I did a big weekly shop yesterday. I haven’t really done a proper one of those since my daughter was born. When she was first born, I took advantage of the Coles online shopping. There was free delivery on a Wednesday.  They have a great deal for fruit and vegetables when you shop online. You can purchase a selection of seasonal fruit and vegetable boxes. They come in a cardboard box and it’s like getting a present because you don’t know what you’re going to get each week. But the number of bags that they use for the rest of the shopping is atrocious. And completely unnecessary. They say that the average use of a single-use plastic bag is 12 minutes. Well with online shopping, it’s more like 2 seconds because they are put in plastic bags in the crates (so they aren’t really necessary as the groceries are being contained by the crates) and then the crates are wheeled in and placed on your kitchen table. Then the groceries are unpacked and you sign for the delivery and they take the crates away. No need for plastic bags at all. Admittedly, it might take slightly longer to unpack the crate but we’re talking about saving the environment here! And the worst thing is that they sometimes package one item per bag! Disgraceful.

Since Coles opened up basically on our doorstep, 4 months after my daughter was born, I decided that it would be really lazy to still get online shopping. So I’ve just been doing a shop every few days. We don’t have a big fridge so that makes sense. It just makes me a bit disorganised when it comes to meal planning. Also, the problem with doing a weekly shop is transporting everything back here. I have an issue with driving to the shops when it is only a 2.5 minute walk. It probably takes longer to drive because you have to go round the block to get access to the Coles carpark. We can’t bring a trolley home because the wheels lock at all the exits (I really thought Coles would give all the locals their own personalised trolley when they opened!). I got a shopping bag on wheels for Christmas (you know the ones that the old ladies use?!) and so far I’ve been a bit embarrassed to use it! But it makes complete sense. However, it wouldn’t have fit all the groceries in yesterday so I combined the shopping trip with another outing and parked in the Coles carpark on the way home (another reason I don’t like driving is because I hate shopping centre carparks!)

I felt really proud of myself. Every item I chose, I considered the packaging and of course avoided any unnecessary packaging (no plastic bags for the peaches, tomatoes, carrots… it would have been easier for the girl at the check-out if I’d bought my own reusable bags but I wasn’t that organised) but because I went to a checkout, I still ended up with one plastic bag. I could have refused it but it would have meant re-packing all the items and holding up the queue. I still think I did pretty well considering there was $200.00 worth of groceries!