It hasn’t always been easy for Jinger Duggar Vuolo to talk about her upbringing as part of the family that found fame on 19 Kids and Counting. It’s been “hard and scary,” she’s said, to discuss the “disturbing” religious environment Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar raised her and her numerous siblings in. But there are aspects of being part of such a large family that are wild in other ways, and I’m talking about that grocery bill.
Part of what enthralled America to the Duggars was the sheer number of mouths that needed to be fed. Jinger Duggar Vuolo and her husband Jeremy tackled that very issue on their podcast, rewatching a TLC special from 2006 — 16 Children & Moving In, which came two years before the series that would become 19 Kids and Counting. The special showed the family making their way across an Aldi in Arkansas before hitting the checkout, with Jim Bob Duggar saying:
We’re at $677. We got seven cartloads, which is a little under $100 a cart, so that’s pretty good.
OK, whoa, let’s break this down. These two parents brought at least a baseball team’s worth of children into the grocery store and filled SEVEN carts. That must have been madness. Then to spend $700 in one trip is what Jinger Duggar called “insane.”
However, at less than $100 a cart, I have to agree with Jim Bob here, because these days I’m finding that just one cartload of food can hit $300 easily. Thanks, inflation! Jeremy Vuolo addressed that exact point, saying:
Imagine what those prices would be today. I mean, he spent $700 for seven cartloads of food. ... That's got to be $2,000.
That sounds more like what you’d pay in a month for rent than what you’d spend on food in a week! No wonder Jim Bob Duggar called grocery shopping a “major operation.”
Thank goodness it sounded like Michelle Duggar knew how to stretch her dollar. She bought in bulk, and Jinger recalled always being very frugal and not letting anything go to waste. Her childhood consisted of lots of canned fruits, soups and bean burritos. Michelle listed off a few items on her grocery list during the TLC special, saying:
Probably today, we will buy like 24 cans of milk, we're going to buy a case of butter which probably will have 48 in a case, and we'll stock up with frozen burritos, as many as they've got. We're going to fill up the freezer and the pantry today.
Jinger Duggar confirmed the family would “easily blow through” seven carts full of food, so I’m sure these wild outings to the grocery store were just part of normal life for the Duggars.
It’s been 10 years since 19 Kids and Counting was canceled and four years since the spinoff Counting On was axed by TLC. It doesn’t sound like Jinger has plans to return to reality TV anytime soon, but at least we can still hear her talk about what life was like on The Jinger & Jeremy Podcast. You can also delve into the Duggars’ darker side by streaming the docuseries Shiny Happy People: Duggar Family Secrets with an Amazon Prime Video subscription.
