How do you food shop without a car?

patricia_elizabeth

I'm an expert at this one as no car,live on a boat and move around,always go out with a backpack,have a bike with panniers and a front basket.The best is use an old gits shopping trolly you can take them on the buses and even add a backpack for the real big loads and saves the arms even on short trips.if you have kids make sure you have a pram/pushchair with a tray underneath plus a bag to hang on the handles

katejo

I have never had a car but I do live within 5 mins walk of Asda and Sainsbury's. I tend to do my shopping in very small batches. I could try an occasional online shop but was put off it in the early days of online shopping and still haven't tried again. If I did, I would only use it for heavy items/stock up on tins of things. When I buy fresh produce, I always hunt to the back of the display for items not too close to their use by date. I have a suspicion that some supermarkets might use online deliveries to offload older stock!

Teddi

katejo wrote: »

I have a suspicion that some supermarkets might use online deliveries to offload older stock!

Totally agree, we used to just do Tesco orders but kept getting dodgy\bruised fruit and veg and meat with really short dates (I know they do the 'if you aren't happy hand it back to the driver' but then I either have no meat or no space in my freezer as I have to freeze it straight away) which is why we switched to the local veg boxes and butcher, always perfectly fresh and yeah, the veg may be funny shapes but it is never bruised or damaged and so much tastier!

Evil_Olive

Me & husband are on a REALLY low income at the moment, and shopping has become something of a military operation of late.
We have one car but husband takes this to work as we live near a station with draconian parking restrictions and it's cheaper for him to drive the 5 minutes to work every day than it is to park it at home (nuts!) He works very long hours so I try to sort out the shopping by myself without transport.

Neither of us work a Mon-Fri job so, with some planning, we can use the cheapest delivery slots that the supermarket offers (only £1 for Asda and Tesco midweek/daytime and free for Iceland at any time)

We do a menu plan/shopping list for a whole month's worth of meals/work lunches etc as this means I can get all the best prices by shopping online from 3 different supermarkets (if I tried to do this weekly, I wouldn't meet the minimum order value criteria as there are only two of us.) plus on foot to Lidl and the local market.

With very careful storage and freezing, I find that most perishables can be made to last a month or slightly more - even things like milk, eggs, ham and veg if you keep your fridge really cold.

I compare prices online and make up the 3 orders but, before I check out, I write the prices on my shopping list and cycle with it into town and pick up any bits on the list that are even cheaper on the market or in Lidl or Poundland, removing them from the online orders when I get home. I then checkout the orders with Iceland, Tesco and Asda and await delivery. I try to get all the deliveries on the same day/similar times for convenience and always get really heavy stuff online unless it's massively cheaper elsewhere.

I only really top up regularly on bread, milk and lettuce and wouldn't even need to with milk and bread if our tiny flat had the space for a chest freezer. The bread/milk is quite cheap at the local Nisa (Kingsmill brown and white 79p, 2 litre milk £1.00) and I cycle to the local Tesco for lettuce and any other perishables or emergency bits - the small basket on the front of my bike prevents me from going in for a lettuce and coming out with £10 worth of stuff although it's surprising how much you can fit in it if you really have to - especially if you wear a rucksack and have panniers/back box on the back as well.

I know this all sounds like a lot of work and it is - probably a whole day menu planning/making list/price comparing/ordering and going to Lidl/market plus an afternoon spent taking the deliveries and putting stuff away but it's only once a month so it's not so bad. I save at least £50 a month by doing it this way which may not sound a lot but our whole monthly bill for everything (and I mean 'everything' - all food/drink/snacks/alcohol, work lunches, household/cleaning stuff, all toiletries, even some basic clothing and top-up shops too) has gone from £200+ a month to less than £150 - so quite a big drop percentage-wise. I save the £2 a month it costs me in delivery charges many times over.

I used to do a scaled down version of this on foot, back when the supermarkets charged a fiver or more for delivery so that it wasn't viable to shop online unless you were doing the whole shop in one place.
I had one of those 'old lady trolleys' a big square tartan one with four wheels. You can fit an enormous amount in those (and 'on' those, and 'hanging off the side' of those). I had a collection of those elastic bungees with hooks on the end in different lengths which were great for attaching big things like giant packs of toilet roll to the top and would tie carrier bags to the sides and handles - I must've looked like a bag lady, but it got the job done I would put all the heavy stuff in the bottom for stability.
I would compare the prices online and make two lists then walk the 15 mins to Tesco with the trolley in one direction for half the shopping, unload it at home then walk the 20 minutes in the other direction to Asda for the rest of it

I still use my trolley a lot for one-off heavy things like big bags of compost in the gardening season or tins of paint etc.

My mum had a massive silver cross pram that had been passed through all my cousins - when we were very tiny (early '70s) she would fit all the weekly shop on it for 2 adults and 3 kids. When we were a little bigger (but still quite small), my mum and us three girls would walk 30mins to the local tesco and walk back carrying up to 20 carrier bags between us - they would probably call that child cruelty these days