I'm trying to reduce the number of short, unnecessary car journeys I make and for most things about town I can walk or cycle (with or without the kids), but the one area I struggle with is the weekly supermarket shop, the supermarket is only a couple of miles away, but I can't currently carry a weeks worth of shopping, for 4 people, home without the car. I could go to the shop more often, but don't want to and also don't really want to use internet shopping as that's just replacing a short, unnecessary car journey with a short, unnecessary van journey!
So, I'm looking for tips to carry a family sized weekly shop home by foot or bike, but before anyone suggests it, I'm too young for a tartan shopping trolley (even if I could get one big enough) and the path home is too rough to push a shopping trolley home!
Van delivery will be doing loads of other customers too, so impact is shared.
Bike trailer. You can get plenty in, and as long as there are no hills, easy enough to pull.
APF
Don't do a weekly shop. My local Aldi is walking distance and I'll probably visit it a few times a week. stuff is fresher, you tend to waste less as you only buy what you need over the next few days. I don't always walk, sometimes I'll combine it with a stop off on my way home from work so not a special journey. I can't remember the last time I made a special car journey for a big supermaket shop.
I use a rucksack and a large blue Ikea bag. It's only 5 mins for me though.
when children are away from home, the two of us manage easily with a shopping trolley.It's blue and dead easy to use. when they're back it's a car journey I'm afraid, unless I am super saggy and volunteer the bike trailer...
Have tried a number of options including:
- 70 litre rucksack and bags
- MTB + large Carry Freedom trailer with puppy cage strapped to it full of carrier bags of shopping
- Old steel folding bike plus Gumtree etc child trailer with seats out
- used Dutch bike with stepthru frame, racks, guards, onboard locks, dynamo, sturdy stand, bombproof hybrid tyres etc and collection of cheap panniers of varying sizes. Uglier the better.
This last one is my favourite to date. In fact I just returned with the groceries. Sometimes 6 miles, sometimes 16 miles or more depending on where I fancy/require to go shopping vs the weather. Don't forget pogies for winter
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I use a big rucksack. That takes all the fresh stuff plus a few extras. We then do the occasional car shop, usually on the way somewhere, to pick up tins, jars, cereal, bog roll, etc
We have never owned a car and have always shopped using bicycle(s), even with children. My wife does the vast majority using a couple of panniers and extra on top. If you want to strongly enough, you will find a way.
Perhaps until you get the hang of it, you could use the car to do a monthly shop for the heavy, long lasting goods and cycle to get the perishables. Sounds cushy ; )
I've got a large rucksack, I've also got a pair of 100l panniers.
A non-tartan shopping trolley with "step climber" axles, bike panniers or rucksack.
All canned, Jarred, bottled goods as well as anything packaged (rice, beans etc.) get ordered online and delivered.
only shop for perishables and junk food as you can only carry so much you end up not eating biscuits or crisps as they take up room for other stuff :). Means you have to plan meals but it can work out healthier.
Don’t do a weekly shop. My local Aldi is walking distance and I’ll probably visit it a few times a week. stuff is fresher, you tend to waste less as you only buy what you need over the next few days
++++1. Completely recommended. Didnt take long to figure that out once I began family shopping and quit the car. More frequent trips = more You Time either on the bike or hoof. You also spot more deals and rush less 😉
Walk there and get a taxi home.
Online shopping!
I could go to the shop more often
maybe look at what you buy as much as how often you're buying. Supermarkets sell a surprising amount of stuff that isn't food / a meal. A lot of what makes people's shopping heavy / bulky ls drinks rather than food. You've already got a tap in your house.
Theres also sense - if you have the storage space - in doing a Costco-like bulk shop every once in a while and stock up on anything store-cupboard. No point carrying home the same stuff every week unless that stuff wouldn't last more than a week in the fridge
for using the bike... two-wheel trailers like the carry freedom - are the easiest way to lug loads about - one large volume is easier to pack than distributing things into panniers
I started the "Shopping by bike" routine along with a thread started here. Still do it (unless I do my shop in a lunchbreak cos I've had to drive to work) - got a cheapo Bob trailer copy and it easily fits a week's shopping in... however, there's only one of me to shop for... no way could you get a family of 4 shop in it. There's a section of woods between home and Lidl which I take. Offroad is no issue. 🙂
What if you had 2 bikes and 2 trailers and one of the kids or the wife came with you? Or one of those child buggies would fit more in...
[img] https://tinyurl.com/y9243tws [/img]
Bike trailer, online delivery or offset the miles by not driving elsewhere.
If you’ve done everything on your other journeys, what’s wrong with driving? If you want to lose the car completely, bike trailer is the answer.
you can even wheel it round the shop. No tartan
don’t really want to use internet shopping as that’s just replacing a short, unnecessary car journey with a short, unnecessary van journey!
Is it? - I've had a chat with the guy that does ours and he basically drives past the end of the street anyway (he'll sometimes phone to say - can I come to you early as I am passing rather than going all the way out to X to turn back).
Don’t do a weekly shop. My local Aldi is walking distance
But he said:
the supermarket is only a couple of miles away
should he move house or are you really suggesting a 4 mile round trip walk every day to get the groceries...
Cargo bike and a rucksack, it’s what I’ve used for the last 5 years and works a treat. I’ve got a Kona MinUte which is fine for 2 of us, I’d wanna Ute if there were 4. It’ll still work a treat though.
Also Burley and for the Rolla Royce option you can choose a British built Bikehod. Will be cheaper than a cargo bike. I have a Dutch roadster with huge panniers for a reasonable shop. The bikehod would cover a week.
I do the weekly shop on the way home from work on a Friday. Actually weekly is a bit misleading, it is really on the weekend as my two sons (in their mid-20's) also live with us and the amount of food they consume is frightening. The super market is a an extra 1km on the journey home. We do a monthly Costco run for a lot of the non-perishable stuff. WHen (if) the boys leave home, I reckon we won't need a weekly shop and just buy stuff as required
Just do the shop when you’re driving passed.
My obliga-pic disappeared. Here:
Cost me peanuts (thanks STW classifieds + top bloke), hugely stable when loaded, has needed near zero maintenance these last 5 years except for a £15 chainset and chain, is scrote-proof as dammit and will (with the front deck swapped) carry at least my weight in groceries with four 54 litre panniers
Tern GSD
I have an e-xtracycle for the shop and commuting when my legs are too smashed to cycle.
Takes the weekly shop no sweat.
My shops are too far away and not on the route to anywhere to consider doing more shops. Fine if you choose to live in town but that comes with plenty other issues for me.
Wheelbarrow.
Surly Big Dummy.
You can even get a sidecar to go with it.
Best training device ever - my mate got one and he's getting faster every time we go for a ride. 🙂
Why not do it properly?
The answer is a cargo bike. I can fit most of our shopping in the two panniers, anything else goes in a box strapped to the top deck..
I do mine using a Yuba Spicy Curry with the 2Go bags and a crate in the Monkey Bars. Also the Basket on the front holds 50kg of stuff. Easily copes with a weeks shopping + child.
Not that you would buy one just for that, if you have no other need for a cargo bike, probably worth getting OCADO/Morrison’s deliveries.
Weekly? We do a monthly shop! For occasional bits and bobs there’s a Tesco Local about half a mile along the road. Morrisons, where we do our main shop is about two miles or so away, so there’s not much difference to the OP. Clearly there’s no unnecessary car journeys involved for the shopping, just once a month is all you need. Providing you can plan all your food that far ahead, which I leave to my g/f, she’s a whizz at that.
Surly Big Dummy
This - there's a chap in Manchester who has one with two Thule racks on the rack for carrying other bikes about; Xtracycle used to sell a kit for converting a normal frame into a long bike.
The kit is what I have ratherbeintobago. Mounted to a Kona sutra .
Carrys 2 other bikes no bother .2 small humans and me or me plus a second human comfortable. 2 humnas physically fit but my legs and the motor doesn't do hills well with them on.... But that's circa 300kg of load.
I've moved Ladders , half sheets of plywood and pallets with mine.
Ben kinetics last I saw was building a fleet of house removals based around cargo bikes.
As for shopping monthly. I've yet to see a tomato or similar that lasts a month
i would do several smaller shops, or just use the car for a weekly shop.
some journeys are necessary, i couldn't walk 4 miles unloaded, never mind with shopping, i am envious of those who can however.
or, if you're flush, a cargo bike is a fantastic option.
It's twenty miles to our nearest supermarket ( Tesco , Hexham ) ..and although our village has a Co-op store ..the prices are hiked up so high due to a captive audience that you wouldn't want to do a weekly shop there ..although it is within walking distance ..
Can't see me ever doing a weekly shop without the car ..and don't like online grocery shopping .
the prices are hiked up so high due to a captive audience
All Co-ops are like that. Almost M&S prices for some reason, but they do have some nice stuff.
[i]just once a month is all you need[/i]
Interesting idea, I'm no good at planning, but I'd be interested to know how I can make fresh fruit, salad, veg etc last a month.
Don’t do a weekly shop. My local Aldi is walking distance and I’ll probably visit it a few times a week. stuff is fresher, you tend to waste less as you only buy what you need over the next few days
We do this as well. OH does the shopping on his cheap (£20 at auction) town bike, it's got a large-ish placcy storage box bolted to the rack and can get a decent amount of stuff in. We've saved quite a bit doing this because he's as tight as a gnat's chuff and only buys what we need 😆
A month may be pushing it but most fresh fruit and veg will last a fortnight easy. Milk and bread stores very well in a freezer.
I have the same trailer as DezB by the looks of it.
Just got back from SSUK where it did 80 miles without a problem, it makes some interesting handling quirks but as a concept it works brilliantly. I was going to do the 65 miles back as well but the hangover was a bit brutal so thankfully got a lift.
I considered a cargo bike or xtracycle, but fundamentally that's another bike, which is fine if your lifestyle is suitable for it and you have space, but I can't justify £2000 on a bike when I got the trailer for £25.
Weeks shopping wouldn't fit, but it depend what you eat. We tend to buy meat etc once a week, then bilk, bread and veg a couple of times, if all I'm doing is getting a few thing then shopping takes less time (obviously) and I tend to go locally (not to the extent of bakers and butchers every time, but we do use the greengrocers) so isn't actually inconvenient as getting into the big tesco extra by car. Also I view it as riding time, I don't begrudge a 90min round trip to a farm shop as it's 90min I would likely have gone for a spin on the road bike, same fitness benefit and multitasking!
It's also really healthy, because 'treats' are either really dense and heavy (chocolate) so you end up too heavy, really fragile (cake), or really space inefficient (crisps), so I just don't buy them! Same with breakfast, I don't buy cereal as 2 boxes would be a lot of the space gone, so it's porridge, toast (as bread is there already) or eggs.
We no longer drive to the supermarket which is about a 10 min walk through town. I now sport a nice stealth black large volume shopping trolley which I shamelessly stroll through town much to the amusement of friends and acquaintances who have seen me. I actually now have a tiny little trolly dog that I might put in there like the old dears do just because!
Seriously though it’s bluming ace and I can fill a small tescos trolly and with judicial packing it all goes in plus a second hand held bag.
if you really wanted to max it out you could double this with a big ruck sack.
Sure beats the arms being oulled from their sockets with 3 bags in each hand. I’m actually looking for a proper outdoors built (north face etc) one just for kudos and something with better build quality that the ones on Amazon etc.
most fresh fruit and veg will last a fortnight easy
But that's half of a month. They said a month!
I just use a 90-litre expedition pack plus the odd 'bag for life' for lighter, bulkier things.
As an aside, there was some media guff recently about how people ate no more these days than in the 1970s, but were mostly fatter. It was supposedly baffling, but my take is that it's entirely in line with a world where people drive everywhere rather than walking or cycling.
Beans on toast for the second half of the month DezB!
I've given this a bit of thought.
I assume your motive is an environmental one?
My usual opinion when it comes to cars and the environment is to keep them for a long time, people agonise over a few mpg or an extra few miles a year, when in reality, it takes a HUGE amount of resources to make a new car, just looking after it so it'll last 20 years and not 10 or whatever will easily outweigh making a new one.
But lets say you're already doing that or your moving towards a 1 car family or even a car-free family.
I think @jkomo cracks it, just add it to a journey you deem necessary, it's a negligible extra use of energy.
Second is the home delivery, the supermarkets aren't stupid, they're not sending out a van from the shop, to your house and back again to repeat the cycle over and over, they're on a route designed to be as efficient as possible.
After that, it's 'shop more often' which you don't want to do, but it's how things works for decades before the invention of the larger out of town supermarket.
The rest of the suggestions seem to involve buying lots of new things, things that need to be made, no doubt as a result of lots of raw materials and parts being shipped globally, welded or sewn somewhere else, shipped here and then on to you. Much energy and resources used elsewhere so the OP save a gallon of petrol a month or whatever. I can't see that making environmental sense very quickly, if at all.
The rest of the suggestions seem to involve buying lots of new things, things that need to be made, no doubt as a result of lots of raw materials and parts being shipped globally, welded or sewn somewhere else, shipped here and then on to you. Much energy and resources used elsewhere so the OP save a gallon of petrol a month or whatever. I can’t see that making environmental sense very quickly, if at all.
For a back of a fag packet calculation you can assume cost = energy, a car is just the cost of iron ore + a lot of energy for example, plus the wages of the people making it, which is spent on more stuff that requires energy, and iron ore is cheap as chips, so it's actually not a bad way to estimate stuff.
My commuter bike cost £150 and saved me £150 in petrol in month 1, by the end of month 3 it will probably manage that after tax (the real cost of petrol is about 50p/l), and in 6 months it will pay for itself environmentally even when you account for me ating food which is delivered from all over the world to supermarkets by lory.
Yes that means I have a car and/or bike sat doing nothing half the time but that should also mean both last twice a as long assuming a 50% split in miles.
The cheap trailer to go on it paid for itself in a fortnight!
There will be people with kids and people without kids here and my experience, having done both, is that the requirements for shopping are very different, not least of which is the amount you buy and the time you have to do it in. Being honest, Ocado bring us our food on a weekly basis. We've tried the "little and often" approach, but it always seems to end up costing more as you buy stuff you don't really need. It also makes it harder to stick to a structured plan for meals as it's way too easy to just buy a pie instead. (mmmm, pie)
Honestly, we're so busy evenings and weekends that I'm grateful that this one bit of our life is dumped on our doorstep on a Friday night and I don't think I'd entertain going back to doing it ourselves, nice though it might be to cycle to the shops.
I guess others will have very different points of view here, but at least we don't take our car! 🙂