Jinger Duggar Remembers Family Grocery Runs With 7 Carts — and Estimates the Cost Today

A Nostalgic Look at Grocery Shopping with the Duggars

On the latest episode of The Jinger & Jeremy Podcast, Jinger Duggar Vuolo and her husband, Jeremy Vuolo, took a trip down memory lane, revisiting their early days on the TLC show 16 Children and Moving In. The couple shared some fascinating insights into how they managed grocery shopping with their large family.

One particular scene that stood out was a clip where the Duggars were seen shopping for groceries using seven carts. Jinger reflected on how normal it felt to see the family moving around the store with so many items. “It's crazy to see this because, yeah, that was normal,” she said. The clip showed them purchasing 24 cans of milk, a case of butter, and plenty of burritos, which added up to nearly $100 per cart.

Jeremy asked if it was typical for the family to spread out in the store to gather items. “Imagine what those prices would be today,” he remarked. Jinger agreed, saying, “Oh, yeah. Insane.” Jeremy estimated that the total could have been around $2,000, highlighting just how much the family spent on groceries back then.

While Jinger acknowledged that they might have used extra carts for the filming, she admitted that the family often went through a lot of food. “More of us probably went to the store than usual,” she added. “But typically, like we could get anywhere from three to four carts of food. And so mom would take a couple of us to help.”

Jinger also shared some other memories, such as buying honey nut cereal by the case and occasionally choosing a special kind for someone’s birthday. She mentioned that the family always kept extra butter in the freezer in case they ran out. As a mother of three children—Felicity Nicole, Evangeline Jo, and Finnegan Charles—Jinger still practices this habit, purchasing canned goods in bulk.

When it came time to check out, the family couldn’t put all the groceries on the belt at once. “You can't put seven carts on the belt,” Jeremy noted. “That would take 45 minutes to check out. How long did it take your family to check out of the grocery store?” Jinger replied that it always took a long time. Her mother, Michelle Duggar, would often let others go ahead of them, knowing it would take a while.

Jinger also recalled that her father, Jim Bob Duggar, had a system for organizing the pantry. “When we would get home, we’d carry in all the groceries and we’d put them on the floor of the pantry,” she remembered. “We would not put everything away immediately. It was like all the refrigerated stuff and frozen stuff went in the freezer and fridge, but there was always a system for it. So my dad, he loved having it organized like a grocery store.”

In addition to the Duggars’ story, the podcast also featured Lydia Plath, who shared how her own family received groceries. “I think a lot of things that stand out to me is how healthy we were,” she said. “Like, we grew most of our vegetables. We grew as much as we could.” Instead of going to the store, her family would meet a semi-truck every two weeks at the top of their driveway to receive a pallet of groceries. Once a month, they would get another pallet of dry goods like oats and raisins, buying everything in bulk.