Shopping in the Fruitlands
Posted by Lise on 29 Sep 2008 at 09:50 am | Tagged as: frugality
Where are all these stores that offer double and triple coupons and amazing customer loyalty programs that bloggers keep talking about?
Where I live, I have two choices of grocery stores: I can go to the Hannaford in Lunenburg, or I can go to the Market Basket in Fitchburg. Both have about the same prices (I’ve checked), but the Hannaford has better service, better produce, and is closer, so I choose to do my shopping there. Neither accepts double/triple coupons. Neither has a customer loyalty program.
Where I previously lived, my shopping choices were Stop & Shop and Shaw’s, which do have customer loyalty programs, but I typically found they just used these to jack up everyday prices. But given as these stores were in Watertown and Belmont respectively, this could just be a function of living in a pricey neighborhood.
Another irony: I live in the “fruitlands” of Massachusetts. I am surrounded by farms and orchards; apiaries and maple sugarers. If you drive down my street, you’ve see the maple sugar taps lining the road.
But ironically, many of these farms have realized they get the best profit by visiting farmer’s markets in Boston, Cambridge, and Somerville, where all the socially-conscious locavores live. So even though Dick’s Market Garden is right down the street from me, and they sell peaches at the Arlington Farmer’s Market, they don’t sell peaches at their stand.
I could take better advantage of these resources, but here I admit my own laziness. Dick’s isn’t open when I get home in the evening, so the only time I can go there is on the weekends, and my weekends are jam-packed. This weekend, I actually drove to Hannaford – past Lanni Orchards, which was open – and bought a bag of Lanni Orchard’s apples at the Hannaford. Yes, Lanni Orchards gets some of the profit; but Hannaford is taking a larger portion and delocalizing it.
Flat Hill Orchards is on my commute home, but have I ever gone there? No. Ewen’s Maple Sugar House is on the same road, but I’ve only been there once, because getting service involves ringing a really large bell and waiting for the proprietor to amble out of his house. The largest locally-owned garden center in Massachusetts is also near me, but I still drive to the Home Depot in Leominster when I need stuff.
If there’s any way my shopping habits can become more frugal AND responsible, it’s by making a greater effort to patronize local businesses, not by taking my business to three different grocery stores.
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I think the prices were more a function of your former locality, and store chain availability. Where I am there is a Stop and Shop, a Trader Joe’s, a Roche Brothers, and a Whole Foods near by. Most of the shopping is done at Stop and Shop, which does have a card program, but also usually has the better prices. The other stores do not have a loyalty program at all, but have higher prices either due to being a specialty store or a higher end chain. Further out there is a Market Basket, which, although a lower end store than the Stop And Shop in the area, does not have significantly better prices to make up for the extra time and travel required.
Certain staple items though, like eggs and milk, are not purchased at Stop and Shop because they can be conveniently purchased cheaper at the other area options.
As far as I can tell, non of them have double or triple coupons, a feature used in other parts of the country in my experience, and generally used to offset higher prices applied overall in those places.
Worse yet, there are farmer’s markets in my area, but they seem to be held in the middle of the week, in the middle of the day, making it utterly impractical to patronize them. They seem more set up for local restaurant supply than home consumer.