Harrington Household Index (HHI)

My cupboards betray my xenophilia and lack of restraint grocery shopping -- little jars of cactus and baby corn remain barely touched. There's been serendipity too, the pickled garlic from Saudi Arabia (via the Caspian Bistro) and the mango kiwi preserves from Israel (via Kowalski's) created a little United Nations force in our kitchen. My daughter likes them. I need to learn how to use ingredients before my enthusiasm breaks my budget. Well, the U.N. has a funding problem too.

I haven't figured out how to review restaurants as a freelancer. Besides, I'm a cook. Fiddling around with food is my idea of fun. My cooking interests started when I found exciting dishes in restaurants. I'm terrible at following recipes, so I reverse engineer them at home. This has led me to hunt for interesting ingredients.

I'm not as carefree about picking up curious condiments in ethnic groceries as I was just a year ago. Ben Bernake isn't the only one haunted by the Consumer Price Index. Wheat and corn price increases have outpaced increases in oil. It's hit the grocery industry pretty hard, and the Harringtons.

As a grocery store tourist, I'm interested in what's unique, what's really good, what's available in a wide variety and what they don't have. Prices aren't my primary interest, but as noted, I'd be remiss if I didn't tip off readers to good or bad deals. I won't promise Consumer Reports, but a rough gauge on value.

The Consumer Price Index has thousands of items from urban locations. The Harrington Household Index is less ambitious. It has five. I settled on: a whole chicken, a bottle of canola oil, a bag of lettuce (any form of greens), a four pack of toilet paper and dish soap -- things I could find in most grocery stores. With these items you should be able to pull off a meal if you have a few things in your pantry and fridge. I also threw in a couple of non-food items you might need. This frees my time in stores so I can do what I want to: chat with the owners about kim chee or injera rather than sneak from aisle to aisle scribbling prices.

I knew my list would have shortcomings, e.g. not every store would have all five. Some stores had only economy sizes. Others had only rip-off "travel" or "convenience" sizes. Whole Foods' cheapest dish soap was an expensive, but "eco-smart" Seventh Generation -- don't expect to find Joy Ultra there. Oddly, the cheapest bag of lettuce I found was also at Whole Foods. And it was organic. The highest price for toilet paper I found was at the Star Market and Deli on Snelling. They advertise themselves as having "African, Middle Eastern and American" foods. Their $1.29/roll TP (1.29 x 4 = $5.16) was off the charts, but the same store sold one and a half pound bags of oregano for $8.99. SimonDelivers sells .2 oz. containers of oregano for $1.79. That works out to $214.80 for a pound and a half.

Kim's Oriental Market on Snelling near Hamline University further confirmed the folly of trying to measure all stores by the seemingly simple measure of price. This medium-sized and well-stocked store had only one item I was looking for -- Greens. No canola. No whole chicken. No TP. No dish soap (unless it was deceptively labeled in Korean). Apples to oranges. I'll limit my index to conventional grocers.

A more nuanced guide would contain more real food items (butter, spices, flour, milk). For the non-cook, a frozen pizza and perhaps my personal favorite, Marie Callendar's frozen chicken pot pies. Including the later two would have pushed Kowalski's toward the bottom of the list of affordable places. I call myself a cook, but the love of Marie Callendar's parent company, Con-Agra, bubbles up each time I pull one out of the microwave. . .

I visited four stores and SimonDelivers online that had all five components. I'll include a separate post of the agonizing detail. Although my objective was to establish an index to benchmark other stores, it's worth mentioning that the all-around winner on low prices turned out to be a small neighborhood market in the Highland area, Korte's.

Here are the official totals for each store, prices are adjusted in some instance to standardize size (chicken, oil, dish soap). I tacked $2 onto SimonDelivers. When we've ordered from them, the groceries were usually around $100, their $9.95 delivery charge amounts to a roughly 10% fee. You can argue convenience vs. price. I was measuring price. The average worked out to $19.34.

Store	Total
Korte's	$16.95
Kowalski's	$17.77
Whole Foods	$20.42
SimonDelivers	$20.65
Rainbow	$20.89

Chicken in Every Pot?

If you live around here (the Minneapolis/St. Paul area), Lunds & Byerly's or Kowalski's mean one type of grocery; Rainbow and Cub mean something else. There are also SuperTargets, Walmarts, Aldi markets, Econofoods and other discount and deep discount stores. Whole Foods and Simon Delivers add another dimension. When reading about these places the tone and type of information are never what I'm looking for. The three color inserts in the newspapers don't have content, just prices and exclamation points. I spend a lot of time online, but do you consult Wikipedia when the "what's for dinner" question comes? Although the article on SuperTarget has 93 references and tells you the average store has 175,000 square feet, you neeed to visit the place to learn the produce is a disappointment. On the other hand, it's a shelf stable paradise if you're looking for canned soup, spaghetti sauce or 3.2 beer. Liquor stores are closed on Sundays in Minnesota, so the beer is important.

I like to browse over good food, but I also care about where I am. Places like the Caspian Bistro on University (Persian restaurant and market) are secret treasures. The little market's floor is covered with open crates of bulk almonds and pistachios. Shelves and cases are packed with exotic oils, pickled garlic, Persian saffron, and dates. But it need not be so exotic. Recovering from years of neglect as the Nokomis Food Pride, Nokomis' Oxendale Market is a store I like. Its previous owners hadn't updated much of anything for years. The store still has dingy floors, ancient freezers and dim lighting. It also has friendly service, a good selection of Kool-aid and some odd items (e.g. pickled eggs and turkey gizzards).

Travel writers have to be practical. I'd be upset if a museum's admission for a family of four was $60 and I wasn't tipped off. Likewise, I'd be remiss to leave out of a review the "premium" nature of stores like Byerly's & Lunds. I've developed a price index, the Harrington Household Index (HHI). The more familiar Consumer Price Index (CPI) is composed of an extensive list of prices urban consumers pay. My index is only five items: a whole chicken, a head of lettuce (or a bag), a bottle of canola cooking oil, a package of toilet paper (4 rolls), and dish soap -- almost a chicken dinner and the clean-up (sorry). I'll try to avoid discussions of the "core" index vs. the more volatile "chicken, lettuce and canola" index. Some of the store-to-store selection differences, e.g. size variants and availability, will be controlled by adjusting on a per once basis. Specialty ethnic markets like the Caspian Bistro might not stock TP or be licensed to sell meat. For them, I'll index based on what they have. Look for the first index coming soon!