PETALING JAYA: Vonica Khoo is a meticulous shopper. Armed with a little notebook and her cell phone strapped to her hand in calculator mode, she recorded her purchases as she manoeuvred through the aisles of Giant hypermarket last Wednesday to get her groceries for the month.

Lim family's grocery basket. (pdf)

She does this each time she shops.

"So that I only buy what I need and I know how much the bill is going to be," she said.

Khoo's habit can only be expected, given the housewife's accounting background. Needless to say, Khoo is deft with the calculator.

"If there's an offer, I calculate whether it's cheaper to buy the regular pack or the offer pack, which could be in a different size," she said.
Khoo crosses out the items she has picked up in her notebook as she moves along the hypermarket.

She prefers to shop alone so that she can concentrate on her shopping.

"We used to take the kids, but it's actually pointless for them to tag along as we shop. So now I plan it around the time they have activities."

She makes it a point to shop at the hypermarket in the middle of the month and during weekdays as she does not like to be rushed through her shopping.

However, Khoo does not always go for the lowest price, but sticks to certain brands, for instance, alternating between Maggi and Kimball for her sauces, and Nespray and Fernleaf for milk powder.

Her purchasing habits also revolves around her 16- and 14-year-old children's preferences -- she gets sotong and fish balls, potato wedges and four packets of pasta from the cold section of the hypermarket.

Rex button mushrooms, canned tuna, croissants and spaghetti sauce also feature in her shopping list, as Khoo tends to vary her menus with fusion cooking.

She prepares dishes such as cream of mushroom spaghetti and chicken ball macaroni soup for their lunch.

Otherwise, a typical dinner at her home is pork ribs and fried kailan one day, then egg seaweed soup, fried curry chicken fillet and sawi cooked with oyster sauce the next.

Her accountant husband, Tony Lim, who works in Shah Alam, packs leftovers from dinner to work every day as he finds it a more healthy alternative.

Two or three times a week, Khoo frequents the wet market in SS2 to get her fish and vegetables.

"The night market here is also a good place to get fish, although sometimes it's hard to determine the freshness in the dark," she said.

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