With thanks to Coles Online
I’ve been meaning to order my groceries online for two months. In fact it was on my May to-do list, and I’d even cleverly delegated it to Mr Fox. He’s a good egg, so he actually spent an evening, and into the early hours of the morning, trying to decipher my handwriting on the grocery list, and locating the items on the Coles website. But somehow, the list wasn’t saved, and I was yet again on supermarket duty. But happily for him, Saints won the game that night…
I was loathe to re-do the list after he’d had a crack at it, and went back into the usual Friday morning routine with my little boy of heading to Coles. I find that if I make a few key pit-stops during our shop, we can get through it with a minimum of fuss:
- He gets to choose some flavoured milk in the Dairy aisle and presses the button next to the milk display that makes a moooing sound.
- I order a ‘twiggy stick’ for him at the Deli counter, which he gobbles down happily, before we hit the Baked Goods aisle and the freshly baked cheesy rolls start to beckon.
- By the time we’re in aisle 7, and he’s run up and down the preceding 6 aisles, he’s happy to sit in the trolley and zone out.
- Or I’ll facilitate said zoneage by slipping him the iPhone and murmuring those magic words: ‘Angry Birds’.
If we’re lucky, I’ll make it through the check-out before he states loudly that he needs to do a wee wee. And touch wood, I’ve never lost him when he’s sprinted down the aisles – except for that time he crawled under the shelves, got stuck and I couldn’t find him. Proud moment.
All in all, it’s relatively painless, and generally, we have fun just because we’re hanging out together.
Yet two weeks ago, after a particularly epic shopping expedition – whereby my son was ‘lucky’ enough to score a mini shopping trolley of his own to take for a spin – I was a broken woman.
When I got home I tweeted this:
Even though I was disgusted that I’d wasted such a big chunk of my day at the supermarket, I decided to self-flagellate further by working out the following shameful facts about what I’d bought:
- Of the 107 items I squeezed into my trolley, only 38 were on my shopping list.
- These items represented 44% of my entire bill!
- One Maybelline mascara – a regular purchase, decided to stock up while checking out the best beauty buys for this article.
- A second Maybelline mascara to try for the above article.
- A lip gloss, as above.
- Air dried unsalted pistachios – I read they are chock-full of antioxidants and so was pinning my hope on their anti-aging properties.
- A pack of Tim Tams. They were on special. I’m only human.
- Some freshly baked fruit buns as my other son had recently mentioned he loved sultanas as much as he loves me (traitor).
- A pair of mini BBQ tongs. They were really cute. Now I just need mini hands to use them.
- A lamington cake who’s best-before date was the next day – for $1 it would’ve been rude not to buy it.
- 5 packs of my favourite facial tissues as they were on sale, and I plan to never run out of these babies. Ever.
If I’d not spent all of that extra money on random items like the 9 I listed above, I could’ve bought these:
Bertie Parnay Cowboy Boots $219.36 ASOS
Dang.
Fast forward one week later. Wednesday night while getting my weekly reality injection via the delightfully trashy WAG Nation, I spent exactly 1 hour and two minutes setting up my Coles Online shopping order while my cherubs were tucked away in snoozesville. I tried to stick to my shopping list, but a couple of extras still made it into the cart. But for the record, I’m not counting a $3.46 packet of crispbread as an epic fail.
I also drank a lovely glass of Shiraz and had some amusing conversations with a couple of buddies on Facebook.
Last Friday, instead of spending half the day inside our local Coles, my son and I spent an hour in the playground, we visited the library, we ate at our favourite sushi restaurant, and we played hide and seek. I also had the time to slip into a couple of stores, and with the money I ‘saved’ doing this grocery shop online, bought this outfit:
Faux fur jacket on sale about $60 from a random store at the mall, Nude Lucy shirt on sale, about $35, GLUE store.
Later that night, a very tall delivery man arrived with some neatly-wrapped groceries and politely deposited them on our kitchen counter. 10 minutes later, everything was packed away, and I couldn’t help getting on Twitter again:
And yes, I did cry when they sang “Rainbow Connection”.
Click here to shop Coles Online. And for those times you still do venture in store, study up on these 5 tips for cruising the grocery aisles in style.
How much of your grocery shopping do you reckon is made up of impulse purchases? Are you an online convert like me, or are you sticking to the supermarket?
And, have you watched the Muppet Movie yet, and who’s your all-time favourite Muppet?
