, I have purchased, in combination with rice and chicken broth, paper towels, and anything to sanitize a dog kennel.

    They would be correct. After a visit to our vet in Eden Prairie yesterday, the diagnosis is “bilious vomiting,” a condition that visits dogs with delicate digestive systems. We do not know what Lucky ingested that set this off while in AZ, but during our month there, I have cleaned up copious piles of canine bodily fluids and administered bottles of digestive meds, while cooking broth and rice for this dog to consume. And then there was the loads of laundry needed after the poor girl ejected herself from the soiled and smelly kennel and jumped on our bed while covered in, well…you get the idea. I should qualify as a vet nurse by now. Our girl lost 3 pounds during the month.

    We had to travel with the dog in this condition, although I got the condition managed enough that all we had to deal with was her flatulence—to quote Lou, “I smell rancid hotdogs.”

    I won’t ever eat a hotdog again. I rarely do, but now I won’t just on principle.

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      1. She is quite a bit better now—glad to be home I think. Here at home I have a mortar and pestle with which I can crush the Pepcid and hide in Peanut Butter. Even when hidden In a pill pocket or soft food, she spits it out. With it crushed, I know it is in her system at the proper dose. I found a few pills spit out in the car and the condo, even though I have become pretty deft at the veterinarian endorsed technique where you put it at the back of the mouth and stoke the throat til she swallows.

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    3. Our biggest dog Humphrey is also a ‘delicate flower’ and requires the sensitive stomach dogfood…
      We know he’s getting into the outside dogs food when he starts farting.

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      1. Thank you.

        Now Lou cannot get the snowblower started. It is very old. He is trying to fix it but it appears we are in the market for a new one soon. I just found a plowing service like Uber called Plows and Mowz. You post a job and somebody answers. We have someone coming tomorrow morning. Ingenious!

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  5. The data hounds would think I’m an alcoholic golfer who lives on peanut butter, pasta, organic spinach, with a few tomatoes and avocados and organic carrots thrown in for good measure, and who is also a cheapskate because I buy most of our meat from the closeout freezer at Cash Wise (lots of things are half price or better!).

    Chris in Owatonna

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  6. Husband bought tons of dryer sheets once to line his drawers up at the rez to ward off mice. Perhaps the data miners thought he was either doing loads of laundry or something of a neat freak.

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      1. It helped keep them out of the drawers, but he still found them skittering around by the baseboards. He hasn’t had any for a while.

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  7. I think that our remoteness here adds to my anxiety, since it isn’t a short trip to get the things we need and want if stores in town don’t stock them and we have to drive 90 miles to Bismarck. I would have been a terrible homesteader.

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  8. I’m impressed, Renee, that your local supermarket stocks celery root. It happens to be one of my very favorite vegetables, but here you have to go to an upscale store like Kowalski’s, Lund’s/Beyerly’s or a co-op to find it. I asked the produce manager at one of local supermarkets if they ever stocked it; he had never even heard of it! When I do find it, it’s expensive. When I find it at the farmers’ market, I always grab a few heads, but even at the large St. Paul market, you’ll only find one or two growers that have it, and usually they are pretty small. It’s apparently difficult to grow here. In Denmark it’s readily available in most markets, and it’s larger and much cheaper; it must grow better there.

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    1. So you know how exciting it is to find it in the local grocery store. We have had good luck growing it in past years, but it was a flop last summer. It adds such a nice flavor to things.

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    2. Now that I think of it, there has to be places in the US where this root vegetable grows well. I wonder where that might be? I just read that it’s very popular in Puerto Rico.

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      1. I use them in soups and stews, especially Huhnersuppe, a creamy chicken soup popular in Bremen, Germany, and in pot roasts. I peel, dice, blanch, and freeze them, and use them as needed.

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        4. My favorite thing to make with celeriac is meatballs in a celeriac sauce; it’s divine. Celeriac is very versatile, you can use it raw in salads as well. I agree with ljb, and like it much better than regular celery. It has a much subtler taste. Here’s a link to a recipe that’s similar, though not identical, to the one I usually make. I think I might try this one next time I get my hands on a celery root: http://www.ediblecommunities.com/recipes/meatballs-celeriac-and-apples

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  9. I’m afraid I can relate to this angst, Renee. In fact, if it were me, I would be tempted to talk to the produce manager in person, make sure he knows that I took most of the celeriac (another name for it, right?) and not be misled. 🙂

    We usually shop at small local markets, and at our HyVee Husband does, but I don’t, use the reward card. I do have a reward card at Walgreen’s, though, because the price reductions with it are substantial. We don’t get our prescriptions there anymore, so I’m there rarely, and yesterday the coupon after checkout was for a 20% discount on anything I buy within a week. The clerk acted as if it were gold – “Those don’t come up just every day!” Well no, only when they are trying to get a lapsed customer back..

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  10. We do most of our shopping at ALDI, except for meat, which we buy at Mike’s Butcher Shop, or from a small organic farm in western Wisconsin. I doubt that any of those places keep track of what we buy. During the Minnesota growing season, all of our fruits and vegetables are from local farmers’ markets, or homegrown by moi or one of my gardening friends.
    Anyone tracking the purchases by this household would conclude that someone in this household is a creature of habit. He likes bagels, Havarti cheese, and ham, and that would be pretty accurate. But obviously that’s a very small detail of the overall picture.

    While I was working in Minneapolis, I participated in some paid focus groups from time to time. I don’t remember how I got involved in that, but $50.00 for telling them my opinion about something or another for an hour seemed like a good deal. That lasted a couple of years, by which time they must have figured out that my opinions were not very mainstream, and probably pretty worthless from a marketing standpoint.

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  11. My Amazon list gets pretty weird because I have an account for the theater and I order lots of play props and things.
    For groceries it’s going to be lots of frozen pizza and milk. 🙂

    It’s been fun as I finish up bookwork from 2018, to see just how many times we ate out or went to Target or how many bottles of Honey Whiskey I’ve purchased…
    (Tell you when I get home).

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      1. Ooooh, it’s good stuff!
        Several different brands but we prefer the Wild Turkey Honey Whiskey. I keep it in the fridge and then add 3 small fridge ice cubes and one big ‘whiskey’ ice cube.

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  12. Data miners have probably concluded that I mostly live on chocolate.

    I usually buy my wine and beer at Morelli’s, which has no loyalty program. Also, they only take cash, no checks or credit cards, so none of my purchases there could be traced to me.

    Starbucks knows my weaknesses well.

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    1. Actually, Morelli’s do take checks. It’s a weird store that accepts checks bu no credit cards. I thought that might change when they got new cash registers, but no, they stuck with the no credit card policy.

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      1. I guess I assumed they wouldn’t take checks if they didn’t take credit cards. A lot of businesses would rather pay the fees associated with taking credit cards than to have to deal with NSF checks. But it takes all kinds.

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  14. I’m not very loyal w/ my shopping… Cub, Aldis, Lakewinds, Target and a few stops at Kowalskis… the data miners would have trouble getting all the data together!

    Online is a different matter. In the last month I’ve ordered a new pair of Birkenstock clogs, a solar system bracelet, a Wild Hockey shirt, gingerbread cookie cutters, lucky money envelopes and a silicon baking pan that makes pigs in a blanket. I’m not sure what this says about me???

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