The AC store is like the Walmart of rural Alaska. The prices can be normal priced for larger cities, double or triple the price that you pay in the lower 48 states. We have survived because we sent several plastic boxes of food two months before we arrived. We supplement those groceries with food from the AC store and the local ACTP store. (Don't mention the AC store in the ACTP! It's like profanity in there! It's like mentioning Walmart in a KMart store.) We have a usual routine of walking to the AC store and checking out items. You never know what is going to be 1/2 off.
These are a few of the items that I bought this afternoon :
We love a good potato salad. I will gladly spend 92 cents for two servings of potato salad for today's lunch. We paired it with ham and cheese sandwiches. Ham was bought in West Virginia. We separated it and froze it for the trip. We thaw out what we need. The cheese was on sale last week 2/$7 which is normal price for cheese in Cincinnati. The buns were bought during a sale 2/$2.50. We bought several and froze them. Our apartment has a large upright freezer to keep on sale items fresh longer.
Our consumption of soda has drastically decreased. We occasionally stop by one of the stores for one soda and share them with each other. This was normally priced $12.60 which makes the sale price $6.30. I know its still expensive, but we don't drink them all the time. You have to spread out the sweets over time or you won't have anything special when you really want it. I didn't think I would like the touch of lime, but it isn't that bad.
We have gotten lucky in the past and purchased milk at 1/2 price, but we don't drink a lot of milk. We bought a large box of instant milk and sent it with the other food items. We can make a little or in this case a lot of milk. We found cereal on sale for $4.30 for the normally expensive Granola.
Dang! That's a lot of Tang! Tang is our orange juice of choice right now. We like to have something sweet to drink at times, otherwise its nice cold water! The water tastes different here. It reminds me of the water in Japan, there's not a lot of chemicals in it. It tastes natural and fresh.
We have embraced the fact that we have to cook because we have no microwaves. We have to bake because there are no bakeries. This is a bunch of muffins that we made a few days ago. I froze them and let them thaw just to see how well they taste after the thaw. Our favorite is no bake cookies, but we are running low on oatmeal. (When I say running low, I mean that I'm down to 1 gi-normous box of it. Remember two is one, one is none.)
I will keep taking pictures and updating the blog as I go. Let me know if there's anything you want me to take pictures of while I'm here.
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