DIY Planner - My Grocery Shopping List - Comments

Heh

shris — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 18:37:11 -0500

Hah.

Not a genius. Just familiar enough with databases to want to try it out for a while. I think I used it for two years or so, maybe 3. It was definitely worthwhile when the kids were so small, I didn't want to drag them around every week trying to shop. The monthly thing was good for a while.

Might go back to monthly runs for staple goods now that we've joined a CSA for our produce. Then the weekly runs would be limited to milk.

I would not share what I built with the general public because it's not simple to use the way software programs should be. The database was ugly and made just for my idiosyncrasies, my idea of what's 'tolerable'. And I would definitely NOT want to be on the hook answering questions, troubleshooting, providing upgrades, etc.

I highly recommend coming up with one's own list of recipes, deciding how many times to use them per month, then multiplying out the ingredients to come up with a minimum stock list. That's all the DB did, anyway.

shris

Loving Shris's Hybrid approach

Nichelle — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 17:17:18 -0500

Shris, you are a genius for creating such a tool from the ground up! I wish I had your knowledge & patience to create my own database that can perform the same functions!!!!! If ever you care to share your creation, I know many of us would benefit.

But until you share, I will use shoppingmate. The program could use some serious updating. Still, I find its features to be awesome. It reminds me of Cook'n & Food Storage planner ( a really, really old...dinosaur... version, however) but it is more focused on inventory & grocery lists rather than recipe management ( it has this feature though).

For $10, its not that bad. if you have the time & patience, making your own database, like Shrish, is THE Best deal!!!!

Nichelle

Meal Planning database

Angela harvell — Wed, 1 Jul 2009 17:06:10 -0400

Would you mind sharing your database? I know you worked hard on it, but would you kindly email it to me. My entire family has to change our eating habits -- high cholesterol, aggravated glaucoma, chronic constipation, pre-diabetes, incontinence -you name it. Teh biggest annoyance is meal planning as we try new recipes and grocery shopping with a list (not just buying what we always buy). I would very much appreciate it. Access is useful, but extremely complex.

Your kindness and consideration are appreciated.

Angela

Save multiple trips to grocery store :)

Ena — Fri, 29 May 2009 17:57:43 -0400

hey i found this site,list2shop.com.

Its a free to use grocery shopping list website. It helps to create, organise, maintain and print your grocery shopping list. You can either use without registering with limited features, or register (free of cost and minimal information) and use it with more features. It has a huge list of grocery items and grocery stores available in US. If you do not find your item or store in our list, as a registered user you can simply add it in your private list. You can even create a list of your favorite items and stores, so that you don't have to search through a huge list every time you create your grocery list.

This surely helps me save time,money and multiple trips to the grocery store. Let me know if you like it.

Grocery lists - timely now more than ever

JWhitt — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 04:54:25 -0400

I thought I had remembered this topic from more than a year ago...with gas and food prices soaring, we're trying our best to plan well when it comes to shopping. My husband is a military veteran, and though the base is about an hour away, it still pays to do most of our grocery/essentials shopping at the commissary- as long as we plan it! Otherwise, there are just too many good deals to pass up and all of our savings are wasted. These tips are wonderful and will help to make the big shopping trip less painful.

One thing that has helped is in organizing the coupons better. I invested $1USD on a cheapo 4x6 photo album. Each photo pocket holds coupons for different needs: canned goods, cleaning products, breakfast foods, etc. I use a post-it note on each photo pocket and list the coupon and expiration date. That way I know exactly what I have when making the list and don't let the good coupons expire like I have in the past.

There are just so many good ideas and tips on this site -- i just love it here!
Jenn

UCE

reepicheep — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 06:57:31 -0400

Yup, spam. Had this been emailed to me privately I'd have considered it as UCE (unsolicited commerical email), which in my view is just as much of a nuicance as spam. Would fail on prime requirement number one for a software product: does the product run on more than the program loader called Windows? It might get a second chance if it runs on Linux or Mac OS X? But it'd still be consigned to the recycling bin as UCE. Though Windows-only makes it spam.

"on topic" spam ?!

ygor — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 21:51:57 -0400

I agree.
I could accept one on-topic plug, but two is not necessary.
It could be more acceptable if the product got better reviews :)

-----------------------------------
"I think the surest sign that there is intelligent life out there in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us." (Calvin and Hobbes/Bill Waterson)

SPAM or spam?

reepicheep — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 06:50:29 -0400

It would be difficult to get SPAM down the wire; SPAM are rather protective of their trademark. ;-)

I considered the double-postings spam (sic) too, which is why I was so critical of the product. But then so were the reviewers at TUCOWS who gave it several scores of "1 out of 3" and a comment improved --- the original version must have been spectacularly awful.

However, this was the first on-topic spam posting I've ever encountered. I'll give them that; so much better than the usual chinese shoe shops or bogus drugs that we receive.

Looks like SPAM to me

ygor — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 23:22:32 -0400

or unsolicited ad-ware, which is equally as unwanted.

Considering this is the second post hawking that product from an anonymous poster.
-----------------------------------
"I think the surest sign that there is intelligent life out there in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us." (Calvin and Hobbes/Bill Waterson)

Easier with ...

reepicheep — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 09:36:17 -0400

From the few online screenshots of this product it doesn't appear to have any real advantage over maintaining the same information in a set of connected spreadsheets. This is the level of (spreadsheet) application set for UK A-level IT coursework projects. And I hope the product is easier to navigate than the self-promoted web site.

As another alternative, one of the demos of Omni Outliner is organising a shopping list. Wouldn't be too difficult to extend tha demo with financial and historical data. I recreated the original demo based using the layout of the two major supermarket chains with shops in my area. OmniOrganiser has tick-boxes; easy to select those items to be purchased and then print just those parts of the outline. OmniOutliner has a major advantage over Shoppingmate: it runs on Apple Macs and was shipped as part of Apple's Mac OS X (Tiger release).

And a further alternative would be to use the online stores that major supermarkets and high-street grocers now offer via their web sites. These have recipe suggestions and auto-transfer of ingredients lists to virtual shopping baskets, transaction histories --- for some even including reminders of regular purchases. Only problem with these online shops is one doesn't get to select the fresh fruit, veg or meat for oneself.

My preferece would be to create those linked spreadsheets for data entry and transaction analysis then have an embedded URL to hook into the various online shops to order the goods.

But there really is nothing simpler than a written/printed shopping list carried in one's hand while walking up the aisles of a grocers, butchers, bakers.

Would you like to try Shoppingmate

Anonymous — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 07:52:54 -0400

Shoppingmate can remember what you have purchased. It should help you without a Palm Pilot.

Squares Solutions Company

Shoppingmate provides a better tool for manage your shopping.

Anonymous — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 07:38:41 -0400

Shoppingmate helps you to organise and control your grocery shopping. It keeps your purchase history. It shows you how to cook your daily meals with your own recipe books. Recipes can be imported into Shoppingmate easily. It helps you to make your meal plans for everyday or occasions. It reconciles your money transactions. It pops up system messages and your messages when it is launched. It gives graphic and summaries presentation of your shopping and financial information. Shoppingmate provides you a powerful tool to total manage and control your shopping easily, efficiently and financially.

Squares Solutions Company

More efficient grocery shopping

Richard Gerard — Sun, 20 May 2007 14:40:26 -0400

I love this article by SusanBeth. The author is certainly a well organized and practical person. She does not, however, address the problem of getting all those bulkey, painful to carry, and cumbersome plastic bags full of groceries home to her door. I invented a tool (Gadget) that makes this chore painless and much easier.
They also allow you to buy more groceries with fewer trips to the supermarket. You can learn more at http://www.baggybuddy.com

Similar idea, with a twist

Friend of Pens — Tue, 15 May 2007 18:02:30 -0400

I like the ring-on-thumb idea, and gave it a try the last time I went to the store -- very elegant solution!

At our house, we have a fairly regular shopping list -- so regular, in fact, that we just keep it in email, already sorted in aisle order. When it's time to make a trip, Mrs. Friend of Pens runs through the list and removes anything that we don't need, adds in anything special that we do (rare, the master list is pretty long) and sends it to me at work. I stop at the store on the way home.

I used to just print out the email, but now I print it and slice it up into aisle-specific strips of paper, punch the corner, and slip on to a ring. Slip ring on thumb, walk through store, shop/rip, shop/rip, shop/rip... what a time-saver, and no worries about juggling my whole list around. Again, very elegant!

I used to use my Palm Pilot too

emoore — Tue, 15 May 2007 16:00:57 -0400

and a shareware program called HandyShopper (for Palm based pda's). I love HandyShopper. It is so much more than just a grocery list. If you join the HandyShopper yahoo group there are a bunch of different databases to download and play with. Grocery lists, household chores (a la FlyLady), Christmas planning lists, travel check lists, etc. I used to combine it with paper, doing my big monthly shopping from HandyShopper and weekly fresh produce trips from paper.

My Grocery Shopping List

SusanBeth — Tue, 24 Jan 2006 10:21:55 -0500

I should probably start by saying that I hate grocery shopping. On the other hand, my household insists on eating, and we can't afford to hire a housekeeper or eat out every single meal or even exist on takeout, which means someone has to buy groceries. My husband offered to take on the job if I'd take over maintenance on the cars. Uh...

Given that I was stuck with the job, I decided to put some organizational skills to work to smooth out the process as much as possible. In particular, I wanted to eliminate the two hassles that irritated me the most:
1) I wanted a way to create a complete list of the groceries that were needed. No more emergency runs to the store for that forgotten strawberry jelly and two cans of tuna!
2) I wanted to progress through the store efficiently. No backtracking from the Dairy section all the way back to Produce because I forgot to get the raisins while I was there!

I've been tinkering with my system for nearly a year now, and I thought I'd share the current version. It seems to be mostly working well, but suggestions for improvement would be most welcome. (Yes, you really must hate a chore to devote this much time to minimizing it.)

The list itself

The core of the system is the form I created to use as my shopping list. It's not complex: A single 8.5" X 11" sheet, in landscape orientation. Margins of .3" all around. I inserted a table with four columns (the full width of the paper) and 14 rows, and then copied the table in again. The result is a sheet of paper divided into eight 'mini' shopping lists, each roughly 2.5" inches wide and 5" long.

I filled in the first line of each mini-list with the name of one of the 'areas' my grocery store breaks down into: Deli, Produce, Dairy, Meat/Fish, Frozen, Bakery, 1st, and 2nd/Unknown. The first six labels are self explanatory -- the specialty areas, generally located around the outside walls of most grocery stores. The store I use (which calls itself a superstore) has divided the interior shelves into three subsets of aisles, two for the 'usual' things you find in a grocery, with a third in between full of ...well, whatever. Beach toys, charcoal grills, plants, clothing. 1st and 2nd refer to the two chunks of 'grocery' aisles.

Use of the list at home

I print out ten or so copies at a time. The entire stack is stuck onto the front of my refrigerator by four strong magnets. A pen on a plastic coil thingy is hung on a magnetic hook beside it.

Throughout the week, whenever I (or any other resident) notice that something is getting low or has been used up or simply decide it would be good to have on hand, the item gets written onto the appropriate mini-list.
The night before I do the shopping I go through the grocery store circular and write onto the list the 'special sale' items I want to take advantage of.
Finally, I plan menus for the upcoming week -- generally just what the main course and side dish will be -- and add to the lists whatever is needed for those dishes that I don't already have in the pantry. For example, last week the decision to make stuffed peppers meant I added only a pound of hamburger and four green peppers to the list, because all the other ingredients were on hand.

Final preparation of list for usage

I extract the topmost sheet from the magnets, and cut the mini-lists apart. I stack all eight up, and punch a single hole in the upper left corner. (Scissors and a single hole punch are kept in a kitchen drawer.) Then a single 'hinged' ring binds these eight lists PLUS my store's 'membership/discount' card AND my debit card into one neat little stack. (Yes, you're allowed to punch holes in credit/debit cards, just avoid the magnetic strip and any raised print. Get a 'spare' card to use for this, if you don't want your main card defiled.)

At the grocery store

All I take into the store is that ring with the lists and the two cards. I 'wear' the ring on my left thumb -- no more dropped or lost lists for me! I can easily consult the lists, and both hands can still be used pretty freely for grabbing those 14 pound tubs of kitty litter or wrestling fruit into clingy plastic bags.

Once inside the store, I move smoothly from area to area. Having a list of just those items in that department really helps me focus. Instead of being distracted thinking about items that are in other areas (What flavor of ice cream should I buy? Should I get one or two dozen eggs?) I see just the relatively small number of items I need to think about at the moment. Radishes, lettuce, tomatoes, grapes, oranges. Zip, zip, zip, into the cart they go.

Before I divided up my list, I often found myself backtracking for an item I'd overlooked in the entire jumbled list, sometimes the full width of the store. Now I virtually never have to retrace my steps even within an area. I march steadily along, tossing stuff into my basket, a model of organization. I am Hannibal astride my elephant, unstoppable and triumphant! (Hey, these little fantasies can help motivate you to do chores you dislike.)

Once I've acquired all the items needed in a particular area, I rip that list off the ring and crumple it into my pocket, and move on to the next area. Once all eight lists are crumpled, I am DONE. Head directly to the shortest checkout line, scan the two cards, and escape from the store! Hallelujah! (Yes, I do hate grocery shopping. I think I mentioned that once before.)

A couple of points someone may wonder about:

Yes, this isn't the way to spend the least money possible on groceries. I don't use coupons, I don't cherry pick the specials from multiple stores, I don't use a calculator to figure out if the 12 oz can at 1.39 is a better deal than the 14 oz. can at 1.59. OTOH, when an item is on sale at a significantly low price, I do pick up several for the pantry and so over time a large proportion of what we eat was actually acquired at a sale price. Bottom line, reducing how much time I spend grocery shopping is more important to me than cutting grocery costs to the absolute bone. YMMV.
Yes, this system requires that everyone who adds items to the list know which area of the store they are found in. This hasn't been much of a problem. Most things are obvious, once you internalize the difference between fresh produce and canned/bottled items. In addition, that last mini list is labelled "Second/Unknown." When someone doesn't know where an item belongs they put it there. I move items onto the correct mini-list at the same time I add circular sale items.

That's the whole system! Between not having to backtrack while in the store AND not having to make at least one 'emergency' grocery run each, I figure I save at least an hour and a half a week. Which may not sound like a lot, but 1.5 X 52 is 78 hours! Nearly two full work weeks worth of my time moved from the 'Have to do a detested chore' to the 'Have fun!' columns. I love it.

I'd love it even better if I could save yet more time, so if you have suggestions, please share them here.

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D*I*Y Planner - My Grocery Shopping List - Comments

Heh