Is shopping at a corner shop eco-friendly and / or thrifty???

If you read my blog post about compromise you will know how my husband and I feel about each others tastes in food.  Well I decided to give in a bit and buy him burgers, fish fingers, chips and a couple of jars of sauces – sweet and sour sauce and tikka massala sauce.  I would have bought most of the other stuff anyway (except for the yoghurt – blog post to follow), but recently we have been making our own chips, fish fingers and burgers (I say we because my husband did actually make fish fingers the other day).  I think buying this food is a compromise as I can cook homemade burger, fish fingers or chips alongside shop bought ones and I can add shop bought sauces to his portions of food and not to the rest of our food…

Sustainable gift wrap course

I bought the food from my local corner shop, which I have to say was entirely empty of other customers most of the time I was in there – I’m guessing it was a lot more of a relaxing experience than any supermarket on Christmas Eve.  Plus either the shop keeper was just being friendly or he was trying to chat me up – either way it passed the time while I was looking for the things I needed.  All in all, there were no queues and I walked out of there with a smile on my face.

You might be thinking how is shopping in my local corner shop eco-friendly or thrifty?  Well actually the corner shop items cost only 64p more than they would have cost in the supermarket – a price I’m happy to pay for a less stressful experience all round.  Some items were even cheaper than the supermarket ones e.g. the four pack of baked beans was £2 compared to £2.50 in the supermarket (current price in Sainsburys). You do have to pay in cash though as otherwise they charge you an extra 50p to use a card…

As far as being eco-friendly goes, the shop might be local, but the food isn’t and you might think the story ends there.  There is a difference between buying food from a corner shop and buying it from a supermarket though.  The difference is that the local corner shop isn’t constantly buying up large swathes of land to build more and more, bigger and bigger stores (although things are changing due to the impact on online shopping). The local corner shop is also less likely to be driving down the price of milk to the point where traditional dairy farms are having to shut up shop and make room for people to start battery farming cows for their milk like in this one recently approved to be built.

So there are environmental benefits to shopping at the local corner shop over the supermarkets and corner shops aren’t the expensive places I always used to think they were. So next time you only need to buy a loaf of bread, rather than going to the supermarket, if you haven’t already then why not give your local corner shop a try – you might be pleasantly surprised!

I am currently undertaking a Year of Eco Challenges . If you have a moment I would really appreciate it if you would consider sponsoring me with an action on my DoNation page. Also if you liked this post please click like on Facebook and follow on Twitter – thanks so much!