Grocery Shopping - My Own Retail Therapy

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Most people would agree with me that retail therapy does work. I've had a couple of experiences myself when I was completely down and buying something exclusively for me, a need or luxury, made me feel way better. A simple new pair of earrings would do the trick. I guess it's my way of telling myself that life goes on, I'm blessed and that there are a lot of things I should be thankful for.

I'm pretty happy that I share the same mindset as my partner of almost 5 years, Mai. Ever since we started living together, we've done a lot of grocery-shopping together. We don't really do a lot of shopping for clothes, gadgets, etc. Grocery shopping is one of the things that we enjoy the most. The grocery store we frequent is SM Hypermart because most of the things we want to buy are there. Mai enjoys shopping for ingredients for dishes she wants to try cooking. And I love the snacks aisle, of course. LOL.

When we were still working, we had a bigger budget for our grocery-shopping. It's our own retail therapy. Every payday, we'll always make sure we drop by the grocery store in Shopwise Cubao or SM Hypermart. We usually spend about Php 2,000 to 4,000 everytime we shop - and that's only for the 2 of us. She usually buys something to cook for my whole family, but, most of the time, Mai just buys ingredients for her cooking experiments. It always makes us feel better after long days of work. I was a senior Team Leader in a call center so I've got lots of daily tasks and Mai would wait for me 'til I'm done with them. You'd wonder how we still have the energy to go around the grocery stores in SM or Shopwise after an 11-hour stay in the office that started the night before.

Now that Mai and I no longer have a full-time job as an employee, we have a limited budget for groceries. What we do now is we try to estimate how much is the total of the prices of everything we got in our cart. Then, at the counter, Mai puts all the important items first, those that we can't go without. I'll look sternly as the cashier passes the items through the barcode scanner. I look at the total on the POS screen and if we're almost over budget, we'd cancel the rest of the items that we don't really need. The first time we did that, we were kinda embarrassed, but, in the end, we started to not really care. Most of the cashiers didn't seem surprised. I guess there are other people doing what we do to ensure they also don't go over the budget.

Aside from grocery-shopping, as I've mentioned earlier, Mai and I don't really like using our money on anything else unless they're really important. However, on the first year we started working, we were able to buy her 2 pairs of shoes (Caterpillar and Nike, all original). Then, we bought a new mobile phone (the one that gave up on me a few weeks ago) for me and a PSP for Mai. Those were times that we felt we really needed some morale boost, and they did help. Now, we kinda don't have that luxury anymore, but, since my online money-making is going pretty well and we just opened our internet cafe again, I'm hoping we'll have more budget for shopping. Right now, my plans are to buy Mai a chef knife that she can use for her cooking since we'll be opening our food blog soon, and some potted herbs for her, too.

How about you? Do you agree that retail therapy works? Care to share your experiences? What was the most expensive thing you bought for yourself? I'd love to hear from you!