There’s a reason so many fascinated viewers tuned in to watch Michelle and Jim Bob Duggar raise their oversized brood of children on 19 Kids & Counting for years: Just about everything they did was so different from the way most households functioned. That included grocery shopping — a massive feat that was chronicled on the show on more than one occasion.
On this week’s episode of the Jinger & Jeremy podcast, Jinger Duggar looked back at one of her family’s shopping trips that was featured on the Duggars’ 2006 TV special, 16 Children & Moving In, and it’s pretty wild to see it all happen in hindsight.
The family was doing a major stock up at Aldi.
In the clip that was shown on Jinger and Jeremy’s podcast, Michelle can be seen telling the cameras that the family was planning to “fill up the freezer and the pantry today.”
“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,” she said.
The grocery trip was chaotic — and expensive.
Not only were the kids with their parents in the store, but Michelle also managed to ring up quite a total: $677 after they filled up seven shopping carts with food.
Jeremy estimated that, in 2025, that kind of grocery haul would probably cost about $2,000, which doesn’t seem like an unreasonable guess.
“We would easily blow through that food,” Jinger said.
Jinger did acknowledge that this shopping trip was a bit of a bigger production than usual for the TLC cameras.
“For this scene, more of us probably went to the store than usual, but typically we could get anywhere from three to four carts of food, so mom would take a couple of us to help,” she explained.
And because checking out with that much food always took a while, Jinger said her mom tried to be as mindful as the other shoppers as possible. “And my mom, my sweet mother, would be like, ‘It’s OK. You can go in front of us. It’s OK. You can go in front of us.’ Because she knew that it was gonna take a minute,” she said.
They had a method for putting all those groceries away, too.
“When we would get home, we’d carry in all the groceries and we’d put them on the floor of the pantry. We would not put everything away immediately,” Jinger said. “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.”
It sounds like an absolutely exhausting experience — now, imagine doing it on a regular basis to feed a family of 21.
Props to Michelle for making it happen!
