SpecsyShopping lists
Stop writing the same grocery list every week
Around eighty percent of a weekly shop is the same eighty percent every week. Rewriting it from scratch is the actual waste of time.
- Product
- Lavazza Qualita Rossa
- Size
- 1 kg beans
- Usual price
- £13.50
- Lasts
- About 5 weeks
The list is not the hard part, the detail is
Writing "coffee, milk, bread" takes twenty seconds. Remembering that the coffee is a specific one kilogram bag, that the milk is lactose free, and that the bread is the dark sourdough rather than the one next to it, is what takes the effort.
That detail gets rebuilt from memory every single week, and lost every time someone else does the shopping.
Once a product is stored properly, it can go back on the list with all of its detail attached, in one tap.
How a repeat item is stored
- The exact product name and pack size
- A photo of the packet, which makes it unmistakable in a shop
- A note on where in the shop it usually sits
- What it usually costs, so an unusual price is visible
- How long it lasts, which turns it into a reminder rather than a memory
Which items are worth storing properly
Not everything. Storing detail for apples is a waste of a card.
- Anything where a brand substitution would annoy someone
- Anything with a dietary requirement attached
- Anything you buy on a cycle, coffee, tablets, pet food
- Anything hard to describe to another person
- Anything you have previously bought the wrong version of
The list rebuilds itself
Once your regular products are cards, the weekly list is a series of taps rather than an act of memory. Add the repeats, add whatever is unusual this week, done.
The immediate benefit is time. The larger one is that the list is now specific enough for anyone in the household to shop from it.
Questions people ask
Do I have to add every product I ever buy?
No. Twenty or thirty repeat products cover most of a weekly shop, and the rest can stay as plain list items.
Does Specsy know prices?
It stores the price you recorded. It does not track shop prices, so what you see is your own history rather than a guess.
How do I add a product properly the first time?
Photograph the packet while it is in your hand, in the shop or at home, and write the size next to it. That is the whole setup.