- My family orders groceries through exclusively through AmazonFresh, an online grocery delivery service.
- Not having to drive to the grocery store several times a month frees up about $640 in extra productivity for us each month.
- We also save more than $100 a month on gas and by not making impulse purchases like we would in a brick-and-mortar grocery store.
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Before having my daughter, I didn't think twice about going to the grocery store every day after work.
I'd pick up whatever my partner and I felt like having for dinner that night - some chicken and veggies to roast, a loaf of sourdough to slice up. Sometimes I'd even hit two stores in one afternoon, like Trader Joe's for a specialty item, then a local chain store for the basics at a lower price.
Read more: 29 products to buy at Trader Joe's - and 12 you should avoid at all costs
But toss a kid into that life and you'll drown pretty quickly. Both my partner and I both work full-time: I'm a teacher by day, a freelance writer by whenever, and my partner works in television. Between our work and school drop-offs and pick-ups, the time sucked up by grocery shopping is a precious commodity. An added complication? We live in Los Angeles, where a five-mile drive can take 30 minutes in thick traffic.
By my estimation, one trip to a grocery store on any given day rarely takes up less than an hour of my time, and often far longer. Ultimately, we decided that we'd prefer to use that time in a different way - like cooking with our daughter, eating dinner as a family at home, reading books at bedtime, or doing some creative work of our own.
In fact, I recently did the math, and found that my family saves more than $750 a month, between the gas we save driving to the store, the impulse purchases we skip, and the hours' worth of extra productivity it frees up.
Here's a breakdown of how our spending and saving play out now that we've switched to online grocery shopping.