Schools are closed. Concerts have been canceled. Restaurants are but a distant memory. All that remains is a trip to the nearest supermarket.
But without places to go or things to see every grocery errand becomes an expedition.
Any purchased goods may be mixed, baked, stir-fried, or cooked.
And the results help differentiate between the never-changing days, at least in terms of taste.
And so our characters find their dopamine solely in brimming plates or glasses filled with wine.
This is a story told on flimsy strips of thermal paper, provided by each store.
act one
What makes it into the basket
These last months have been calm.
Most days are spent at home, spent studying or working in the common area. The lack of storage space in the rather small flat shared by five make grocery trips quite frequent.
number of shopping trips
The local coop pronto supermarket is just a few meters away, so it's visited often and spontaneously. The larger supermarkets are further away and require some planned trips. Unsurprisingly we can also see this effect in the average spend:
average spend per trip
But what goes into the basket?
Being comprised of (mostly) vegeterians, meat is not the candidate for what takes up most of our budget.
Not too unexpectedly, right after dairy, come alcohol and tobacco products.
average spend per category
act two
How the rest of the country compares
We are well aware that we aren't a normal household in terms of composition, behavior, or boundaries. Nonetheless, we wanted to answer the question "Are we normal?" solely based on our grocery shopping habits.
While it isn't all regular purchasing behavior there are some food categories where we don't stray too far away from the status quo. However, since the average Swiss household only consists of 2.21 People and our household counts 5 members, we first had to extrapolate all the "foreign" data to be able to compare ourselves to the average.
swiss population
our wg
click to select a category
act three
Why is there a dayslong spike in candy cravings, and what happens on Mondays?
To finish this tale, all that remains is looking for patterns in this data.
And just minutes before giving up and burning all those strips of paper that are a nightmare to sort through, we found not one but two.
These patterns may not stick out too much if the context is missing, but allow us to explain.
spend per category by weekday
sweets
alcohol
There came a week pretty late in the month where we purchased far more sugary products than in any comparable span of days during our data collection. "What could be the reason for this?" some might ask, but four of us knew precisely what caused this spike in sugary cravings: PMS. Luckily for us, we are as in sync as we could be, meaning there is at least only one week per month where we indulge in sweets a little more than usual.
data sources
- Federal Statistical Office: Detailed household expenditure of all households by year
- Federal Statistical Office: Development of food uptake in Switzerland.
(We ended up realizing that this statistic includes food items, such as grains, used by the industry for example in meat production additionally to direct consumption making the numbers non-applicable for our purposes.) - A shoebox filled with receipts.