Day Four Gone. Let Day Five Begin
After my rookie experience at Aldi’s, I decided to go back and give it another try. So right after work, I made the quick drive over. Parked in my exact same spot from the day before. Grabbed my Wal-Mart plastic sack and stuffed it in my pocket.
As I’m walking in, an older guy even offers me his cart he was going to put up! I politely say no, thank him and walk inside. I’m finally in the “in-crowd” at Aldi’s! For dinner, it’s spaghetti. I already have sauce, meat and noodles at home. My goal for Aldi’s is to make it in and out with crescent rolls and garlic bread in hand.
In about ten minutes, I have my rolls and bread. I spent 9 of those minutes just walking up and down the aisles pricing everything in my head. Make my way to checkout, give the cashier my two items and get my total: $3 and change. (FYI if you use your debit/credit card, you have to type in your pin). During the whole checkout time, I was observing all the cashiers. They were all extremely nice to all the customers AND they are quick with the scanning. One cashier scanned an entire grocery cart of food in minutes. If only AVI servers were that quick with serving food……….
Day four also marked my brother’s birthday. I texted him happy birthday and check to see if he was doing anything. My siblings and I all usually get each other birthday gifts and I’m going to have to figure something out. I am “balling on a budget” and will likely just give him cash once I see him next. Then I have my nephew’s birthday this weekend. Fortunately I “cheated” and purchased his gift last month. I don’t want a kid to have to be affected by my project minimum wage and get a crappy gift. Like I said at the beginning, I am taking certain liberties with this project.
But seriously, say you live in a family of four or six and not making much money. The kids would have to come first for gifts so I’m sure there are many couples who don’t even get each other gifts because they put their kids first and secondly to save money.
On top of all this, I’m out of light bulbs at home. I try to stick to energy efficient light bulbs at home but they are pretty costly compared to the $1 package of four light bulbs you can buy. Being energy efficient isn’t exactly cheap. It’s kind of an oxymoron. You have to spend money to save money. I’m just going to stick it out through this month and if I have to live in darkness so be it.
So my current budget after dinner is $307 that needs to last through January. The first weekend is coming up in Project Minimum Wage. If I’m lucky my friends won’t be doing anything so I can stay in and save money. For sure I won’t be going out to the bars to watch the Cotton Bowl tonight.
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Schedule for this weekend is Letter T where I’ll be trying something new. It’ll still be in my Project Minimum Wage budget. I just have to be a little creative!
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Happy Dining All!
You will like shopping there. Its so much cheaper