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Frugality for Small Family Reunions · Jul 5, 03:24 PM

View looking west from Mt Rainier, after a four hour hike traversing snow fields.

Recently, my wife and I returned from my family’s biannual reunion in Washington State at the The Lodge Near Mt. Rainier. This year, I organized it (finding a roomy location and communicating with the family) and my wife took over the menu planning. Thanks to my wife’s casual meal plan and smart shopping, I have some good frugality hints for small family reunions or group trips.

Tips for Family Reunion Frugality

Plan your meals

Make a shopping list

Find your grocery stores

Price your shopping list via store websites

Let someone who cares about prices and cooking shop

Our family started holding family reunions a few years ago after my sister’s wedding brought everyone together to remind them how much everyone likes each other. Since then we meet in areas near National Parks or other outdoor recreation areas.

It seems as if most of the time at these gatherings are spent driving. First, we drive to look at the sights and then quite often we drive to dine. Our family likes to cook, so each meal that we skip the driving and eat at our temporary home is enjoyed by everyone. So with this reunion, my goal was to cut out the driving to eat as well as the cost of eating out. Also, controlling the cost was important to us, as one half of our family was unable to attend due to pregnancy’s and thus the price of the cabin per couple was a little higher than we would have liked.

1 Plan your meals

Using local Washington, DC grocery store sales and Costco prices, my wife planned out a menu for each meal, including, three breakfasts, two lunches, and three dinners. Our first concern was to pick easy to prepare economical food that someone would easily be able to cook (Spaghetti, pork loin, burgers, hot dogs, chicken, eggs, Costco mixed organic salad greens). For example, I make pork loin for most special events, which when purchased on sale is priced at $1.99/lb. With pork loin, we had one dinner planned out. Our other dinners would be pasta and a BBQ with real burgers and hot dogs. Lunches were the easiest with sandwiches (made with sliced deli meat) for a driving picnic one day, and chili for an at home day. My sister is good at making breakfast, so I bought lots of potatoes for hash browns, eggs and sausage (for one day only).

2 Make a shopping list

As we priced out our shopping list we benefited from years of browsing Costco aisles (we usually walk out with only an item or two), and shopping from weekly grocery store circulars by knowing what a fair cost is for most items. Our price list used circular pricing with the guarantee that should the item not be on sale we could get it at Costco for a bit more. For example, Costco meat is priced at about $0.50 more than circular sale pricing.

Given that a retail market such as Tacoma, Washington, two hours from Mt. Rainier, has at least two major national grocery chains with numerous stores, it was a fair plan to find most of the items on sales (more of this in part 4).

Our menu price settled out at about $18 per person. We found that most meat for dinner meals would cost about $15 for 10 people (with leftovers) when the meat is priced at about $2/lb. We brought spices from home, and purchased a few dry goods to fill the cooler we brought to transport the meat and other refrigeratorables.

3 Find your grocery stores

Along with our shopping list, we needed to have a list of stores to visit. I chose to shop near Knapps Restaurant in Tacoma. To find grocery stores, all I did was search for “grocery store” and the zip code of Knapps via google, then click on the top link Local results for grocery store near 98407. Google then provides a nice list of stores and a map of the location of each store. I found an Albertsons and a Safeway within blocks of each other. Near the Costco we found a Red Apple Market which looked like it would have a few good deals. With my list of stores in hand, I was able to take their zip codes and visit their websites to view the stores weekly circular.

4 Price your shopping list via store websites

Shopping and store list in hand, we were able to price out and divide our shopping list by store. Many US stores allow you to view weekly circulars with sale items on-line. Originally planned to allow you to view your local circular on line, it works for us to view out of state circulars! We just entered our stores’ zip code and we were able to see what was on sale. The one kicker is that some stores have their sales from Sunday to Saturday and others are Wednesday to Tuesday. Both Albertsons and Safeway are on the Wednesday to Tuesday schedule, so we had to wait to make our final lists until Wednesday morning, a couple hours before we got on the plane.

By looking at circulars, we knew what we would purchase at each store to maximize our savings. For example we purchased cherries at Albertsons for $1.69/lb saving $2/lb, at Safeway tomatoes on the vine for $0.99/lb saving $1.50/lb, at Costco pork loin for $2.29/lb saving $1.50/lb, and Red Apple Market hot dogs for $0.69/lb a savings of $0.30/lb.

Overall, most of our items we were able to get on sale at one of the stores or buy for a fair price at Costco. A few items we paid full price for, but those were lower cost items such as vegetable oil.

5 Let someone who cares shop

Finally, we had to make sure that someone who cares about cost do the shopping. There are many people who value their time much more than money, we chose to let them benefit from the savings with zero investment of their time. From our standpoint, we enjoy shopping the deals and are willing to take our own free time to do that, so it was my wife and I who were the shopping team. Overall shopping took about 3 hours, between breakfast and check-in time at the lodge. Had we shopped for everything at one store we might have saved about two hours but spent much more money.

The results

The reunion was good fun for all, and everyone had tons of good food to eat. Our family ate all of their mails from our shopping list except for one chili dinner which was added to the menu but we were not told what to buy. Additionally, one meal was replaced with chicken curry, for that we were only told to buy the chicken and yellow/orange peppers. Two couples with a child each also ate lunch out one day when they brought the kids to a zoo. That being said we fed the 10 adults and two children for $18 per adult. Had we purchased everything the price would have been about $22.

We were very happy with our control on the food costs. As a comparison, the breakfast and lunch my wife and I ate before and after shopping cost us $10 per person. At the lodge, we had coffee, juice, bananas, eggs, hash browns, and bagels for less than half that cost.

Overall, everyone had lots of food to eat, including a surprise birthday Black Forest cake, and no one felt that the food quality was lacking, and we still had food left over.

Lessons Learned

Control the shopping list, because one party chose to shop for some of the food that they were using in the meals that they were cooking, they were stuck paying for it themselves. I would have preferred to have that split across the group.

Buy more eggs, bread, orange juice, and milk, we found that our group required about 18 eggs, one gallon of milk, and 1/2 gallon of OJ for each day. We also almost ran out of bread and that is so cheap we should have had extra.

Pre-boil your potatoes before making hash browns, otherwise they will turn into a large sickly glob as you cook them.

You will have extra food so plan for it. My brother lives in the area, so I planned to have him take the extra food home with him. His family did not show much interest when I asked him to take it with him (no room in the car). But when I offered to drop it by when we visited for dinner, they happily agreed to that. So when we showed up for dinner we brought along all of the extra food, along with one full spaghetti dinner for ten people!

. . .

And other cheaper stores?

Winco have a branch on Federal Way in Tacoma and they are usually cheaper than Safeway. Other stores like Shop-n-Kart, Food4Less and maybe even Thriftway might have given you even better deals.

I don’t know if these are nationally known (Winco has stores in Washington, Idaho, Nevada, California and Oregon) but they are usually a lot cheaper.

http://www.wincofoods.com/
http://www.food4less.com/

Z.
— Zwack Jul 5, 04:25 PM #
Yes there are cheaper stores. I limited myself to stores that I recognize because I knew that they would be full sized. Except for Red Apple Market, which was small but good for a few sale items.

It was also interesting to note that major stores such as Fred Meyer and Wal-Mart with grocery combined other product types did not to show up in Google under grocery.
— Iolaire McFadden Jul 5, 04:39 PM #
Well, if you’re in the area again then it might be worth checking these two out. I don’t know if they have coupons online, but they are full sized stores.

Winco usually works out cheaper than Costco for most things and is employee owned. We do most of our grocery shopping there.

Food4less has the largest, most diverse fruit and vegetable section I have seen in a supermarket. They seem to cater specifically to minorities so Asian, Hispanic and Russian food are easy to find there.

It would be nice if there was a “where to shop in this area” site that you could check for recommendations of which localised full store chains are worth visiting. Along with the smaller specialist stores that round out the experience. In Portland Oregon I would recommend Winco and Food4Less for cheap food, People’s Food Co-op for Organic food, and New Seasons for expensive but good quality groceries. Sheridan’s is also worth checking out for good meats and general groceries.

New Seasons is a local supermarket chain that promotes locally grown and organic foods. Has an excellent deli, and superb customer service. If it wasn’t so much more expensive I’d do most of my shopping there.

Except for Jerky which is best found at the Corbett General Store on the Historic Columbia Highway at Corbett.

If someone actually produced a site that allowed these sorts of comments and a rating system then hopefully the better places would get more business and people would try and distinguish themselves in some way (better produce, cheaper produce, better service) because it would be worthwhile to them.

Z.
— Zwack Jul 14, 11:35 AM #