I suck at shopping for groceries. I don't mean a little bit, I mean a lot. When I head to the local store for bread, milk, cheese, and a couple other things, I come back 3 hours later and feel like I lived through the Blair Witch Project in real life. It's that feeling of being completely lost, all the time that does it. I don't know what it is, but I can never remember the layout sufficiently between one trip and the next to really make any kind of efficient trip to the grocery store.
Well apparently I'm not the only grocery-impaired person in the world. Dave Cheong is a software developer that had the same issues as I do with shopping (although probably not quite as extreme as me), so he decided to do something about it. Dave wrote Grocery Shopping Helper. While the name doesn't sound all that interesting, the concept is really clever, and it's sure to actually speed up your shopping trips.
This is how it works, described by Dave himself:
- Start by making a list of the items you are interested in. Not just the items for this week (like a conventional shopping list), but for ALL the items you are, might be or used to be interested in.
- Just for the very first time, go to the store and note down all the aisle numbers against every item you have on your list. Your supermarket customer service might already have a list defined, so ask them first.
- Come back to this site and enter each item into the text area below (separate the description from the aisle with a comma).
- Generate a report alphabetically by clicking the 'Generate' button. Print it in landscape and stick it on your fridge for future reference. This is a convenient lookup index which you can use to find the aisle by the item description. You only need one of this.
- Click the browser's back button. Select the "Sort by aisle" checkbox. Generate a report by aisle and print it in landscape. Unlike the previous report, you should print as many copies of this as possible. You will need one of this every time you go to the grocery store.
- At the start of each week, get a fresh aisle report and stick it on your fridge.
- Each time you run out of something, say milk, place a mark in your aisle report next to the item indicating the quantity you need. You can use the alphabetical report to look up the aisle number.
- Take each weekly aisle report when you go to the shops. Simply walk from one end to the other end of the store (ie from the first to the last aisle) and pick up the items with marks alongside as you go past them.
8 steps to a psychosis-free shopping trip - is it worth the effort? In my case, I think so. What do you think?