E-bike, good ROI from grocery shopping?

Life Hacking
1

Hi there,

I’m thinking of buying an e-bike to help reduce our monthly grocery bills and getting around a bit more. Also to do fun excursions with the family without too big costs like gondolas and similar. Maybe you can help me see if this is a good idea or not?

So we are a family of 4 who live on the country side. No car, only using public transport and rarely our bikes. We live on a steep hill and there are lots of really steep hills around. We are sporty and our little dog needs 2 big walks a day so we are quite sporty overall, just not when it comes to biking :blush:

We currently get our groceries delivered once a week from leshop, on average 1200 CHF per month. I do mealplanning and we drink moderate amounts of alcohol and eat a lot of vegetarian food.

I’m thinking that by having an e-bike I could instead of buying from leshop, I could take the e-bike with the bike trailer and do a weekly food shopping run at the closest aldi/lidl shop, ca 45 min away one direction. This would then only be possible to do during the snow free months (?).

I’m thinking we could save 30% or so on groceries during these months by doing this? One thing I would like to do before buying the e-bike is to rent one (ca 50 CHF) and try these things out: carry it out of the house (too heavy?), adding a bike trailer, going food shopping 45 min bike ride away etc. To see if it actually works or not.

If this would work, the e-bike could potentially pay for itself after a year or so?

What are your thoughts?

Thanks!

2

For sure going to lidl/aldi by bike seems a good idea. Can not really help you with the ROI

1200 CHF seems a lot even with leshop.ch. Have you try to buy less processed food, more vegetarian food and food in bulk ? like vegetable, frozen vegetable, rice, lentils, pasta ect.
Maybe you can buy vegetable to farmers in the region
You should track which food cost so much.

3

I don’t know about you, but if it took me an hour and a half to get to the grocery store by bike, I would starve. :stuck_out_tongue:

Maybe you can pick up some groceries each day on the way back from work, and still get heavy/bulky items delivered.

1 Like
4

If you only consider the ROI, E-Bikes are still more expensive than used motorcycles last I checked.