The other day when chatting to a friend, she told me about her parent’s crazy food shopping habits.

Apparently her mother had been complaining that they had spent £90 on food that week.

So my friend decided to go and investigate.

She went to see them on the day ASDA delivered the weekly shop so that she could see what they were buying.

To her horror, she found out that her mother was basically ordering the same shop each week plus any extras they believed they needed.

That meant that she was not checking to see what they already had in and what they had not used from the previous week’s delivery.

Her mother was simply ordering more of the same whether or not they needed it.

When she went to the fridge to put the two new bags of carrots away, she found two unopened bags of carrots already in the fridge.

Her father tried to throw away a fresh broccoli to make room for the carrots.

Her parents love fruit and each week they order punnets of strawberries, raspberries, blueberries and grapes.

The fruit bowl was stacked so high, it looked like it had been pinched from a hotel breakfast room.

There were enough apples and bananas to feed a primary school.

When my friend went to put the new punnets away in the fridge, she found several unopened punnets of moulding fruit.

Her father was in the habit of filling the fridge without stock rotation.

He would push the new fresh food on top of the food already in there which is why there were several punnets of mouldy fruit buried at the back.

To cut a long story short, her parents were ordering food which they didn’t need, and they were throwing away a lot of food that had gone rotten because they hadn’t got round to eating it.

She also noticed that the freezer was rammed with food such as fish and meat that wasn’t getting eaten because they were eating the fresh stuff which was being delivered each week.

My friend suggested that they focus on eating the fish and meat they have in the freezer, not ordering any more until it was all gone and then only ordering what they need each week and eat it when it was delivered.

She asked why neither of them checked the cupboards, the fridge or the freezer before ordering the shopping and why they never removed anything from the saved online order.

There answer was… ‘We don’t like doing it’.

Her parents are quite old and spend their days pottering around the house. From what I am told, most of their time is spent on the sofa in front of the television with them both playing on their laptops.

Both of them are still capable of walking and doing stuff, it’s just that they don’t really want to.

Half an hour is all it would take to see what they already had, what they needed and to modify the online order.

By simply reordering the saved online order every week and adding a few extras to it, her parents are throwing good money in the bin.

Freezer food isn’t so bad but a lot of the fresh food is just being binned because they are not eating it.

They might as well throw fivers in the bin instead.

I am not one to suggest that people should go crazy trying to save money and cut back on everything and live a frugal life to protect a few pounds.

I prefer to recommend people to find a way to make more money because:

1. It’s a lot easier to make money than most people realise.

2. There is a limit to how much you can save. If you have £100 to spend in a week, the most you can save is £100 if you do nothing more than stay in bed in the dark for seven days.

3. There is no limit to how much money you can make when you start to earn extra money. You can save £5 by buying a couple less punnets of fruit whereas you can earn £100 or more writing a few articles for people or selling a few items on eBay sourced from a car boot sale or charity shop. The more you do, the more you can earn.

However, I will say this…

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