budgeting

It’s OK To Say NO To Food Delivery!

I was half asleep when the doorbell rudely dragged me back to full consciousness. At the door was the representative from the food delivery service that stops at our home every two weeks. The items we typically purchase from the service usually fall into two categories:

• Novelty items that we cannot easily find elsewhere
• Items that are better quality than at the grocery store

The reason our purchases fall into these categories is because the cost of the delivery service’s products are generally much higher than at the local grocery store.

Usually, my wife and I make a list of what we want, and submit our order online the Sunday before he shows up at our door. By ordering online ahead of time, we accomplish a couple of things:

• Conscious Ordering : We can make note of what we have already on hand, and make a conscious decision as to what to order. This keeps us on budget, and ensures that we don’t order duplicates or make an impulse purchase.
• Ensures delivery : By ordering ahead of time we guarantee that our items will be on the truck and saved for us. Otherwise, something we may want may sell out by the time the truck rolls into our cul-de-sac.

Unfortunately, we forgot to put together our order on Sunday. So when our delivery representative showed up at our door, we pulled out the catalog and started paging through it. We felt hurried because he was standing in our doorway waiting for us. We felt obligated to buy something because it’s our choice to have him take the time to stop at our home.

He drove away with close to $40 of our money in his pocket. But we really didn’t need anything.

Buying products from the home delivery food service certainly isn’t a necessity. That’s why it doesn’t come out of our weekly food and household goods budget, instead it comes out of our entertainment budget. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be mindful about the value of our purchases. We need to follow two very important guidelines when dealing with our home food delivery service:

Remember to Plan Ahead

When we take our time, we’re very purposeful with our purchases. When we’re under pressure because the guy is waiting we tend to buy things we don’t need, or have had before and really don’t like.

NO Is A Valid Answer

if we forget to plan ahead, OR if we simply don’t want anything it’s OK to pass on buying anything. It’s also OK to ask if he could come back another day because we haven’t had time to look through the catalog. I don’t want to waste his time, and I don’t want to waste my money. It would be more productive to just have him come back another time. It’s also OK to just decline to buy anything that trip. Our delivery guy doesn’t have to live with our budget, and he doesn’t have to look at a chest freezer filled with products that we may or may not ever eat.

Getting the most out of our money means being mindful of every purchase, even those that are for purely “wants” like home delivery novelty food services. We need to remember that we are not obligated to purchase something each time, and to be true to our budget and our financial means when deciding what we want to purchase.

Do you use a home food delivery service? Do you feel pressured to buy something each visit?

Brought to you courtesy of Brock

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Brock Kernin

Brock is a software engineer by day and personal finance blogger at night. He is a fitness junkie and enjoys grilling and smoking meat. Married with two children,  Brock strives to improve his skills as a husband and father, and is always on the lookout to stretch his family’s budget as far as he can.