You Need a Shopping “map” for Your Grocery Store
I really dislike navigating inefficiently through the grocery store – for example, when I walk up and down each aisle and then realize that I still need PB and tuna, and go through three more aisles and then go back to sour cream again, because I always forget about this taco night. But this summer, this dislike of inefficiency has reached a climax because I spend the summer in a soccer field-sized grocery store rather than my usual small and crowded Brooklyn Trader Joe stores. I found myself wandering around Pricechopper from end to end and back like a stoned hippie on the Grateful Dead, overflowing with choices and planning my debut film about consumer culture and alienation.
So I made a grocery store map. I saw this offer a few years ago on Ask Metafilter , the premier grocery shopping list by geographic location. I once spent an additional ten minutes and recorded down the aisle everything I buy from Pricechopper, in the order in which I go down the aisles. I keep a copy on the refrigerator where I can tag things when we’re done, a copy in my car in case I make an impromptu stop, and a copy on my phone in case I forget the paper version. But usually for a big store for a week, I just shoot a copy from the refrigerator.
For example, the first pass I come across at my local Pricechopper store is groceries / baked goods / specialty cheese. So this is the first column on my list: all our usual vegetables, fruits and breads, and then a place to write down unusual items: cinnamon rolls, which I only allow myself occasionally, mascarpone, etc. I only have a few items in the aisles 1, 2 and 3 because it’s pet food / wine / personal care products and stationery and I get these things elsewhere (and I don’t have a pet. HOW DO YOU CHOOSE DOG FOOD? TOO MANY OPTIONS THIS IS A PASSAGE TOO LARGE).
I used Excel, but it doesn’t matter what you are using as long as it has columns and rows. (And if you’d rather keep things digital, you can easily make a version of this on your to-do list of the app of choice.) This person on Pinterest built (a project! She’s a designer, and you know how they are) a PDF of her shopping list. which you can probably customize for your store, but it might be easier to scroll through it with your notebook and then type it in. A friend who is hyper- organized laminates her shopping card for TJ and uses a dry erase marker to mark what she needs … but she’s the kind of person who knows what she’s doing day in and day out and will get it. laminated sheet with her as she heads to the store. I’m the type of person who gets hit by the repetitive lunch event every day, so I need to duplicate many copies. I plan on updating it regularly too, so I don’t want to be tied to the whole laminated thing.
So I no longer need to buy sour cream or PB. My reward for new-found performance? Pack of 12 cinnamon rolls.