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Comment by nkrisc | Hacker News Reader

As a millennial myself, my beef isn't with groceries, it's with the once-a-week, huge shopping trip. I much prefer to make a few small trips a week if it's on my commute. I used to live near a small, independent grocery and would usually stop in on my walk home from the train and grab stuff to cook that night.

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I love both! I like stopping by small independent grocery stores, but I also buy what I can at Costco. My wife and I love to go to Costco and walk around. We set limits on what we will buy and have general rules such as no buying more of any category until we eat what we have. We spent about 600 per month at Costco, 150-200 at other grocery stores, and 150-200 eating out.

Whoa, where do you live that you're spending $1000 a month on food for two?

I love Costco too, but our apartment is too small for storing lots of bulk food items. My wife and I dream of having a bigger kitchen, pantry, and chest freezer someday.

I live in the California Bay Area. I can't break down the Costco since in the past I have not saved receipts. I estimate that out of that $600 I spent about $50 on beer and wine, and maybe $150-200 on household supplies.

I'm working on getting better numbers, since it seems like a lot too, especially when I think about what I'm eating: toast for breakfast, leftovers for lunch, simple dinners. I'd really like to know!

I find it really easy to hit that price point.

When I was single I was averaging about 250 -> 350 a month. But I offset this by buying chicken in bulk at 40LB increments and that usually lasted me several months.

For two right now I'm average about 700 to 800 a month. I have a number of food allergies so ingredients or restrictive. The other half is as close to organic as possible.

I'd say the biggest contribution to the price is moving off farm sourcing. I don't have the time right now to process 40lb of chicken, or several cases of produce.

Im hoping all of that is for more than just the 2 of you?

Yeah, a roommate pays for about 4-5 dinners per week. I've also used the numbers from my budget categories since I'm happy on the rare months that we hit the limit on each and don't want to be labeled as low-balling my food to make eating out seem expensive. Cooking at home is cheap even if you give numbers this high.

Same here, I like buying veggies from smaller stores on my way home from work. However, my wife and I still make a Costco run every Sunday.

I won't say I love both but we do both. My wife and I still go to Costco for bulk or other goods that don't necessarily need to be fresh. We also get gas there too.

It freaks me a little bit how on-demand most people seem to do their grocery shopping, but I have to attribute that to my atypical rural upbringing. When it is a 30-40 mile round trip to the grocery store, you become accustomed to doing all the shopping for the week at once, and whipping something up with what is on hand during the week.

Also that it seems like nobody has more than about three days of food in their pantry. My mother still puts up hundreds of quarts of canned vegetables every summer out of the garden, freezes enough other stuff to fill an entire full-size freezer, then they buy half a beef-creature from the farmer down the hill to fill the other freezer. And usually a couple hundred pounds of potatoes. There's probably enough food to keep them alive for two years.

Makes total sense in a rural environment, but it's a hassle for urban living.

A lot replies here seem to be from people living in large cities, but there is a whole lot more out there than just that. I don't live in the country, but the way my city (one of the top 100 largest US cities, that nobody has heard of) is sprawled out walking to the store is completely unreasonable.

Driving to pick up dinner each day would be just tedious.

I've found this to be my experience as well. Going to Target or King Soopers takes like an hour because it's an absolute Zoo, so I just stop at 7/11 or Wawa pretty much once a day.

It's interesting because I do this myself and attribute it to my time living in a developing nation for a few years. In one example, I was at a family home and there was almost nothing for breakfast on several mornings. When I asked what was up, they just told me they'd sent one of their children to the bakery up the street. Same thing with meat purchases for later meals.

Huh, I've been living like this for so long that I'd forgotten most people do the once-a-week blowout shopping spree. Having lived in Europe, one of the perks was that you invariably had local groceries, bakeries, and butchers seemingly on every street corner. Berkeley is kind of like that for me now: fresh bread, sausage, and local veggies only a 20 minute walk from home. Can't imagine living any other way!

Personally, I think it's the better way to live. For many people in the U.S., at least, it's probably hard to live that way. Some places are way to spread out for that.

For sure. I've grew up around Berkeley and now I'm in Europe. Both places (at least where I am now) are walkable which surely helps when making small runs to the market/bakery/etc.

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