How to Save Time at the Grocery Store

We've been sharing a lot of ideas about how you can save money on food by cooking at home instead of eating out. But how much longer does it take to walk up and down the grocery aisles than to order in a pizza? When it comes to grocery shopping, you have a couple of options: you can buy enough food to last you a week or so, or you can make another trip every couple of days. Both can be time consuming, but I opt for buying about a week's worth of food at once so I don't have to go back so often.

Once I'm at the store, I don't have time to browse. The basic solution: make a list and stick to it. I love grocery lists for two reasons. First, they help me avoid impulse buys, which in turn helps me keep my budget under control. Second, they point me to the items I need, so I don't have to spend a long time looking at every shelf trying to remember everything.

At my house, we've found a way to take this supermarket tool even further. We make our grocery lists into spreadsheets.

I know; it sounds super complicated. It's not.

The first column is for our basic list of items (milk, eggs, bread). The second column is for the quantity of each. For staples like milk and bread, we generally don't need to list a quantity because we know how much we need, but this column is important when it comes to ingredients for specific recipes when we might forget how much or many we need.

The third column is the real trick. Here, we list where each item is located in the store. This isn't just about remembering where to find things, either. When the list is finished, it can be sorted by this "department" column, making it super easy to go through the store one area at a time. This way, all the items that are close together in the store are also close together on the list. All the produce is together, all the frozen foods are together, all the dairy is together. You get the idea. Easy.

Here's what a very short grocery spreadsheet looks like:

Calling a department by the term grocery might seem overly broad, but that just means the big section in the middle with all the dry goods on tall shelves. The other departments are self-explanatory, with frozen, dairy, and deli being some other options that aren't listed here. Go ahead and use whatever terms work for you based on your store, and if you know the aisle numbers, even better.

The first time my boyfriend and I used this method, we cut our shopping time down to about 20 minutes for a list that probably would've taken us close to an hour before. No scanning the list over and over to find the items we needed from each department; no doubling back for things we overlooked the first (or second, or third) time. Much faster.