the snail shell


Grocery Survey

Every year I total up what we spend on what, and I continue to be baffled by our grocery costs. There are 3 of us1, we buy from all over but most commonly from Whole Foods, and the number just seems huge.

Before you make fun of me for shopping at Whole Foods and wondering why my groceries are expensive! Back in 2009 when I lived in Seattle and had a lot of time on my hands, I did a survey of grocery store prices. The headlines I remember are:

- Trader Joe’s is about 9% cheaper than your average grocery store (QFC, in my case). And most of their food, besides their produce, is pretty good.
- Whole Foods is only about 5% more expensive than your average grocery store. 5%! That’s nothing!

But is this still true? It would be nice to know, especially now that I buy 3x as much food!

Headlines

Results in more depth

Methodology

I went to Whole Foods (WF) in East Liberty, Giant Eagle Market District (GE) in Shadyside, Trader Joe’s (TJ) in East Liberty, Aldi in Garfield, and Community Market (CM) in Bloomfield.

I picked out a “basket of food”, roughly corresponding to what we’d use in a week. This feels like the only sane way to think about food - it doesn’t really matter if the price of salt is high at one place because you’ll use about 1/50 of a container in a week. Some of these are arbitrary, like we don’t need 1lb of asparagus every week, but we would buy asparagus some weeks, broccoli some weeks, etc, so hopefully the price of asparagus would cover all this. In general, “what should be in the basket” is arguable, but I don’t care about those arguments.

For each item, I looked for up to 3 prices:

At TJ and Aldi, I skipped “the one that I’d buy”, because there aren’t many choices, and when there are, I’d usually just buy the cheap one. At Community Market, I skipped “organic”, because they don’t have much organic food. Of course I standardized sizes/units. In the case where volume = discount, I allowed buying up to 2-3x as much (e.g. if I’m comparing 1lb of peanut butter, I’d include the price for a 2lb jar divided by 2, but not a 5lb jar). This is because pantry space can usually stretch to 2x but not 5x; buying 2lb of peanut butter is easy but buying 5lb may not be.

I mostly didn’t include meat because I don’t buy meat from grocery stores. Meat is expensive; this may affect your results.

I imputed a few missing values because stores didn’t have a couple things. This is generally risky2, but in practice, there were only a few missing items: walnuts at TJ, kimchi at Aldi, and a few things at CM (but CM isn’t winning our contest anyway), so I threw in an imputed average value and moved on.

Then I calculated the cost of the basket of food, and used that to make claims like “Aldi Cheapest ($102.12) is 59% of WF What I Buy ($172.59)”.

The data

here

  1. one of the three doesn’t eat as much but he does throw food everywhere so I’m counting him as a full person ↩︎

  2. This is generally risky; in general you can’t really compare stores that offer different things! For example: store A: apples $3, caviar $10; store B: apples $1, caviar $20; store C: apples $2, no caviar; and a basket of (1 apple, 1 caviar). Then say we impute “$15 caviar” for store C. Store B looks more expensive than store C, but in reality B is better than C! We could imagine other imputations, like max(other stores) so store C would have $20 caviar too, but that can backfire in other ways. So maybe we should compare A-B, B-C, and A-C head to head, using only items that exist at both stores, and get a pairwise comparison instead of a strict ordering. But that muddies the conclusion. So, idk, I imputed a couple values, Community Market come at me ↩︎



Staying Ahead of the Pain

the principle

When my dad had cancer, he had a few operations over the years. His doctors would send him home with opioids and tell him not to be too hesitant about taking them. They told him to “stay ahead of the pain”: that if he took them when he still felt ok, he’d continue feeling ok; if he waited until he felt awful, it was a lot harder to take enough painkillers to stop feeling awful again.1

the pain

We recently had a little fender bender. Even “fender bender” overstates it; it was literally a “fender-paint-scraper.” On our end, we will fix it with a $20 car paint kit, a 1/4" paint brush, and about 10 minutes of work; the other guy could do the same. However, we gave him our information anyway and said “sure, have your car guy look at it, whatever” as we are Doing the Right Thing.

He came back with an estimate for $1200 and a week of a car rental.

This enrages me:

  1. I’m mad at the guy for not just letting it go.
  2. I’m mad at his shop for not saying “we filled in the paint, that will be $20.”
  3. I’m mad that cars are so fragile.
  4. I’m mad that we live in cities that ~demand we drive cars.
  5. But heck why are people are so precious about their cars that they don’t just let this go.
  6. And I’m mad that fixing anything as tiny as a paint scrape involves consulting Professionals who never just say “don’t worry about it.”
  7. But shoot, maybe they’re right to get worked up about it because maybe this scrape would lead to rust and worse and so on if left unchecked and maybe my little paint kit will wear off in 5 years and so on.
  8. I never wanted any part of this, but we don’t really have a way to get away from these machines that are so fragile that one little mistake can have such dire consequences. Where can you feasibly live without one? In the three metro areas that have public transit (and an average house price of twelve zillion dollars)?
  9. Augh but this would be much easier if this guy wasn’t such a precious twit. It’s a Jeep, which is the least reliable brand of car; therefore, this guy’s a dumbass who probably bought a huge ass car in order to feel big on the road
  10. And his stupid car shop. He probably said “ha ha, we got some sucker on the hook, or their insurance company, run up the bill!” and the mechanic said “yeah, let’s get em!” and this kind of “not my problem” thinking is the problem with the world today!
  11. And and and…

You see. I’m only actually mad at four things, but spending any time thinking about them gets me endlessly worked up, cycling through them in a tornado of more and more frustration and anguish.

staying ahead of it

There is no fix to this. We are going to be out $1200, one way or another (either we pay the guy, or our insurance company pays him, we pay a $1000 deductible, and then they raise our rates by $100/month forever). This is unfair and stupid; we made a $20 mistake, we should pay $20. Thinking about this traps me in the Injustice Quicksand.

Though, emotionally, there is a fix to this: we can afford it! We can just absorb this loss and not think twice. Sometimes my accountant will say “you should pay $1200 in taxes this quarter” and I shrug and say ok; how is this any different? In fact, sometimes good fortune gives me $1200 or more2 I can float above this on the Cloud of Overall Fortune.

When I first realized we were going to have a $1200 problem, I floated above it on the Cloud of Overall Fortune: I was in an interesting conversation with some new friends, life was exciting and good, and this wasn’t going to get me down. But in the middle of the night, I woke up and somehow my thoughts drifted over to the Injustice Quicksand.

Luckily I realized there is no way out of the Injustice Quicksand from within the Injustice Quicksand. Once you’re in the pain, it’s so hard to take enough painkillers to get out of it. All you can do is stay ahead of it next time. Fill your life with enough joy, perspective, and gratitude that you don’t fall in in the first place.

This is true in relationships too: once you’re in a local pit of Injustice Quicksand about your partner it’s so hard to climb out. Much easier to boost your general feeling about your partner so that you always float above these on the Cloud of Overall Fortune. Seek reasons to brag, instead of fairness.

and if you do fall in

I think quicksand is a great metaphor, because all you can do is wait to get out. Put it aside, do something else. Build up your Cloud of Overall Fortune: do something that feels physically good, get into your body. Or at least go write a blog post instead of lying in bed seething.

  1. many people’s stories go from here into: “and then he got terribly addicted to opioids and they ruined his life.” luckily, this was not my dad’s story. (opioids didn’t ruin his life; the cancer did!) ↩︎

  2. for example: I had a great manager at my last job who, twice, told me “you’re getting promoted! your new salary is $35k higher per year.” I did not try to get promoted; I didn’t think I was “ready” for it or anything. If not for the good fortune of him looking out for me, I would have probably waited at least a year each time. That’s $70k of good fortune right there! 50x as big as this tiny bump! ↩︎



Amazon-type Transactions Are Weird

Here are some characteristics of buying something on Amazon:

  1. everything is one item of a SKU, which has many items
  2. all items of a SKU are interchangeable
  3. you can see a lot of information about each SKU, instantly, before you buy it
  4. you can see a lot of competing items
  5. you can see the exact price of the thing you’re buying, and the prices of its competitors
  6. you can even compare the price on Amazon to the price elsewhere, instantly
  7. the price on Amazon is the same for everyone and there is no haggling1
  8. you do not have, are not expected to have, and cannot have a relationship with the seller, beyond perhaps “I like/dislike this brand”
  9. you can see a ton of people’s reviews of the item (though, granted, many are fake)
  10. the item is almost always in stock, and if you don’t buy it today, you can buy it tomorrow

(we haven’t even gotten to “the prices are cheap” and “shipping is quick” because I don’t even think those are the weirdest things here!)

It’s not just Amazon; Wal-mart, Target, Giant Eagle, Safeway, even most retail stores like the Gap follow most of these rules. They’re somewhat eroded (hard to see as much information/reviews about this Gap T-shirt when you’re in person, less often in stock) but mostly there.

But compare this to all other situations where you buy and sell:

And compare to most of human history! Until, idk, post-WWII I think this was not largely the case, and you’d do most of your shopping for “whatever was around locally”

unfortunately:

You’ll encounter Amazon-type purchases early in life; as soon as you can buy candy from the nearby drugstore, you start to think of commerce as a series of Amazon-type transactions. You only encounter non-Amazon-type transactions later.

Even more unfortunately, these “non-Amazon-type” transactions are the ones that really matter. Some of them will be in magnitude of $10k or 100k, while optimizing all your Amazon/Safeway/Target/Aldi purchases combined might make you a few thousand.

so what?

I guess just:

  1. I have unfortunately developed a new peeve, and it is when people say “bartering” when they mean “haggling.” Bartering is “I will trade you a goat for ten chickens, with no cash changing hands.” Haggling is “you’re offering this chicken for $50, will you take $40?” ↩︎