What I’d Tell My Own Mother - A Store Manager’s Guide to Grocery Shopping After 60

My mother shopped every Saturday for sixty years. One morning in the cereal aisle, I showed her the little number on the shelf tag that tells you what you’re really paying per ounce. She looked at it for a long time, then looked at me and said, “Walter, why didn’t you ever tell me that?”

This book is everything I should have told her.

I spent forty-six years in the grocery business: pushing carts, stocking shelves on the night crew, running the dairy and frozen department, and twenty-two years managing stores. This is how a grocery store works from the back room. It covers why the shelves are laid out the way they are, when things really go on sale, what the words on a package legally mean, and which foods deserve a little more care once you’re past sixty-five.

It’s not a book of tricks, and it won’t scare you about your food. It’s a calm, plain guide to shopping smarter, eating safer and wasting less.

What’s inside:

• 26 short chapters, one topic each. Every chapter follows the same simple format: a story from the store, the one rule to remember, the steps to take, the mistakes to avoid, and where to check the facts yourself.
• How the store works. Why the milk is in the back, why the end-of-aisle display isn’t always a sale, the weekly calendar behind the ads, and when markdowns happen.
• How to read a label. The unit price, what “best by” and “sell by” really mean, “frozen dairy dessert” versus ice cream, and the nutrition label for people watching salt and sugar.
• Department by department. Produce, meat, dairy and frozen, cheese and deli, the pantry and the wine aisle.
• Food safety after 65. The short list of foods to heat, choose carefully or skip, keeping food cold from the store to your kitchen, damaged cans, and how to check recalls in two minutes.
• Money. The weekly ad and a simple price book, stocking up without waste, warehouse clubs for one or two people, loyalty cards and coupons, and receipts and returns.
• When getting to the store gets harder. Delivery and pickup that actually work, and shopping for one or two.
• Walt’s Back Pocket: nine pages to print and keep. A price book, a pantry log, a freezer log, a shopping list in store order, a label decoder, a temperature chart, a cupboard card, a wallet card and a recall log.

Large type and wide margins throughout. Facts and figures are drawn from the USDA, FDA, CDC and other public sources, listed by chapter at the back.