Organize Your Grocery Shopping

So I used to purchase those long, narrow notepads to use as a shopping list.  I would always end up writing in my own categories all over it so that I could better streamline my actual shopping at the store.  But sometimes I wouldn't leave enough space on my sheet for a certain category, or the categories ended up being out of order with the grocery lanes, and it took too much time for this busy mama to write everything down.  Then it dawned on me...there must be a better way to do this!

So as I often do when looking for a great answer to my problem, I turned to Etsy.  {If you STILL haven't checked this site out, you MUST!!  Seriously, whenever I "google" something, it ends up eating up too much time, and directing me to the wrong place.  So, more often than not, I go straight to Etsy to do a search, and there I find what I'm looking for quickly and accurately}.



Anyway. Once I arrived at my answer on Etsy {that is, major choices for custom grocery shopping lists!}, I started perusing designs I liked.  But what it ulimately boiled down to for me, was not a design, but just a streamlined, easy-to-navigate shopping list.  So what did I do?  I decided to make my own.  Partly for saving money, but moreso, because I wanted to integrate a few different elements of the ones I saw on Etsy into one grocery shopping list that fit me just right.

Now, mine aren't nearly as cute as the ones you can find and purchase on Etsy.  But, for now, these will work.  Unfortunately, I'm no graphic designer...so I'm thinking I may hire my graphic designer friend to make a cute design for me later {once I actually decide what design it is that I want!}.

The main thing here is that you need to figure out which items you are purchasing over and over again.  The next most important thing is knowing how your grocery store is set up, and arranging your food categories to go with the flow of your store.  Once you have that figured out, it's pretty simple.

Like I said, I'm no graphic designer, so I just made simple bullet points {I actually used the "o" letter because I wanted to be able to "x" what things I needed to get at the store} with my most frequently purchased items, and then added some blanke "o" to add in anything else I might need.  I also added a weekly menu section at the top.  And the kicker? The phrase I used {which I admittedly "stole" from a cute one I saw!}: Time to Break Out the Fat Pants.  C'mon now.  How appropriate for grocery shopping, right?!

I'm proud to say I've been using my little system I set up for a few months now and am loving it!  The one thing I don't like is remembering to print off my shopping list and keep it downstairs with my coupons. I wish I had a whole pad of these, ya know?  So I'm contemplating laminating it {you can do this without an actual laminator, by the way...just sandwich your paper in between 2 pieces of clear contac paper}...then I'd be able to reuse it again and again with a dry erase marker.  Would save paper and ink, too. 

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