My roommate keeps buying those pre-cut veggie trays and it's killing our grocery budget

I saw the receipt from our last trip to the store and she spent $12 on a single plastic tray of carrots, celery, and broccoli. That's insane! A whole bag of carrots is like $1.50, and a head of broccoli is maybe $2. You get three times the food for a quarter of the price. I tried to show her by buying the whole veggies myself and cutting them up in ten minutes on Sunday. It filled two big containers for the week. She said it's 'too much work' and that the pre-cut stuff saves time, but we're both students in Chicago trying to save money. That $12 could have bought a whole chicken or a bag of rice for the month. How do you get people to see that the extra five minutes of prep is worth it? Has anyone else had this fight?

3 comments

3 Comments

jessem592d ago

Is it really that much work though?

max_cooper213d ago

Tried the same thing with my old roommate. I started just buying the whole veggies and prepping a big batch while I was already cooking dinner on Sunday. I'd leave a container of the cut stuff in the fridge for her with a note saying "free snacks." She started eating it and eventually got the point when she saw how much longer it lasted.

jordan_henderson132d ago

That's a clever way to handle it. My version of meal prep usually ends with me eating all the prepped snacks by Tuesday and having to start over. So much for planning ahead.