How to Make Efficient Multi-Store Shopping Lists
If you need to get numerous things from several different stores, one specially-designed list can help make planning and shopping easy.
It’s summer! And you know what summer means: camping!
Personally, I don’t understand camping. Great women and men throughout the ages fought against all odds, studied, experimented, suffered defeat, and then triumphed in the quest to invent electricity, indoor plumbing, microwaves, and air conditioners. And how am I supposed to honor their memory? By considering it “fun” to turn my back on their sacrifices and go out into this so-called “nature,” where they don’t even have room service? Heck, they don’t even have rooms!
Nevertheless, my friend Bernice is on her way to the Venus Descending festival. It’s a gathering of people who are into Pagan and Earth-based religions. “The Goddess provides, and this is my chance to thank her in person,” she declared. So she’s gathering all her camping gear and packing it up, in gleeful anticipation of taking it out to a festival and getting it wet and dirty, while she dances around bonfires playing the drums. The she has to bring everything home, wash it, and pack it all up again. I can’t imagine a better way to spend my vacation.
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It turns out that preparing for festivals requires trips to several stores. It also requires all kinds of gear that you’ll never use for anything else. So Bernice has constructed a shopping list of a couple of hundred items that she needs to buy so she can go enjoy nature, unfettered by modern consumer culture.
Her list includes things like tents, tarps, headlamps, dried food, bottled water (to wet the food with), flashlights, blankets, inflatable mattresses, portable stoves, propane for the stove, insulated coolers, ice, sarongs, pirate costumes, ninja costumes, evening gowns, and bacon. Lots and lots of bacon.
Make a Separate List for Each Store
Not only is this one long list, but the items need to be purchased at several different stores. So when walking into Stud’s Sporting Goods, Bernice has to scan down 200 items and figure out which ones she should be looking for at Stud’s. It only took her a couple of trips to realize that while it’s easy to make a list by just writing down everything she needs, it’s hard to use a list that way.
Bernice’s solution was to organize the shopping list by store. She made three shopping lists: she has a list for Stud’s Sporting Goods to buy camping-related items, a list for Saras’s Supermarket for food, and a list for Felicia’s Fabrics for the materials to make her costumes.
That’s a good first step–but for her purposes, it’s not enough. There’s so much to buy that she often thinks of new items she needs; when she does, she has to dig up her lists, find the right list, and add the item to the list.
Now, she has to keep track of multiple pieces of paper, and she is always worried that she’s duplicated items between lists and will accidentally buy two pirate costumes. That would be a tragedy.
Consolidate with X’s in Columns
Making a single list is convenient because you can write all the main items down at once, and simply add new items to the end. But having separate lists makes it easy to quickly find stuff in a given store. Luckily, there’s a way to combine the benefits of both lists into one.
Start with a piece of engineering graph paper. Label the first column “Item.” Write the items to buy in the first column, one per row. Bernice’s items include vegetarian faux beef jerky (I don’t want to know what it’s really made of), an inflatable mattress, and an eye patch for her pirate costume.
There’s a way to have a list that’s easy for adding, and easy for shopping.
Now, label each additional column with the name of one of the stores you’ll be visiting for your shopping run. Bernice labels column 2 “Stud’s Sporting Goods,” column 3 “Saras’s Supermarket,” and column 4, “Felicia’s Fabrics.“
For each item, put an X in the column (or columns) corresponding to the store where that item can be purchased. The jerky gets an X in Saras’s Supermarket, the mattress gets an X in Stud’s Sporting Goods, and the eye patch gets its X in Felicia’s Fabrics.
Now, when entering a store, Bernice only needs to scan down that store’s column, looking for Xs. When she finds an X, she knows that item can be found at that store. This offers the convenience of just having one list for writing down items, with the benefit of easy-to-scan columns that create a separate shopping list for each store–without your having to rethink every item from the beginning, each time the shopping list gets consulted.
Consolidate with Checkboxes in Columns
Bernice loved this technique so much that she started using it for everything. However, she noticed that when she was scanning down a column, her eye would be on the right side of the paper, in one of the store columns. To mark off a purchased item, though, she would have to scan over to the left side for the checkbox, making it easy to lose her place in the list.
So she proposed an improvement: instead of putting an X by every store where an item can be bought, put an empty checkbox. Then when you buy the item, you can check it right off, since the checkbox is already where you’re looking. If an item can be found at more than one store, put a checkbox in both columns. So then when you buy the item, you can just check off all the relevant boxes for that item.
Bernice is awesome.
Gotta run–I have to help Bernice carry her shopping bags in from the car. She got everything she needs, and she and Melvin are off for a week of “camping.” And drumming. And communing with the Goddess. I’ll wait here and watch Netflix.
To sum up: shopping lists are well and good, and to make it super-fast to construct one, use engineer graph paper. Label columns with store names, and every time you add an item, just write an empty checkbox in the columns of the stores where you can buy that item. When you go shopping at a store, read down its column. The items with checkboxes are your shopping list–so once you have an item, just check it off.
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About the Author
Stever Robbins was the host of the podcast Get-it-Done Guy from 2007 to 2019. He is a graduate of W. Edward Deming’s Total Quality Management training program and a Certified Master Trainer Elite of NLP. He holds an MBA from the Harvard Business School and a BS in Computer Sciences from MIT.Â
