Butter Chex Ice Cream - Annual Wrap-up

Many have commented on how 2016 was a rollercoaster of a year.  Those who have followed the BCI Index know that only one product in that bundle actually produces variation.

I started this silly escapade to data check my perception that Chex cereals never go on sale.  That has proven essentially true at my home supermarket.  In the process, though, I've also seen some other patterns.  I've also verified that Chex are cheaper at Target.  Hold onto your hats.  Deep dive time.

Chex went on sale precisely 3 weeks out of 47 observations, always to 4 for a dollar.  I love Chex but prefer to buy it a lower unit price than $3.99 for 12 ounces.  Butter goes on sale for key holidays - apparently Easter, Father's Day, Bastille Day, Columbus Day and Christmas.  At my particular store, they actually jacked the price just after Christmas.  Ice cream is a wild ride.

The quarterly summary actually shows that ice cream is more expensive in cold weather months in Pennsylvania.  It's cheapest in the early spring.  Buy your Chex in Q1.  They'll keep essentially all year.  Buy your butter in the fall/early winter.  Chest freezer?  Probably worth it.

The cheapest ice cream crown is well-distributed.  Although the store brand has the lowest base price, the name brands are more often the cheapest by a long shot.  Some brand is always on sale.  Don't be a sucker by paying full price.  Mmmm, Breyer's.

 
 

Butter Chex Ice Cream - Third Quarter

I hope you're sitting down.  In this data update, I shall reveal that the only thing that goes on sale at my grocery store more rarely than butter is Chex cereal.  It's gonna be 'uge.

 Multiple brands attempt to manipulate shoppers into pulling the trigger on ice cream way more frequently than the store does with its own brand.

 

Butter Chex Ice Cream - Second Quarter Update

Still tracking prices on a bundle of three items: store-brand butter, Chex cereal and ice cream.  The big excitement in the second quarter was when my main grocery store was reorganizing its products and therefore sold ice cream tubs and novelties for $1.50.  I should maybe not count it in the index, but then I wouldn't get to tell you how exciting it was to buy ice cream sandwiches and Klondike bars and rocket pops for $1.50.

Interestingly, some of the name brand ice creams exceed the store brand in instances in the first half of the year in which they have been the cheapest offering.  Perhaps that's not interesting.  Perhaps I'm writing this only for myself.

Introducing the BCI Index

After a holiday party discussion about when certain commodities go on sale, I got a hankering to collect real data to back up my intuition.  Oh, and I have intuition.  For instance, baking commodities - flour, butter, cake mixes - go on sale during Thanksgiving week, early December and, to a lesser extent, around Easter.  This seems counter-intuitive in that the stores clearly know that people concentrate their baking around these dates.  Wouldn't it be wise to jack up prices?  Apparently, they believe that price elasticity also goes up along with the baking impulse.  They need to force the vague thought about baking into action by enabling us to save x percent on pumpkin filling.

Perhaps less well known is that Chex go on sale before the super bowl.  Why?  Chex mix.  Same reason as above.

So, on my shopping trips this year, I chose three items - store brand butter, Chex and the cheapest ice cream - and monitored prices at my grocery store, which is the rust belt Appalachian powerhouse Giant Eagle.  Below are the trends in the inaugural CBI (Chex, Butter, Ice Cream) Index, with high and low prices marked.  Note the Chex super bowl dip and the Easter butter dip.  

Butter averaged $3.91 per pound. Chex averaged $3.75 for a standard 12-ounce box of gold-standard Corn Chex.  The cheapest ice cream (er, frozen dairy dessert - why?) averaged $2.96 per 1.5 quart.  

Here are the first quarter trends:

Also, for anyone interested in the trend of what ice cream brand was cheapest week to week, here's that data:

Market Research

A chatty cashier at the grocery store told me this week that 80% of people who bring their own bags to the store also use coupons.  I'm curious about whether his field research matches the preferences of CP readers.  There's a poll up in the corner of the blog.  Please take 12 seconds to satisfy my curiosity.

Better living through science

Nice job, Western civilization.  It only took how many thousand years to come up with these easy open cereal bags?

This competent parent attests: they are easy to open.

Now if we could get the good people of Kellogg's to infiltrate Trader Joe's and work on the bags in their boxes of woven wheat crackers (Triscuit(tm) knockoffs).

Type I versus Type II Grocery Shopping Errors

Over the years, we've pursued various approaches to grocery shopping, from shopping together to alternating to finally me doing 98% of the shopping.  While it was nice to shop together when we were first married, I much prefer one person doing all of the shopping.  We run a pretty tight shopping list regimen, but there are some staples that I just monitor in my head (bananas, breakfast juice concentrate, Teddy's provolone) and buy when I know we're out.  That's hard to do when we alternate.

Results of a Type II Error

Still, with a good list and a limping-along brain, it's possible to make mistakes.  I've decided that I prefer to make what I call a Type II grocery error rather than a Type I.  I define Type I as not buying an item we need and Type II as buying an item we already have stocked.  When we were young and poor, fiscal caution would make a Type II error slightly more painful.  Now, I prefer to just put the extra in the pantry and know that we'll use it eventually.

First grocery shopping without my little shopper

Flickr Photo: MyEyeSees

When I got to the grocery store last week, it was my first regular weekly shopping without Teddy in the cart since November 2008.  He's too busy with kindergarten to go shopping with me now.  It hit me with a pang in the store, but I held my emotions together...temporarily.

The words "grim" and "bleak" came to mind to describe shopping without him.  Regular readers will know that Teddy considered the grocery store the best errand we could run together.  On most trips, he got to ride in a race car cart with two steering wheels of his very own.  On most every trip, he got a cookie card cookie at the bakery.  He could tolerate other errands if I promised that the grocery store lay at the end of the rainbow.  He chattered happily through a trip except when he was ingesting that precious cookie.  He just brought a shine to the whole experience.  So if "grim" and "bleak" go too far, "lackluster and "workaday" certainly don't.  On this trip, I suddenly noticed a fair number of older ladies shopping alone; yes, they were mostly ladies.  It reminded me how short the window actually is when little kids accompany their parents to the grocery store regularly.

It's felt like a long pull for me because Paige entered law school when Charlie was a year old.  From then on, with short interruptions, grocery shopping has been my purview, usually with at least one young patriot in tow.  I've become conditioned to a small human presence with me, often right in front of me, increasingly-longer legs sticking out those two windows in the wire mesh or curling up in the race driver's cockpit.

Later that day, in the library, I had a strange "phantom limb" experience.  Running errands with little kids means walking at a slower pace than one might alone and constantly checking to make sure they're keeping up.  I strode into the library and instinctively started to perform the tag-along check only to realize that nobody would tag along.  That this solitary circumstance would persist on the vast majority of errand-running outings in the foreseeable future hit me pretty hard.

There are advantages, of course, to flying solo.  In the checkout line as I told the clerks that I was shopping without my little guy for the first time in a long time, a 2-year-old in a stroller melted down two lanes over.  Mom struggled to console him while keeping the checkout process moving.  Also, no one asked me (whining) when we would get to the grocery store before I got there.

I had to grieve the loss of an occasionally-troublesome companion.  In the parking lot, when I finally let the tears flow, I called Paige (who thankfully answered) to unburden myself about how lonely it all felt.  I just needed to cry and feel the pain of realizing how Teddy's sunniness about the grocery store could bathe the whole enterprise in a positive glow.  It's easy to notice and complain about the efficiency drag a young, mercurial child can put on just getting things done.  It took his absence to remind me of all the positive aspects of his companionship.  When I first went part time at work, I thought about all of the intentional, enriching things that daddy and son could do together in two whole days every week.  Pretty soon, I realized that what we mostly had to do together was transport ourselves to various places where we could acquire, service or divest of the various things our household needs or no longer needs: grocery store, dry cleaner, library, city compost dropoff, butcher, "fix it garage", gourmet cheese emporium, consignment store, shoe store, (ugh!) mall.

That kind of stuff made up the bulk of our days together, and sometimes my challenge was to engage with him there in the trenches.  He could learn and grow there with me; we didn't need to be at the museum or on a playdate.  A proud moment occurred in the grocery aisle when he asked that we buy some product and then said "which one's on sale"?  A few moms nearby overheard, and we shared a knowing laugh together.  He had adopted a chief norm in our family's culture.

Although the end of this season approached for months with no hint of surprise, it's taken certain physical moments to understand how real it is: he just got on that school bus; I just walked into this store without him.

We lose our time with them in stages.  He still comes home in the afternoon.  I find myself looking forward to days when school is closed and to next summer.  Older parents always tell younger parents to "hold onto these days and cherish them".  How can one possibly do that?  One must decide to do that.  And the only day that any of us can hold onto and cherish is the current one.  We have to decide that the moment we're in - no matter how insignificant it seems - is the only moment we actually have and control.  This is the moment whose positive attributes we should appreciate.

I hope Teddy learns more at kindergarten than he  learned with me, but I know there are certain things he could only get through the contact we had these last three years.  Also, I hope he wants to go to the grocery store on Veteran's Day.  It's a Friday.  School is closed, and I don't work on Fridays.

Annoying Intrusion

I find the way grocery stores track consumer behavior and attempt to manipulate it pretty interesting. The most obvious manipulation - cash register coupons - range from the intuitive to the head-scratching. How do they decide what to incent me to buy based on what I've bought up to now? For example, I discovered recently that spending $100 at my regular store when I don't usually spend that much triggers a coupon at the cash register for a free gallon of milk on my next visit. On other trips, I get a coupon and think they're depending on a buggy algorithm.

On my last trip, though, when I looked at what the cashier handed me, I found something annoying. Rather than a register coupon lagniappe, she handed me an advertisement. For Kleenex with some kind of space-age polymer in them. Already disgusted with receipts as long as my arm (and filled with useless messaging), do I now have to figure out what to do with an advertisement? I'm managing groceries and usually one or more children; the last thing I want to do at that moment is think about getting that slip of paper home to my recycling bin. By teaching me that I should expect something of value - a relevant coupon - they have also trained me to look closely and consider this advertisement. That Pavlovian manipulation irks me the most.

If you share my dismay at this intrusion, I propose a little consumer civil disobedience: leave the ad at the register. Make it the store's problem. Just think if everybody did it - cashiers awash in ads for Kleenex and Depends.

The Grocery Store Population Schedule

For the past seven years, I've done the majority of our family's grocery shopping. As life circumstances have changed over that period, I've found myself shopping at various times of the day. The chance to observe the grocery store through its daily and weekly rhythm has given me insight into patterns of who shops when at my city-edge/first-ring-suburb grocery store.

Early Weekday mornings: CIC Time	The old and frail clog the aisles on early weekday mornings. They've been up since 5:15 anyway, just waiting to get their day off to a roaring start by purchasing a quart of milk, some Lean Cuisines and a box of After Eight mints. The dominant population makes itself known through their most graphic symbol: canes in carts (hence CIC time). If you walk with a cane, a grocery cart transforms into a walker with the advantage of storage. While you store your Metamucil in there, you can also store your cane, which you don't need as long as you can lean your shuffling weight against your temporary wire mesh traveling companion. On a recent trip, I saw a member of the CIC set with another telltale accessory: the giant magnifying glass.
Late Weekday Mornings: The At-Home Hour	It takes the at-home parents a little minute longer to get to the grocery store than their geriatric forebears. Clusters of 1-3 children per shopping party make this the most difficult time to get the novelty carts (truck, racecar) that my children covet. Kids occupy themselves with a few activities: munching cookie card cookies from the bakery; pointing out licensed merchandise to buy; climbing into, out of, onto and off of the cart. The at-home moms occupy themselves not making eye contact with me because I'm the wrong gender. The few at-home dads give me the "hey bro" nod.
Weekday Lunch: The Saddest Office Lunch Hour Ever	Who eats lunch at the supermarket? Yes, there are tables near the hot food counter. Yes, there's that popcorn machine in there. But isn't that just to save the staff from walking across the parking lot to Wendy's? In my benefit-of-the-doubt theory, the guy in the tie eats there with the woman in black jeans because she's his wife, who works there. Employee discount and all. That's still pretty sad; I'm crying as I type.
Early Weekday Afternoon: The Golden Lull	Possibly the easiest time of day to get that prime parking space close to the door or the cart corral (depending on your priorities in life). Clog-free aisles and a deli counter with no line await. Fully-staffed daytime checkers make for plenty of checkout options with little competition. The at-home set has retreated home to oversee naps. Other would-be customers are napping themselves or working or pregaming for WheelofFortuneOprahJudgeJudy.
Early Weekday Evening: Workday Warrior Season	I work all day. I have no kids. There's no babysitter on the clock. I don't really plan out meals. I go to the grocery store in my work clothes on the way home and grab some stuff. I use the self checkout.
Weekday Evening: Prime Time...for Staff Hormones	While some customer groups mark this time, the most dominating population is the staff - part-timers who don't get the cherry daytime shifts. When Paige was in law school, one night a week presented a daddy-toddler bonding ritual with little Charlie at the grocery store. When this was my key time to shop, I could expect interminable waits at the deli ("I've been thin-slicing this ham for seven hours straight, and I'm so tired I'm not going to make eye contact with any of the dozen people holding those flimsy paper numbers.") There were a few other populations out at this time; jelly-stained at-home parents who escaped the tedium of home for the thrill of forty kid-free minutes under the fluorescents once their spouses came home and took over; true workday warriors who had worked late and now - ties loosened, hair coming unfixed - filled their baskets with microwaveable dinner, Ben & Jerry's and margarita mix. But the most salient feature was the army of high school students who take over from the career checkers after dark. I was just happy if I could get them to scan my groceries in between scamming a date to the prom or sucking their teeth about their peers at school or work ("No she ditn't!")
Saturday: Grab bag	I'm not very familiar with Saturday, but it seemed to be a more random time than other periods. Mothers of teenagers seemed to kick it old school on Saturdays. Also, some grandparent/grandkid groupings. Those who depend on a jitney to get to and from the market also seemed to enjoy Saturday shopping. No, I don't live in the hood. I live nearthe hood.
Sunday afternoon: J-Dub Time	OK, so not everyone who overdresses for the grocery store on Sunday afternoons is a Jehovah's Witness. They just look like it. Fancy dresses, high heels, suits that stop one notch short of pimp-level. They execute something less than full-scale shopping trips. Too late to be equipping a Sunday dinner, they appear to use the dangerous approach of entering the grocery store without a list or a plan.
Sunday evening: X-Cargo O'Clock	Oh, the road warriors. Are they on the exit ramp when they realize there's no milk or juice for breakfast? Are they looking forward to home cooking after a weekend sports tournament? Or have they just eaten mom's cooking for an entire weekend, rendering their home grocery store a little bleak? In Pittsburgh, probably the former; everybody's mom lives here. Looking haggard, they're attempting a surgical strike that will allow them to get home to the mail they missed as soon as possible. Don't rush, dears. There's nothing but coupons for the grocery store in that mailbox. But you might want see who's outside picking over the contents of that lovely cartop carrier.

A prayer with two audiences

The other day at dinner, Charlie (7) was getting jealous of all of the wonderful things that Teddy (3) had gotten to do that day with me. He was bummed because he'd had to be at school and couldn't, for instance, go to the grocery store. Teddy loves our grocery store because it has cookie cards - buy the card for a dollar for charity at the beginning of the year and present it at the bakery and kids get a free cookie each visit.

With that context, this was Teddy's prayer during family devotions after dinner:

"Thank you that I could ride in the race car cart and get provolone cheese and have a cookie...and Charlie didn't...Ha ha!"

Seasons and Hours

While I was out and about this week with Teddy, I noticed two things:

-At-home-parent outing season has returned
-Old-and-infirm hour at the grocery store

First, because all of the big kids are back in school, it appears to me that the at-home parents in my 'hood have come out of the woodwork. Summer, when the big kids are at home, doesn't seem like a good time to hit the library and the bakery and the playground with the little ones. It feels so much easier to go on an outing with just one child, even if it's the little, unpredictable, nap-time-bomb-ticking, equipment-intensive smaller child. Now, it may be that all the other parents were in all the at-home-parent outing spots all summer, and it's just that I've returned to the spots. But I think it's actually a community-wide shift. There's an urgency about getting out now because the bad weather's going to come. It's so great to go out without worrying about jackets, boots or finding gloves and hats.

Second, based on a trip to the grocery store at 2:30 today (Friday), I've concluded that the mid-afternoon is when the old and physically broken shop for groceries. I saw more canes in carts today than I ever have. Swing the big truck/racecar kid shopping cart around the end of an aisle at 2:30, and you are going to bowl over a crowd buying Depends and Metamucil. I've seen it on weekday mornings, too, but this afternoon felt twice as extreme as those mornings. Before I became a part-time at-home parent, the only time I could shop was in the evenings after work. Totally different crowd: very few older people, not that many parents with kids, a few people each time who looked like they'd come straight from work to shop before a late dinner. There's a different pace at night, too. People who shop later in the evening are moving fast and trying to get home. In the afternoon, they're trying to kill time until the early bird specials start.