We buy paper goods and cleaning products from Costco, so it’s an automatic large quantity because of the number of, say, rolls of toilet paper in the package. I don’t consider it to be stockpiling, just a money savings and fewer trips to the store for those items. We no longer buy cases of canned goods and the like as we did during the pandemic days.
I’m amazed at the amount of effort some folks put into making shopping easier.
One thing’s for sure: between urban vs suburban vs rural, large families vs solos, spacious vs cramped quarters, spacious vs cramped budgets, etc., there sure are a lot of different circumstances represented in this thread.
I’ve found if you work the supermarket sales cycles it’s cheaper than the big box stores &
- I don’t need to buy 4 gallons of ketchup, much of which will go bad & get tossed, thereby making it more expensive
- I don’t need to pay $60 a year for the privilege of shopping there
I have to eat extra sodium, because my labs have trended low for many years, and my father (1933-2003) and his mother (1915-2007) both had repeated hospitalizations for critically low sodium levels, and I really don’t want to experience that. After she went to a nursing home and later had to be taken to the hospital in an ambulance, he told me, “I’m going to get a bottle of salt tablets, and give them to her nurse and tell her to make sure my mother takes them,” to which I replied, “Sorry, but her doctor would have to order them.” I knew where he was coming from. Miss you, Daddy and Grandma!
BTW, when Dad died, my sister stuck around for 2 weeks afterwards, and decided to organize the built-in pantry that was over the kitchen stairs. One thing she found was an open can of breadcrumbs, expiration-dated 2008, that still looked fresh. Ewww, I wouldn’t have wanted to eat those “new”!
We never had a chest freezer, despite 3 hungry kids, and now that I’ve heard far too many horror stories about them, I understand why.
Me? I occasionally do some stocking up when things go on sale, of things I use and eat. I recently found a 20-pound bag of rice at a local Indian grocery, and portioned it out and put quite a bit of it in the freezer so it won’t go “buggy.” Last time that happened, I cooked it and fed it to the local wildlife.
what horror stories? Dead bodies?
Umpteen hundred dollars of stored whatever (often meat) going bad when the compressor fails or there’s a power outage?
It / they can be a single point of failure with very costly consequences, and no good solution for greater redundancy.
Not just for eating. I know very well its not good for everone to eat in excess.
It’s a perservative, a cleaner, a wound dressing.
It’s great to have plenty if you’re a dedicated hoarder.
This, or the kids unplugging them as a prank. Yeah, heard about that more than once, although I understand that modern freezers often have some kind of mechanism where the plug has to be screwed into place.
Basically, I shop once a week, and get what I think I’ll eat that week. I do have a small stockpile of canned goods and dry goods. Prior to recent times, I always kept them around as if I got a bad cold, I had no resources to get more food or soup. However, nowadays, you can get anything you want delivered at any time you want, so I have lessened what is on hand.
(side note - on a recent cabinet cleaning, I had canned goods that expired in 2018. That helped me change my perspective).
I too long to hear more about this.
I typically had a chest freezer because it’s more energy-efficient. But damn, it is a PITA to find stuff. No matter how you organize it, something’s gotta be on the bottom where it’s annoying to fish out.
So I reluctantly decided: screw the environment, I’m a gonna get me a standing freezer. And I did. I separate by: flours & grains; nuts & seeds; meat/fish/tofu; ready-to-eat; and fruits & vegetables. That’s my five shelves, right there. Spices and overflow go in the door.
But I feel guilty, sort of. Tell me more of these “chest freezer horror stories” so I can feel better.
ETA: NM, the stories have been told. But those problems apply to all freezers, no?
Only horror story I got about a chest freezer…(alas, we lost her. It was a lamented loss, let me tell you…)
I was getting out a package of tomato sauce, as I was shutting the door a cat I was fostering jumped in.
I couldn’t stop the door from shutting. So the cat was in.
You had to wait a brief period before you could reopen the lid. (That suction thingy)
Any way, I got it open. Flung it up. Cat expoded into the garage and took off.
He was fine.
The cherry pops he peed on were lost. Lost, yet not forgotten.
Horrors!
I wish I did more grocery stockpiling.
Now that I’m using my costco membership, my 7 cubic food freezer isn’t nearly big enough. When I move into someplace else I’m wanting to get rid of it and get a 15-25 foot upright freezer.
I’d love to only have to go grocery shopping once every couple months.
Also my apartment doesn’t have a pantry. I’d hoard much more food with long shelf lives if it did.
This was a huge problem with my parents chest freezer. They had a large chest freezer (I’m not sure of the sq ft) but because it was so tall, it wasn’t easy to lean over and pick stuff out of the bottom. So my parents would grocery shop and put new stuff in. Then they’d eat that, then put new stuff in on top.
One time I went in to clean out everything in the freezer and reorganize it. There was an entire layer of endless frozen foods that had expired years ago at the bottom. It took a lot of trash bags to throw that stuff out.
I’ll never get a large chest freezer after that. I currently have a small chest freezer, but if I buy a large one I’m going with an upright model. They’re so much easier to organize and get things out of.
I thank you for the affirmation of my decision to go with a standing freezer.
The other chest freezer problem I had - partly due to the construction, and partly due to the fact I’m an absent-minded space cadet - is that I would dig through to find the delicious item at the bottom, which involved removing other items and setting them aside on a nearby counter.
Did I then replace 100% of those temporarily removed items back in the chest freezer, or did an occasional steak, bag of vegetables, or container of tasty casserole sit and rot, neglected, after I inadvertently failed to put them back?
I think we all know the answer to that.
Baskets work great in a chest freezer. The trick is to remember what basket has what in it. Not as easy as you think with multiple hands in there.
I have several freezers mainly because I have permanent fisherman/hunter who needs a place for his game meats.
My upright still gets stuff pushed to the very back/left corner. Its never an easily apparent food item. It could be frozen fish bait. In the trash. Everytime.
I’ve long heard that a good freezer guideline is 3 cubic feet per person. Since I’m a household of one, my refrigerator/freezer is sufficient.
We are a retired couple, and we order our weekly shop for delivery from a local supermarket. Before we started having it delivered we used the “click-and-collect” service, and before that, I used to do a supermarket shop every week.
Shopping like this imposes its own discipline. Our deliveries are on Fridays, so we get fresh veggies for the weekend, and we jointly plan the week’s menus.
We have a big American-style fridge/freezer which easily holds the perishable delivery, and a fairly small cupboard to store cans, jars and packets.
The supermarket’s website is good for repeat items and also easy to search for special offers. Where a regular item is on offer we often buy several, but always bearing in mind use-by dates and storage space.
I also do some batch cooking: Spaghetti Bolognese and curry are great in the slow cooker and leftovers go into containers in the freezer, so there will usually be half a dozen meals in store. We also buy some of the supermarket’s own-brand ready meals which are good value but have a short shelf life.
Me: I’m going to make some chili, could you pick up a can of tomato sauce?
Her: You know, we have one in the basement.
Me: Yeah, but after I use it, we will have zero (as I refrain from mentioning her 26 bottles of hand soap in the storage cabinet).
mmm
Screw into what? The walls receptacle?
How would that physically de done?
We stockpile more than before the pandemic.
I have that disconnect in my household. I grew up in the burbs, and my mother shopped bargains. My husband grew up in a cramped apartment in NYC.
So we used to follow what my husband grew up with, and mostly but what we were going to eat now. Yeah, maybe we kept flour and sugar around, but not much else.
But i discovered i could mail order paper goods, and started buying my toilet paper in bulk. I started doing this a little before the pandemic, so i had most of a case of TP when it started getting hard to find. I don’t regret that. 
I’m still buying it by the case (i keep it in the basement, 2 feet off the floor in the laundry room, so it won’t all get ruined if the washer leaks.)
I saw the food shortages coming, and i stockpiled a lot of dried and canned goods early in the pandemic, before things got closed down. I went to the local Indian grocery store, where it’s normal to buy a couple of 25 pound bags of rice, and several 4 pound bags of assorted types of beans. During the supply chain problems, i bought 50 pound sacks of flour from a restaurant that was selling restaurant supplies to stay in business. (It failed anyway, sadly.) I tried to buy a chest freezer, but the only one i could find was a Bezo upright freezer. It was made for the UK market, and it’s taller, and not as deep as the typical US freezer. It has lots of drawers and shelves. I can’t tell you how much i love my pandemic freezer. I got really lucky with that. I have a couple months of meat in there, the bottom drawer is full of flour (it keeps forever frozen, and provides some nice thermal mass for the freezer), i have a coffee stash in there, a drawer full of frozen vegetables, and my stash of home made broth moved to the freezer compartment of the overflow (party prep) fridge.
My husband thought i was crazy when i came home with all that rice and beans, but he later said i was right to have done so.
We ate through all the pandemic stock, although some of the less popular types of beans (including ones that are easier to buy in cans) lingered for a while.
So… I have replenished some of that stock. My husband was surprised that the rice in the overflow pantry is new. But i just feel better knowing we have food on hand. He’s not wild about it, but tolerates it.
However, during the pandemic we did one big shopping each month. Which means the vegetables we ate were mostly old broccoli and root vegetables, and some frozen. We’ve stopped doing that. I pick up fresh veggies right before cooking them most weeks, and buy what looks good. The stash of frozen veggies subs in when I’m lazy and don’t want to go shopping. But usually it’s something fresh.