Springville Herald | 1951-04-05 | Page 7 | Housewife Spends 15 Days per Year Buying Groceries

'Housewife Spends 15 Days ' Per Year Buying Groceries Each Utah housewife can get an extra vacation of more than a week from household activities this year. A little more than seven full days in the 365 could be added to the leisure time of every home-maker home-maker in the state if she would modernize her food shopping habits, hab-its, a recent study reveals. The research disclosed that most of Utah's 134,977 housewives shop for groceries every day, staggering total of 49,131,628 hours, or approximately ap-proximately 2,024,655 days. By I shopping only, twice a week for food, which now is possible because modern household refrigerators can hold more than a week's supply of food at a time, each housewife could reduce grocery shopping time by half. Whereas everyday shopping shop-ping requires an estimated 15 full days a year of each homemaker, the twice-a-week system cuts the figure to. 7.5 days. The study also revealed flaws in women's food shopping habits. For. example, 66 per cent waste valuable valu-able energy by concentrating grocery gro-cery purchases into Friday and Saturday, although they could more easily shop, during the first three days of the week when stores are less crowded. One reason advanced ad-vanced for the housewife's adhering adher-ing to week end shopping habits is that she has not yet fully realized that modern refrigeration keeps perishable foods many days longer than was possible with the old ice box which long ago made necessary neces-sary both frequent shopping and "loading up" for the week end. The error of every-day shopping is most prevalent among city homemakers, the research showed, because of the around-the-corner accessibility of stores. Suburban dwellers have learned to buy twice or three times a week, and the rural Saturday shopping habit is still fairly general in" the state.