Span Alaska Grocery Order

In addition to placing orders for dry goods at Walmart or on Amazon, 

we do about three orders a year through Span Alaska.  

Span Alaska allows you to order refrigerated and frozen items like cheese and meat, 

which for us is priceless.

We are lucky that our housing came with an extra standing freezer in our laundry room.  

We were getting down on food in there, mostly meat, 

and I don't want to come back in the fall to an empty freezer. 

So we set about getting an order together about a month ago.  

The nice thing about ordering from Span is that their dry goods price in the catalog includes shipping.  

Unfortunately, when ordering frozen or refrigerated items, that's not the case.  

The price per pound to ship to Marshall is $1.71.

 Generally Joe (a veteran teacher and Josh's BFF) gets everyone together for an order, so our orders' total weight is 1000 pounds.  If you can get an order of 1000 pounds or more, you can get bypass, which means the shipping is free.  We have been able to do that every time this year. On this order alone the free shipping saved us $290.00.

Once we have filled out our order sheets, Joe scans them and emails them to Span.

Roughly three weeks later we have our delivery.

Once the order arrives, Josh and Joe work their butts off delivering box after heavy box to anyone who placed an order.

It's a very exciting day, and even the boys get excited when the Span order comes.

Lasagna!

Hot dogs!

Cheese! (Sharp, Medium, Shredded Mozerella and String)

Broccoli!

Pork Chops!

Chicken nuggets!

Lunch Meat!

The only bummer is that sometimes they are out of something. For instance, yesterday we didn't get any butter or sausage.  I am really bummed because we need butter, and we like to have sausage for our pizzas.  So we will have to figure something else out, or place another order and hope next time it comes.

 (Sidenote: we figured out that Gogurt can freeze, so last time they had some at the co op Josh bought like ten boxes of the stuff, and we are rationing it out to the kids. Brilliant!)

The reason I don't do all grocery shopping through Span is that it's like shopping at Costco. You get a LOT of items instead of just one or two.  Ordering through Walmart, I get to hand pick how much I get of something.  

Although, I am thinking of doing a little more of my grocery shopping through them, just so I can contribute more pounds to the overall total.  Especially items like flour and sugar, where I use a lot and they could add up quickly.

It sure feels good to have that freezer full of good food for our family.  And it's nice to know that it won't be empty when we get back here in August!