My five minute trick for preventing forgetting and backtracking at the grocery store, and for keeping cold items as cold as possible.
Almost nothing is more frustrating to me than realizing I have to walk back across the store for one more thing in the grocery aisles, once I’m in the produce department, especially when I have kids with me, because I know my minutes of pleasantness and cooperation are limited. Over the past five years of being the primary shopper in our household, I’ve developed a grocery list method that mitigates the chances of forgetting something and having to backtrack, that really works. Here it is:
Take five minutes at home to rewrite your list in the order you will shop.
BEFORE 
AFTER 
BEFORE 
AFTER
The four main categories you need to arrange are:
Dry Goods
Produce
Cold Foods (meat/dairy)
Frozen Foods
The ideal arrangement is in the order I’ve listed them above, to keep cold things in their cold places at the store as long as possible, making their stay in your cart and your car before they get to your fridge as short as possible. However, you can reorder the arrangement based on the layout and your needs at the particular store you’re going to.
For example, my Aldi list is in the above order, while my Kroger list is usually Dry, Cold, Produce; Sprouts is Dry, Produce, Cold. (Yes, I shop three different stores to get the best prices, variety, and quality. More on that another day!) Back in my days of shopping without kids, my HEB list went Produce, Dry, Cold, Frozen, because the produce department was a maze located right at the entry doors.
The beauty of having my list rewritten “in order” is that I only have to look at one set of items at a time while I’m in that part of the store, decreasing the likelihood of overlooking “peanut butter” in the jumble of my whole list, and then noticing it later when I see it next to “bananas” while I’m over in Produce, causing backtracking, or worse, forgetting it altogether, causing another run to the store (or living without it).
How to save even more time:
To stack your time savings, group items within each category together that you know will be found in the same place. For example, I would write anything in the baking aisle, then anything in the cereal aisle, then anything in the canned goods aisle, and so on. If you know your store well, you can write each sublist in the order of the aisles at the store! I was a time-saver nerd and did that in MO. I’m still learning my TX stores, but I hope to be back to that point in another couple of months. This also works for the other categories. If you know what you’ll naturally walk by first, put that first on the list, and so on.
I know this sounds kind of nit-picky and fussy, but it legitimately saves me time and sanity every single time I go to the store! Maybe it’s only two minutes per trip, but that’s at least four minutes a week, which is about 3.5 hours a year, or nearly six days of the next 40 years of my life! Maybe I’ll start ordering my groceries online before then, and I’ll really only save two days worth. But the peace of mind I have, knowing I’ve streamlined my grocery shopping for now, is definitely worth it.
Happy shopping, y’all!