Azure Standard Order

As much as I dislike shopping in person, I never mind shopping online. But . . the Azure Standard orders that I have to figure out almost every month . . those are stressful. I spend at least half a day once a month adding items to my order and I try to do that at least two weeks before the order deadline. Then I’ll have another two weeks to fine tune the order. Because most of what I buy from Azure is in bulk, it can get expensive and I have to be careful not to go over the budget I’ve set for myself. I try to spend no more than $300 per month at Azure. That may sound like a lot for two adults but I do not place orders that will be picked up in November, December, or January. So, when you figure that nine months a year, I’m placing a $300 order, that’s $2,700 which averages out to $225 per month.

The reasons I don’t place orders for picking up November – January are that the November order generally has to be picked up close to Thanksgiving and I am busy for at least a week getting ready for Thanksgiving. Same with Christmas and then in January, the weather is so iffy and January is the month I really try to work out of the pantry/freezers.

Sometimes when I make that first run through the Azure website, the cart will have $700 or $800 of items in it. I’ll walk away and come back to it a few times and whittle it down to the items we need. I never want to run out of the items we need and use but maybe I’m running low on black beans and have those on the list. 25 pounds of black beans is $41. If I have even a couple of pounds of black beans left, as well as plenty of other types of beans, I know I can skip ordering the black beans this month and add them to the list next month.

Yesterday I went ahead and placed this order. I can change up until the deadline but these are the things I’ll receive if I don’t make any changes. I have 18 days before the deadline.

This order will get changed . . add this, delete that. I know it doesn’t have to take as much time as I spend and anything we might run short on before the next month’s order, I can almost always buy at the local grocery store.