WSEM 21 Challenge

At the close of Day 3, I wanted to briefly share my grocery shopping experiences. The first stop was an intense hour-long in-aisle price comparison of store-branded products at Giant Eagle, where $8.81 later, I had more than 1/2 of the food I thought would get me through the week. My next stop was the West Side Market where I spent another $9.25 in a series of barter exchanges akin to what you might see in a Turkish marketplace. The booth owners were okay sports and I think secretly enjoyed the back-and-forth haggling. In the end, I did pretty well. For instance, I bought a single lime for $0.25 and had a butcher sell me 1/2-pound of fresh ground turkey breast for $0.80.

The complexity comes tomorrow when I leave for Chicago for a day of meetings. I plan to wake up at about 5 am so that I can take the time to make a large breakfast and still get to my flight on time, rather than my norm of leaving myself 15 minutes to make my flight and buying something at the airport. I am allotting $2.50 for lunch (which will bring my total spend to $20.56), hoping to run into a decent Chicago street vendor, and have also scheduled my flight home to get me back in time to make dinner. Normally, food is the last thing on my mind when I travel, but I find it now becoming one of the primary mechanisms influencing the actions of my day.

3 days down. 4 to go.

Joe