Chicken and Wal-Mart

How does one spend nearly $400 on groceries?

Perhaps buying six trays of boneless, skinless chicken breasts will help. Oddly, what if the person buying it isn't really a fan of chicken? But this happened in real life, as my kids would say.

Buying all sorts of organic or otherwise purportedly-labelled healthy products will raise the total. And, even though it is a healthy choice, if you let it sit in the fridge to rot, it didn't do you any favours.

Anyway, I'm not sure how he did it, but Husband managed to rack up the biggest grocery bill ever in our history. This was a couple of weeks ago, and, believe me, it didn't last longer than most trips. In fact, I think it lasted less because he didn't buy all of the staples I use. How nice to buy curry paste and fish oil, but I'm not making Indian or pad thai every day, you know?

Man, we've come a long way when we were first living together. Salad days for certain, as we would only bring $50 and a calculator to the grocery store, making sure we didn't spend more than that for the week. And it was tough: remember this was before everything was made in China. Few things cost just a dollar.

Segue.

We have municipal elections tomorrow. One of the big topics is the possibility for a Wal-Mart to come to town. They already bought a chunk of land, but it is zoned industrial so they're taking the city to court. Nice.

I can't say that I've never shopped there, but I don't go out of my way to do so. For instance, the older kids needed skating helmets. We were late in the season to get them. We checked Canadian Tire, and the usual suspects in town, but we're not going to spend $80 each for two kids who couldn't care less about ice time. So, we drove 20 minutes out of town and hit Wal-Mart. It wasn't any cheaper than Canadian Tire, but they had them. Lots of them.

In fact, they had lots of everything. Husband hardly ever shops. He was a little overwhelmed by the sheer size of the store. Getting back in the car, he said, "If Wal-Mart comes to town, it will swallow it. I totally see what so many people are upset about."

I don't know if it would decimate the downtown core, what with all the boutiques and specialty shops. They're so tourist-driven. I can't see a tourist coming in and saying, "Let's go to the edge of town to see if their Wal-Mart looks just like ours." But the old pharmacy downtown? Gone. The little sporting goods store? Bye-bye. The pet shop? See ya. I'm sure the grocery stores and the Zellers, Sears, and especially the Giant Tiger will be very badly hit.

Middle Sister swears by Wal-Mart. But then she complains that the downtown where she lives is dead. "There's so few shops, really. There's only services like doctor's offices or financial planners and stuff." Guess why?