Relative cost of living is obviously different for me in South Africa, but no, nothing’s changed. I prioritize good food (both good ingredients and good restaurants) over most anything else.
I’ve cut waaaaay down on eating out. I never ate much fast food, and I don’t eat any now. Only rarely at In-n-Out. But I’ve been working – successfully – on losing weight for the last year and a half, so that’s most of the reason I don’t go out much anymore.
With eating mostly fresh produce, I have to be careful not to waste, but prepared foods are more expensive, so I actually save a little there if I don’t let anything go to waste.
I didn’t respond earlier because I thought my response might sound assholey. But, in the interest of giving the thread the full spectrum of SDMB responses, I don’t look at the prices in the grocery store, and just buy what I want. I have noticed that total is often much more than I think it would have been in the before times. I also don’t care what it costs to eat at a restaurant. We eat out frequently.
My wife does most of the shopping (I stick to the pet stuff and cleaning supplies) and so she gets all the credit for saving money. We very, very infrequently eat beef of any type now, opting instead for fish, pork, chicken, and ground turkey. But she has found that buying boned chicken, thick pork chops, and similar cuts seems to work best for us overall, especially if she goes on days that the store has marked down older packages.
For example, she marinaded and roasted two small pork loins last night. Th package was about $8.00 (marked down). We ate most of one last night and will have about the same portion reheated tonight. The rest will be made into a pork stir-fry tomorrow, so less than $2.75 for meat for each meal. Roasted small potatoes and a veggie last night and tonight, with a small salad tomorrow, round the meals out. I just can’t imagine paying $30+ for a package/cut of some beef on a regular basis. If others can afford it, great!
To be fair, my wife does this in part because she wants to be able to afford her yogurt, eggs, figs, and other snacks each day.
Started shopping at Aldi about a year ago. Our overall food costs are lower, even though we still eat most work lunches at the canteen or at a restaurant.
Coincidently we found that hubby really needs to avoid eating beef and processed meats too often, so we make sure to eat more chicken, fish (not cheap) and vegetarian meals.
If I’m at the nearby grocery store in the last 30 minutes before it closes, I make sure to look at the discount pile. I only buy certain things, especially treats, if they are marked 50% off.
Kroger sends us coupons-- one coupon they send sometimes is for '$20 off $200 or more worth of groceries". Used to be, I’d hardly ever get to the $200 limit, or I’d have to make a point of buying extra stuff to get to it. Now I hit $200, and often well over, all the time. I’m surprised they haven’t upped the $200 limit yet.
I’m kinda like @Procrustus in that I haven’t been paying attention, I just “it is what it is!” it and carry on. Also like @solost that I don’t spend much money on anything else, so I have money for food.
But my last grocery trip did give me pause. Everything is just exploded in price. And it probably didn’t explode between my previous trip and the most recent one but damn, I finally noticed that food is expensive.
Probably what hit me is that I was looking at the bakery sale rack and they had an 8” pecan pie on markdown. The label prodly proclaimed that it was $7 off. Your new price: $12.99. WUT?!?!
I might also consider switching toilet paper brands. Maybe.
The biggest change I’ve undertaken was forced on me: the local Indian buffet closed during Covid and never re-opened their buffet. It may have been forced on them in turn due to higher prices, as the buffet was already $15 and if you factor generalized inflation along with food inflation it may have needed to be $25 to get the same profit margin, which most people would not pay, and for less food and probably labor they could just make a dinner entree for the same price.
I used to go to them anyway for said entrees, but it’s over 5 miles away, and it’s not worth the drive for just one entree.
We started using a meat subscription service about 2 years ago, and I can’t see going back to purchasing meats at the grocery store. I’d become very frustrated with the prices and quality. We never go out to eat anymore, but we typically do take out one night a week, and I often bitch about how the prices have gone up. The cost of a large, plain pizza has risen dramatically, and as was mentioned up thread, fast food has gotten insane.
Like some others said, I make enough money that I don’t really pay that much attention to how much food costs. I just buy what I like.
I do, however, save leftovers, and always have (so I guess I haven’t changed any habits in that regard, either). Like the OP, my parents would not allow any food to go to waste when I was growing up, likely because they both came from lower class backgrounds. But I also save leftovers just as a convenience thing. I will purposely cook more than one meal’s worth of food and portion out the leftovers in individual Tupperware containers to take to work for lunch or reheat for dinner on weeknights when I don’t have much time for cooking.
The more I read this thread, the more I realize I apparently really do eat pretty frugally despite not really thinking about it. I haven’t eaten at a restaurant in years, and it wouldn’t even occur to me to not save leftovers.
Left overs, even if they go into the freezer, rarely last more than a week or two. I don’t buy a lot of meat every weekly shopping trip. I tend to buy in bunches and freeze it as that allows me some flexibility with menu planning. I usually buy some sort of chicken, some pork chops, some sirloin strip steaks and a couple pounds of hamburger, usually a pork(preferably) roast,and sometimes some sausage. I will buy turkey drumsticks when they have them(lurve me some turkey drumstick) The rest of my groceries, if the store/discount brand is adequate, I buy that, but not for everything.
I don’t eat fast food if I can help it. I don’t shy away from eating out, but tend to prefer foods that, here in Idaho, might be a little more expensive for what ever reason, like sushi or good, well prepared actual italian (not olive garden).
Yes things are more expensive. Yes, I have changed some food habits, but I’ve been doing that, slowly, for a couple years now anyway, for health reasons, so not sure how much economics plays into it at this point.
Yes, actually. Prior to about 3-4 years ago, I’d regularly buy a t-bone or fillet for a nice steak dinner on the weekends, and would buy pre-packaged barbecued ribs. Nowadays, the costs for them are routinely $25-$30 to buy them in the store. For that cost, I can go out to a restaurant, get a nice steak with 2-3 sides, for about the same price. I’ve changed from eating at home, to eating out more, as eating out is cheaper.
Yeah, for me family of four, I spend about $30 a day, so we just barely hit $200 for the week. I used to not that long in the past, like I only had my second kid in 2016, be able to do it for $20/day. And we eat pretty good, if I do say so myself. I just know how to make great meals from whatever assortment of cheap items I could find. It helps my favorite cuts like beef shank, pork shoulder, and chicken legs or thighs happen to still be pretty cheap. Even deli items I rarely crest $5/lb. There’s usually a Polish sausage at $3/lb, for instance (today it was the grilling sausage, often it’s the zwyczajna, or “ordinary” sausage.) We have the disposable income to buy whatever we want, but neither me nor my wife are built that way, and most stuff I love to cook is cheap. Today, for example, I have some shrimp-sausage-chicken gumbo made for about $15, enough to serve about 6 adults.
I used to like getting different two-liters of pop. I used to sub out an evening snack with a glass or two of zero-sugar ginger ale, Squirt or cherry 7-Up. But two-liters have gotten insanely expensive. Now I’m trying water enhancers like Mio to scratch my evening itch for flavor. Now we maybe buy two two-liters a month, whereas before it was two or three a week.
No, because aside from an occasional barbecue or dinner party, I’m mostly just feeding myself. The tradeoffs of a single-person household make prepared convenience foods an attractive option. But as I recently said to my doctor, that doesn’t mean junk food – it usually means good quality freshly prepared meals and convenience foods from the better local supermarkets.
Are prepared foods more expensive? Sure, but the expense-convenience tradeoff is minimal when feeding a family of one. A family of four or more would have completely different tradeoffs. If I happened to be responsible for regularly preparing meals for a household of four or more, I’d sure as hell be making a lot of stuff from scratch.
I seldom eat in restaurants, and was that way before the pandemic.
Facebook has several local pages of people who post grocery bargains, usually short-dated perishables. I plan to head to a nearby town across the river tomorrow, and take advantage of this (and bring ice blocks with me!).
I used to work at a grocery store in the mid-90s and 2L were 88 cents. I really hadn’t bought any since then. Imagine my surprise when I was shopping for a holiday party last year and they were $3.69! Holy cow!
It’s still the cheapest per ounce way to buy pop. At least when it’s on sale (like it is now at my store).
This rings true for me, too.
We seldom go out to eat, so not much difference there. And I enjoy going through the grocery website and clipping the coupons there to maximize savings when we go to the store.
Since we’re retired and home, we eat leftovers for lunch, and sometimes have a leftover dinner if stuff is accumulating. Every Thursday evening we inventory the freezer so we don’t lose stuff there. We throw out very little.
We see what is on sale and design our menu for the week around it. When we go shopping Friday morning we have our meals planned so we can buy everything we need for them without going back to the store.
This summer we’ve had the best garden ever, and so plan around eating from it. We’ve gotten 103 zucchinis so far from 1 bought plant and 2 volunteers, 15 pounds of peas from one packet and probably 20 pounds of beans. And tomatoes. So no store vegetables for us.
On sale prepackaged ribs are about $14, which is enough for dinner for both of us (I still eat a lot) and leftovers. I suspect they are that much normally but we don’t buy them then. When steak goes on sale we buy a lot of it.
I’ve noted that while list prices have not gone down much or at all, the number and length of sales has increased. But you have to work at it.