I save them all—always have—and tally them up from time to time. As a result, I am a veritable encyclopedia of supermarket information, and the world’s leading authority on my own shopping habits. So should the need somehow arise, I can tell you exactly how many bottles of Bolthouse Farms Mango Lemonade I bought in July 2005 (2, each for $3.99). This quirky habit actually helped me to land my first job in the food industry, in 1993, when I compiled a comprehensive market research study, complete with charts and regression analyses, on myself. I compared price points, devised intricate graphs, and quantified how my purchases in each department of a traditional grocery store shifted once a natural foods store opened nearby. It made for a hell of a cover letter. But there are also some unusually deep insights to be gleaned by studying your receipts. MORE: Eight Times It’s OK to Pay More at Whole Foods Start with total spending. In 2014, we forked over $9,067 on groceries in my two-person household, or an average of $174.37 per week. Is that high or low? A recent USDA report indicated that under a “moderate cost” plan, the average family of two eating at home spends $142.70; under a “liberal” plan, they spend $178.30. In my household we consume no red meat (typically about 20% of the average grocery bill) but we do buy all natural and organic food (which is usually 5–15% more expensive than conventional food) so I guess we are right where we should be. But there are some other factors to consider. What about pet food? We have two cats and insist on feeding them natural, grain-free food, which costs us an additional $14.20 a week at independent pet food stores. We also average $21.48 a week at restaurants—but it turns out that is less than half the $51.50 per week most Americans spend, according to federal statistics. So how does it all add up? In an interesting 2013 article in The Atlantic, it was reported that households in the upper 20% of income brackets spend, on average, $10,991 per year on all food. My total last year, including groceries, pet food, and restaurant meals, was $10,924. So I am feeling extremely average. MORE: 11 Natural Foods That Contain Surprising “Other” Ingredients Turn now to shopping venues. I live in the Phoenix metro area, where there are many, many food retailers. On my 25-minute commute to the office, I pass right by an astonishing 13 of them. Last year, we spent 95% of our grocery dollars at five of those retailers: Fry’s/Kroger (16%), Costco (12%), Trader Joe’s (21%), Whole Foods (24%), and Sprouts (21%), which is to say one conventional store, one club store, one specialty store, and two natural foods supermarkets—a split that is not uncommon among natural foods aficionados, who tend not to care about “one-stop shopping.” But, like most people, we used these stores in very different ways:• Fry’s was our convenience store: We went there 111 times in 2014, more than twice a week, but spent an average of just $13.26. The most common items purchased: commodity natural beverages (fat-free organic milk, Oregon Chai, Simply Lemonade Blueberry, Silk Dark Chocolate Almond Milk), on which Kroger’s aggressive move into the natural foods business has typically yielded the best prices in town.• We made only 12 visits to Costco, but spent $60 a pop on large bags of avocados, pineapples, chia seeds, coconut oil, and Tillamook cheddar. Interestingly, we did not tend to buy multipacks at Costco the way most people do, but instead shopped it selectively for individual products and brands that were either very well priced, or that we couldn’t find elsewhere. That’s one indication of the change that has swept over this big-box retailer, which, according to a May report by BMO Capital Markets, has now surpassed Whole Foods as the nation’s leading purveyor of organic foods with more than $4 billion in sales a year.• We shopped at Sprouts 64 times, spending about $30 per trip, mostly on produce. Everyone needs a cheap produce store.• TJ’s was a once-a-week destination for us, at $36.53 per trip, and we tended to use it for out-of-the-ordinary staples like asiago-and-cracked-black-pepper bread, chunky applesauce, olive or eggplant spreads, and of course their chocolate-covered pretzels, which never last in our house more than a day.• Whole Foods Market was still our No. 1 destination in terms of dollars ($2,071) but it fell out of favor a bit last year as other stores started carrying more natural food products at better prices. Whole Foods became our “break-out-of-the-rut” store, as evidenced by a recent $47.36/12-item foray there, which included five items we cannot get anywhere else—Le Sweet pear-cinnamon pound cake, Beyond Meat chicken-free strips, Natura plantain chips, OCHO organic dark coffee chocolate bars, and San Marzano tomato sauce. We also bought two items whose quality is vastly superior to any other retailer in town: fresh Dover sole fillets, and some perfectly ripe nectarines. MORE: The Next Natural Foods Trend? Get Ye to a Piggly Wiggly In all, we made a whopping 322 trips to grocery stores in 2014, a number far above the American average of 83. That total was inflated by my tendency to go to a supermarket to buy lunch (usually cups of Fage yogurt, of which I purchased more than 150), an increasingly common trend. But that number was actually down from our totals of 401 in 2013, and 425 in 2012. Yikes. So OK, my receipts tell me I’m a little bit obsessed with supermarkets. What do your receipts reveal about you?
