Simplifying the Grocery Shopping Routine

Guest post from Mystie Winckler

 

 

It is startling how much time and energy we can spend on the entire grocery process — from plan to list to purchase to pantry to meals. With so many recipes and so much food available as options, just making decisions about them all can be draining.

Making decisions of all sorts, even those related to simple things like what goes on our grocery lists and what does or doesn’t go into our cart, wears down our conscious will. The more we use that up, the more likely we are to make impulse decisions that we will regret later.

Simplifying the Grocery Shopping Routine:

The way we minimize decision-making fatigue is by setting up parameters and routines that remove as much decision-making from the equation as reasonable.

• Do you decide every week which store you’ll go to and what day you’ll go?
• Do you try to evaluate every item you walk by at the grocery store, wondering if it’s a good deal and if you should or should not buy it?
• Do you start from scratch every week (or worse, every day) with your meal options, having no idea even what the possibilities are until you browse your cookbook, your previous plans, or (worse) Pinterest?

If any of these are true, then the grocery process is demanding too much of you, requiring energy that would be better spent in more significant pursuits.

Here are a few ideas to turn decisions into routines for food-related activities:

• Choose the best 1-2 stores for groceries in your area. Just shop at those and don’t waste time and gas going all over town in search of the very best deals. Offering those deals still works in the expensive stores’ favor, and you’re not likely to be an exception, even if you think you are.
• Have a master grocery list that you always start with, rather than starting from scratch with a blank page every time.
• Narrow down the items you buy, and only keep recipes that use those ingredients. Always keep those ingredients on hand, and you can always have options for meals. This is the tactic of my eBook, Simplified Dinners.

For more tips and techniques for simplifying grocery shopping, hop over to my blog, Simple Pantry Cooking during the month of October, for my 31 Days of Simplified Grocery Shopping series!

How do you keep grocery shopping simple?