Show Us Your Grocery Receipts: Fairway in Harlem
Kosher meat is expensive.
This week Billfolder Rachel Goldfarb sent in both a tweet and a receipt:
@HelloTheFuture want to do a grocery receipt piece w/ CRAZY cost of kosher meat? I just paid $7.99/lb for boneless skinless chicken breast
Here’s Rachel’s full receipt analysis:
This is from one of my relatively rare trips to the Fairway in Harlem. Fairway is a quintessentially New York grocery store — the original location, on Broadway at W 74th, has an insane number of products shoved into a teeny tiny space. But the Harlem location is basically the size of a suburban grocery store, shoved in next to the Hudson River in the edge of Harlem. Instead of a refrigerated section, it has a cold room. A whole room that is always super cold where the yogurt and such just sits in wire shelves! It’s pretty great.
I go to Fairway when I need something that is either hard to find at the smaller grocery stores that are closer to my apartment, or that is crazy expensive at the smaller stores. This trip was primarily because I wanted chicken. Kosher boneless skinless chicken breasts aren’t even stocked at the grocery stores closest to my apartment, and they’re $9.99/lb at my local Westside Market. I paid $7.99/lb, which is still way more than my mom pays in the suburbs of DC! I eat mostly vegetarian, because keeping kosher makes eating meat incredibly expensive, and I’d rather save the money for other things.
The rest of this list: the Buotoni packaged tortellini (cheese and roasted garlic!) has already become pasta salad, with sautéed shaved asparagus ribbons and raw tomatoes and a shallot. One serving for dinner, two more already packed up for lunches. The salad greens, beets, herbs, avocados, the second container of tomatoes — those will all become salads in various combinations, probably with some chicken on top, for work lunches. I’ll eat the strawberries as snacks. And the better than bouillon and the cumin were stock up items. When I’m not buying meat, my usual weekend stock-up trip to the grocery store will have beans or tofu or canned tuna — all much cheaper. My usual weekend trip to the grocery store is more like $25–35.
I’ll make a second grocery trip in the middle of the week for more produce, probably, or stop at the produce stand by my subway stop. I eat a lot of vegetables, and I prefer to shop twice a week for that, at least until my CSA starts. From June through October, I’ll get a vegetable-and-fruit share from a farm upstate every other week, and then I’ll just try to eat in order of potential spoilage.
I don’t buy kosher meat, but like Rachel I also strategically plan my meals so that they don’t involve a lot of meat—I might do a pork or chicken dish once every two weeks (or tilapia once a week), and then the rest of the time it’s beans and tofu and pasta because all of that stuff is cheaper.
What about you?
Previously:
Show Us Your Grocery Receipts: A Couponer Restocks
If you have a grocery receipt you want to share with The Billfold, email me at nicole@thebillfold.com.
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