Grocery Shopping

I dislike shopping period, or perhaps I dislike shops, because shopping online is definitely not unpleasant. Of all the stores I dislike shopping in grocery stores have to be about the worst.

To start off, it is akin to washing dishes, you are never done with it. Then there is the grocery cart (a.k.a for my European readers, trolley)! They are usually sticky from the last child who sat and dribbled candy or cookie all over the handles, and unless they are brand new, they will have either a wobbly wheel or at least one wheel that doesn't work or wants to go in a different direction than the others.

Here in the US, the carts are huge! or is that just in Texas? I am barely over five foot tall and I have to reach up to hold the sticky handle to push the cart. Fortunately our local supermarket does supply sanitizing wipes at the entrance to wipe down the cart, and frequently the container of wipes is not empty.

We have made a ritual out of our grocery shopping. Every Saturday morning, we first have breakfast at one of our favorite Mexican breakfast restaurants, actually, they serve lunch and dinner too and we often have dinner there, but we love their breakfast and they are five minutes from our local grocery store. Grocery shopping for us is almost like a military operation - actually compared to some more recent military operations, it is probably a whole lot more efficient.

Larry found an app that works very well for us, since then there a lot more similar apps have appeared, but we stick to our first choice, OurGroceries.com.

We can add items to our list online, from our computers, or from our phones. The app allows us to categorize items into a logical order and I have also added recipes and, at a click of a button, I can add all the necessary ingredients for that recipe to my shopping list.

When we first got the app I took photos of the signs over each aisle in the supermarket, so that I could organize the categories in the comfort of my home. I numbered each category in logical sequence, and now, so long as they don't reorganize their shelves, which of course they do from time to time, we can fly through the list skipping the aisles we don't need to look at, and checking items off our list in order.

I push the cart ( though when I had my foot surgery last year I got to try out their electric fat lady carts ) and Larry mans the list on the phone.

We can frequently have breakfast, complete the weekly grocery shopping and be home in less than 90 minutes. That really does reduce the pain. I am not sure that I want to shop for groceries online, but I think I could be convinced, as soon as Amazon decide to support that service in Austin, TX.