I love a stocked kitchen! I love putting all the food away and seeing my cabinets full. How could it get any better? Well, it could be delivered right to your door in separate freezers bags and boxes.
Daniel and I started bulk shopping to try to lower our grocery bill. Food in Rio de Janeiro, especially Zona Sul, is ridiculously expensive.
Great plan and a total pain in the ass. I have two kids and a husband that works. The carts at the store don't always have a place for the kids to sit, not to mention the tiny isles and dodging of other shoppers. We started driving to larger, nicer stores.
I know loading your kids up in the car, driving for 45 minutes to Barra, spending another hour and a half shopping (2 if the kids really give you trouble), then loading everyone and everything back up to go home sounds like fun, oh for sure, but it's not.
Sorry for sounding like a commerical but I now use Pão de Acucar online shopping. Not the mountain, the grocery store. Google it. You'll get pictures of the mountain and links to the store. Win win situation.
Anyway, they rock! I've tried Zona Sul online shopping but it sucks. Pão de Acucar comes when they say they will and they have special little bags for freezer and fridge stuff that are labeled. Everything else comes neatly packed in boxes. When my stuff arrives, I'm in anal organization heaven. Well, as anally organized as anything in Rio de Janeiro can be.
So yeah, I pay an extra R$12 for delivery and Pão de Acucar is one of the most expensive grocery stores in town. But I'm sane! How much is your sanity worth? Mine is definitely worth a R$12 delivery fee, about R$30 in higher grocery costs, and an hour or two online.
That last part is a bit annoying. The site is organized but still a bit difficult to maneuver. It almost has too many categories and is in Portuguese. Portuguese? What are we, in Brazil or something?
But you manage! And for you Moms out there, it means that you aren't stuffing your kids full of chips you wouldn't even have normally bought just to shut them up long enough to pay for your food. Not to mention all the stuff you have forgotten because you were distracted by your pre-schooler's questioning of fat and old people. Thank goodness he was speaking in English!
Check it out Pao de Acucar
We do this too. One nice feature is that you can save your shopping list and then when you go to order the next time, just adjust quantity to reflect what you need/don't need. In other words, it stops being a pain in the rear once you've successfully ordered all your normal items.
ReplyDeleteWell bite me, but here in the country I do everything by phone. I call the butcher and say I'll have my usual order, it's in my house in 20 minutes. I call the video store, they send stuff (books, magazines and movies - plus the food to go with) in 5 minutes and I don't even have to pay for it right away. Whatever you want, just pick up the phone. I've bought presents for birthdays over the phone. Natura delivery at my door. Even if I want vegetables and fruits, I have the best stuff delivered, and it's all better picked than if I had done it myself (ok, that's not so hard). Just the supermarket itself is not so great, but I enjoy shopping for groceries (by myself, of course), I mean, evetually I have to take my nose out of the house, right? Nothing is online though, everything by phone, meaning you have to chat with all the store owners and employees for about 10 minutes... which is not so bad either, you end up filled in the city's gossip.
ReplyDeleteRachel,
ReplyDeleteTotally agree with you, we even bought groceries online when we went to our beach house, they always delivered on time and neatly packed.
We saved time to be at the beach opposed to at the grocery store and didn't have to deal with transporting groceries to the beach.
Pao de Acucar delivers to every small town on the Coast between Sao Paulo and Rio.