How do you food shop without a car?

WantAnOrange

That's it really. I don't have a car and have to feed 2 adults, an 8 year old and a 2 year old (also have a 13 week old). Over the years I've tried online shopping with Asda and Tesco. I live within walking distance of a good butcher, fruit and veg shop etc... I could also go to Iceland who do free delivery and are great accept they only sell half of what I need. My choices seem to be to either order everything from Asda but miss out on lovely local shops, or spend a silly amount of time trailing around local shops. I've never got into a routine and just being nosy really! What do others do?

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WantAnOrange

can also order veg boxes from very nice local place at a reasonable price but still need to go elsewhere for everything else.

jk0

I have a car, but was pleased to find a lovely house near a precinct containing Lidl, Waitrose & Iceland. I drop in one or the other for my day's groceries on the way back from my morning newspaper walk.

I recommend it.

WizzyPop

We don't drive and live 10 mins from the local super market. Me and OH make it a weekly visit and share the responsibility to carry the goods home.

Wea re just feeding the 2 of us but don't find it that massive a task we try to buy heavy goods like washing powder and bags of spuds on alternate weeks so as to spread the load.

I also find we do the occassional top up shop mid week but its usally when one of us is already walking past one of the big supermarkets.

I have never done an online shop in the 15 years that i have lived in my own place.

thriftwizard

A lot depends on where you live. I've been carless for quite a lot of the 23 years we've lived here, and have managed to shop for a family of 7 with the help of a good, 4-wheel shopping trolley (2-wheelers usually have to be pulled rather than pushed, and put a horrible lopsided burden on your spine) which back in the 90s was considered horribly uncool, but it worked fine once youngest was out of her pram. A pram, by the way, will carry a whole lot more shopping, more easily, than a pushchair... bigger wheels make them easier to push & steer.

However, as well as a rapidly-diminishing range of small local shops, we have a fairly big & comprehensive "street" market (not actually on a street, has its own space) which has saved me a fortune over the years, as well as providing us with some of the best food the South has to offer - venison at the same price as beef, pheasant, really fresh fish, fantastic local cheeses & sausages, New Forest mushrooms, wild garlic, samphire and sea cabbage - it's a foodie heaven, at lower than supermarket prices! Plus we are close to the port of entry for imported foods like paraguayo & nisperos, so there's lots of choice.

Don't know if there's anything like it near you? People are often very wary of market food, and sometimes rightly so, but I'd advise taking a look at least if there is one. Various friends of mine are of the opinion that it can't possibly be good stuff, thinking it's either off the back of a lorry or nicked from the supermarket's reject bins! But they're the ones who will never buy YS food, would die rather than go out foraging, and rarely cook from scratch anyway. Usually working FT, 9-5, too, which makes shopping outside the big boxes difficult.

For most of this time I've planned my meals weekly around whatever's best value (not necessarily cheapest) at the market on a Friday, and just had a monthly supermarket delivery of non-perishables, as we only had a small & expensive local supermarket. Now I do have full-time access to a car, I can do that bit myself, but we do still have milk delivered, even though it costs a bit more, to stop me having to trot out for more.

I'd suggest keeping a close eye on what you need from the supermarket, and how often; after a while you'll know how much you need to order to get you through a couple of weeks or a month. Look at your storage and work out how much stuff you can reasonably keep; do you have a freezer? A decent-sized veg rack? A dark, cool shed you could keep spuds in, in dark paper or fabric bags rather than plastic? Somewhere you can keep tins & packets of stuff you use regularly? If not, can you find the space somewhere? (I used to keep tins in the kickspace under my kitchen units at one point!)

Meal-plan at least a couple of days ahead, and buy fresh stuff from your local shops a couple of times a week. Get to know the shopkeepers; you may well benefit from being told about the best bargains & even given stuff that's not saleable, for example, if they know you're a regular customer. If you don't plan, you'll find yourself wasting a lot of time going to & from the shops, or money having more deliveries than you need to. And always keep enough bits n'bobs in your store cupboard for a couple of days scratch meals - pasta & jars of sauce, corned beef, tuna, rice, couscous, onions, frozen veg, tinned beans & chickpeas - then when one of the kids is too ill for you to go out, or it's pouring, you can cope.

HTH!

FairyPrincessk

OH and I have a routine. I do a menu plan and shopping list each week and then on Sunday we put on our rucksacks (filled with hand carry bags) and walk to our local Aldi. I imagine it takes us between 15-20 mins to walk there. We buy what is on the list and walk home with it.

Periodically we'll top up heavy things. This used to be with a quarterly online shopping order, but now we tend to pop out to our local shops for it since we now live closer to them. Some of our local shops have good fruit and veg and we make more of an effort in the summer when OH is off school to use them--we use it as an outing. We used to buy our meat exclusively from the butcher and freeze it but they closed down.

If we had children this probably wouldn't work as we wouldn't be able to manage the children on the walk as well as carry the shopping. I think we'd probably top up more with online orders and only one person would do the weekly shop, or we'd move to a more frequent shop with one person doing it on their way home say 3x/ week.

I think the most improtant thing is meal planning and keeping a store cupbpoard. It keeps what you have to buy limited to what you'll actually use and if things are getting a bit heavy we can always leave the sugar/flour/tinned tomatoes for another week when the shopping is lighter. Similarly on light weeks I'll grab a few extras of heavy things. Weirdly this also helps keep the budget stable (although it is less appealing if you shop in one of the bigger SM and want to take advantage of multibuys--this isn't really an issue at Aldi).

GreyQueen

My parents are in their seventies and we two kids are middle-aged. We our childhood until ages 12 and 10 carless and 1.25 miles from the nearest shop - and it was uphill on the way back.

In recent years, Dad has mentioned that he doesn't remember grocery shopping as being a problem, pre-car, which caused the rest of us to roll our eyes at each other, as we remember the problems all too well, even after all that time.

I'd organise your life so that you had online orders for bulky and/ or heavy stuff like loo rolls, nappies, boxes of detergent, tinned foods and storecupboard items, and use the pram to shop for fresh veg, fruit, dairy and bread a couple of times a week, maximum.

With meal-planning and good organisation it's entirely do-able. I know people who've replaced cars with two four-wheeled shopping trolleys (thriftwizard is bang on the money with the ease of four-wheelers as opposed to two-wheeled trollies).

I'm a singleton and shop on foot/ by pushbike, and aim to pick up my groceries when going to and fro the allotment/ work/ my archery class, rather than specifically 'go shopping'. HTH

SailorSam

The shops, including a big Tesco are less than i mile away so i'll normally walk There is a little bus stops right outside my frontdoor going direct to the shops but i've only bothered with it a couple of times, I have a small rucksack and don't buy more than will fit in that, sometimes i'll do two journeys if i need any more. But i am here by myself so don't need that much.
The only time it was a bit awkward i wanted paint from Aldi which is about 3mls, i could have got the car out of the garage but have my train pass to travel for free so went twice. I try to leave the car at home as much as i can to get a bit of exercise.

Eeasp

When I was at Uni I didn't have a car and neither did any of my house mates. The nearest supermarket was definitely not walkable so we'd jjust do an online shop. They were great! I think we used Asda the most. You can pick a delivery slot, usually a 3 hour slot I think and then you just pay a little extra for the delivery and you do it all online and just wait You can set up standard shopping lists or items so you dont have to input your items everytime you do a shop. Hope this helps

june89

Have had a trolley since my mid-20s and it's paid for itself many times over in its usefulness, don't care if people think they're only for grannies. Could easily fit a week's shop (for two adults) in and get it home on my own. Also used it to take bulky packaging to the recycling centre, picked up items from click and collect orders, even helped someone move with it!

I don't use it so much now that walk past a supermarket daily, as I tend to pick up just the bits we need rather than do a weekly shop. But it still gets brought out for larger shops, probably every month or so. Then every couple of months, I do an online order for the really heavy things (e.g. cat litter) that the trolley could handle, but I live at the top of a hill and don't really want to drag it all the way up!

SailorSam

Op have you thought about getting a bike and putting panniers on the back.