About 18 months ago my local Albertsons had a good sale on pasta and I took advantage of it like Bill Clinton takes advantage of interns. Well, that sale came back and I decided i could use a few(!) cases of rigatoni.
Shopping carts are for amateurs. When the Zero stocks up, he goes deep.
Savings? Well, according to my receipt, what normally would have cost 238.80 came out to sixty bucks. (Got careless, forgot to ask for the 10% case discount.)
The apocalypse will be a fairly carbohydrate-heavy experience what with all the rice and pasta in storage, it seems.
In actuality, this is mostly my desire to have a large amount of day-to-day use items on hand in case some sort of financial donkey punch occurs. When you show up at work one day and your boss says “We’re being bought out by another company. This office will close in three weeks. Good luck.”, you really want to have some of the expensive niggling details (like food) locked down. Also, I just feel calmer and more at peace when I look at the shelves and see boxes and cans of food, racks of toiletries, paper towels, soap, detergent, and all the other consumables that keep my quality of life above that of some Third Worlder.
Wouldn’t it make more sense to stockpile the cash instead of the food if I am worried about such things? Well, yes…except for that part about the fabulous sale. Lets put it this way: You have $60 cash in hand..save it or buy food? If you’re worried about a job loss, for example, and you’ve tied that $60 in food, then you only have that one thing (food) covered. But if you keep the $60 in cash, you can use it to buy food..or fuel..or electricity. So does that mean it makes more sense to stick that $60 in the bank? Nope.. heres why: I didn’t buy $60 worth of food. I bought $240 worth of food and paid $60. Or, put another way, if I stuck that $60 in the bank, when I used it in the future I’d get only $60 worth of food. In this particular case, my purchase power today was 4x what my purchase power would be with that same $60 later. (Disregarding inflation, which would actually make todays purchase more than 4x the purchasing power.) The more clinically minded of you will say “Wait, we’re drifting into Time Value Of Money country..” Yes. Yes we kinda are.)
This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t put money away as part of your preps…it just means that you need to think about things past the obvious. Maybe you already do that..I didn’t used to. Preparedness is really about resource management in regards to risk reduction – we try to get the most for our money when we take steps to protect ourselves from future problems.
Regardless, I’m pleased with todays purchase. It’s more food on the shelf and one less thing I have to worry about acquiring when/if I hit an economic rough patch.
I didn’t know Sig made pasta.
Starting to pay more attention to pasta. One of my kids just decided to go vegetarian last, so we are buying more and more pasta. Sure, I have a few cases of MH chicken, beef, and pork in the deep storage, but I was considering how long it would take before she would have to fall off the meatless wagon. Pasta is also one of those great ways to “eat what your store and store what you eat” without going into the specialty stuff like the freeze dried items.
My daughter tried that vegan BS on us. At dinner that night (roast beef) my daughter asked what was for her.
My wife said “hunger”.
And that was the end of that… BTW, she’s a surgeon today.
I do that as well when our local stores have the big Pasta Sale Don;t recall the price exaclty for pasta but it was less than 50 cent in case lot, usually a dollar a pound. Cans of Hunt’s Spag sauce for 75 cents by the case but still 25% off.
You want Restaurant quality AND bulk packaging? Check this place out. The meats are of Choice quality, not Select which is the lowest grade. Fer instance, this weeks sales fliers have Tri-Tip roasts (avg of 9 # sealed bag) for $2.88 a pound and last week, a local market here was selling them for $5.99 # in steak form. Saved $3.10 a # for cutting them myself. Make sure you
50 # sacks of Baker Potatoes, the big ones, $8.00 every day, all day. Major savings as my store sells them for 89 cents a #. Split the bag up with a few friends and we are eatin cheap. Restaurant equip (8 inch egg pan, aluminum, coated/non-coated- $10.99) tons of deals.
You’re going to love this place. There is at least one in every PNW state. New sales every week.
https://www.smartfoodservice.com/locations/store/missoula-505/
Been there done that: http://www.commanderzero.com/?p=4336
You probably know this, Z, but for some of the rest; be really careful how and where you store pasta. That stuff attracts bugs like flies to crap! Once the bugs are in one box, they’ll be in them all! If the pasta is stored in your pantry, the bugs will get into everything else; a TEOTWAWKI disaster! If you’re going to store it “raw” (in its original box), split your larder up. That way, if bugs get into one stash, there’ll be a chance that the others will be OK. I use a Foodsaver vacuum sealer to keep the weevils out of mine. Mylar bags sealed with an impulse sealer are another good choice. I have a bunch in 5-gallon buckets that is just as clean now as it was ten years ago. One thing though; the more eggs you put in one basket, the more you lose when you drop the basket…
I do, and have done, the same for the last several years. Right now, we lack space for more bulk items. That is being worked on as we speak.
But looking at the regular price of $2+/lb. I don’t see how people can NOT afford to buy bulk when on sale.
Too many people don’t think ahead. I won’t miss them when they’re homeless or dead.
Dollars are the prepper’s multi-tool, but you have to know how to use the tool. And, since the training doesn’t exist, it’s all OJT.
Some learn how to use the tool, others let the tool use them.
What are the odds that at least half of that will be eaten at some point in time?
High.
You’re almost certainly going to eat a lot of this between now and Apocolypse, but for the portion that gets set aside for the Deep Sleep, how are you going to store it?
Sealed up in plastic containers. Why?
Sealed how? I’ve stopped using just food grade buckets for long term storage and added mylar bags inside the buckets that I use the Food Saver to suck the air out of, plus oxy absorbers in the bags, before sealing them.
Short term – planning to use it within 2-3 months – I’ll just go with the buckets.
I was curious if you’ve found or developed a better solution, or one easier to do.
The environment I live in seems to provide some benefit in these regards. It’s quite dry in terms of humidity, and we don’t seem to have the pests that many warmer, wetter places do. My experience thus far has been that plastic storage tubes with tight fitting lids seem to take care of things pretty well. However, even dry foods left in their boxes on the shelf have remained free of pests.
Preach it, brother.
I’m currently rotating through a month’s supplies, to bring in new stuff, and found out the cans of beef I’d allocated at 1/day have enough in them for two meals@, meaning I have twice the depth of food reserves I thought I have.
And my food bill this month so far is $5, for power to run the microwave 3 minutes a night for a month.
What I’m spending in 2014-15 dollars, when I bought the current stuff, is quite a bit less than what I’ll spend next month when I go back to eating on the economy.
A stash of money’s nice, but not when they can’t sell you food because the power (and computerized registers) are down. Or because there’s nothing on the shelves because of random disaster panic buying.
I’m also not going out in traffic now risking merely stupid drivers and adding mileage and burning gasoline, but more importantly, if things get annoying, I won’t be going out on the streets then, either, risking potentially something much worse than just a fender bender, nor will have to for some good amount of time.
It also means in a moderate disaster, I’m part of the solution, rather than part of the problem, and thus not another mouth to feed for the perpetually unprepared agencies in charge of preparedness and disaster relief.
Something a piddling 4.4 quake (think fat kid falling upstairs) close enough to feel yesterday gave me a gentle reminder of.
My parents grew up in the Great Depression.
I never put that lesson together with why we always had a coupla months’ food canned sitting in the kitchen pantry, or my Mom’s fascination with a table garden every spring amidst the plenty of Golden Age middle-class suburbia, until much later in life.
Twenty dozen cans of chow? For 60 bucks?
Nice score, man.
Mad props to you.
I’m mainly a Costco/Sam’s Club/Smart&Final (institutional food originally, but now a retail/wholesale supermarket chain hereabouts) guy.
That and the occasional buckets o’ staples from the LDS cannery, thanks to your link many moons back. (There’s one right behind one of the hospitals I occasionally work at!)
But next, I need to have a heart-to-heart chat with a couple of the local grocery store managers.
Coming in late to the conversation:
I have a small-to-fair amount of pasta set aside for use in recipes that wife likes to fix.
BUT——I have a larger store of flour, multi purpose, multi tasking flour; bread (etc), pasta, thickener & sauces, etc.