"Quick" Trips to the Store

Today I discovered how to minimize the damage when making a "quick" trip to the store: walk!

Ok, so you need to live close enough to walk to a grocery store for this to actually work, but there are some elements that you can use even if you don't.

We're still in the process of figuring out how often we need to go grocery shopping, how quickly we use each item (we're going through milk a lot faster than I expected), and deciding which items we actually need. It's been a week and a half since we last went shopping, and we used the last of the eggs and milk for breakfast today. It's also our turn to bring snacks for soccer today, and I hadn't bought them yet.

Since Mr. S takes the car to work and the grocery store is only about a mile away, I decided that our walk this morning would be to and from the grocery store. I loaded LMS into our trusty BOB jogger (love that thing! we got an awesome deal on it on craigslist and we've definitely gotten our money's worth out of it) and headed out. At the store I grabbed a basket, set it on top of the jogger, and filled it with the items I needed: milk, eggs, cheese, yogurt, carrots, and snacks for soccer. After I paid for it all, I stowed everything in the basket under the seat and walked back home.

What I learned: a basket's worth of food fits nicely in the basket of the jogger. If I'd bought anything more, it wouldn't have fit. This limits how much I can buy, meaning I think more about what I'm putting in the basket, and therefore spend less. I also got a better workout on the way home- a gallon of milk adds a significant amount of weight to the jogger.

If you can't walk to the store for a quick trip, when you get there you should still grab a basket. They're a pain if you need anything heavy (like a gallon of milk), but the size of the basket will limit what you can put in it, helping to avoid impulse purchases.

Any other good tips for avoiding over-spending on quick trips to the store?