Ok, so my girlfriend (F37) and I (M36) go grocery shopping once a week. It’s a bigger shopping trip where we buy most of what we’ll need for the coming week. My girlfriend grew up with little and later became quite successful, so food is something she values highly and is willing to spend on. She doesn’t like looking at labels or comparing prices because she feels she no longer needs to, and sees food as a metric of success. I had a similar background, but I do check prices and compare products because I think it’s logical to avoid wasting money.
Lately, one thing that's been bothering me is that we often buy fresh fish, salmon, shrimp, etc. She likes to get it fresh, and so do I. However, 90% of the time we end up freezing it because we don’t manage to cook it in time or only eat parts of it. This bothers me because buying fresh is more expensive than buying frozen, and I think it’s wasteful. I don’t mind buying fresh and happy to spears a bit extra on quality produce, but feel we should then take advantage of that fact (taste & quality). If we’re going to freeze it anyway, I think we should just buy the frozen equivalent.
My girlfriend doesn’t understand why this annoys me. She thinks I’m being a penny pincher, which I’m not. I’m happy to buy fresh, but again seems pointless if we won’t use it fresh. She argues that if we buy fresh and then freeze it, we know where it came from, but that’s beside the point for me. I’ve explained my issue with this several times, and I don’t think it’s economical. Whenever this happens, I get a bit annoyed because it keeps happening. While it’s not a huge amount of money per item, it’s the mentality and habit that bothers me.
Am I making a bigger deal out of it than it needs to be? Am I getting to riled up over essentially nothing…?