do you want a server farm with that bottle of milk?

This is kind of embarrasing, but what the hell, i'll share it anyway.

While I'm generally messy, disorganised etc., I have created order in one particular part of my life: the 'master shopping list'.

this sounds like the nerdiest, most anal thing imaginable. People -- even nice people like other programmers -- think this is a freakish and terrible thing to use. Well, stick it Jack. The list works a treat!

what i've got is an excel spreadsheet that contains every item we buy from the grocery store. The spreadsheet is laid out in the exact same order that the products are located in the store.

this master list makes it much easier to prepare for a shopping trip, and makes it almost impossible to forget things when you're there.

The first problem this list solves is those rare items that you run out of much less often than you go shopping. it's so easy to forget that you're almost out of toothpaste, or deoderant.

the biggest benefit of this list was something quite unexpected. thanks to this list we now only need to go shopping once every 3 or 4 weeks. And when we do go, the trips are quick, and stress-free. (dairy products and fresh fruit n veg are a different, much faster, weekly, task)

The question is: do i want to take this nerdy list one step further? the next thing would be to add a "minimum shelf level" for each item, as well as a re-order level. For example, "reorder pizza bases if there's less than 2 remaining -- and restock them up to a level of 5." It's too nerdy... yet tempting.

but it doesn't end there... oh no. there's three more steps i can see beyond that.

That's not nerdy, nerdy is when you take that list, put it into a database, that syncs to your smartphone, and allows you to generate a list on the fly when you go shopping, checking off items as you put them in the basket.

Ummm. Oh .....

I'd like my fridge/food pantry to not only keep track of what items are in there, but how much there is. That is, there might be a 1L carton of milk in there but how full is it? When does it expire? Warn me when the expiry is soon and suggest some recipes that require milk based on other food items I have. Correlate that with my statistical milk consumption and suggest I buy a smaller carton next time. If I run out of sugar, I'd like to know which of my nearest neighbours has a spare cup I can borrow.

@Jason:
>a 1L carton of milk...how full is it?

Yeh -- this is the tricky stuff. Items where you need to track the level within the item, not just the number of items.

We have the same problem with our milk at work. We need to reorder when the bottle gets about half empty (half full? optimist?)

i've drawn plans for an infrared milk-level reader (placed in the fridge), or a weighing platform that the milk rests on.

i hadn't thought of the use by date problem.

so the extra factors are:
consumption rates, delivery lead times and product shelf-life.

we'd need a standup scrum each morning to discuss how our milk estimates compare with our published targets.

overthinking??

I can't see how determining whether or not you need milk is a problem that needs to be solved with lasers.

How about a bio-metric id system to track access to different items! And, if you are dieting, you could link that up with nutritional information to help budget and audit your calorie intake!

I have absolutely thought about doing this on a PDA. My wife thinks it's the silliest thing.

I also wanted to put my music collection into a database on one so I could shop at the record store and never accidentally pick up a dupe. (also put in the titles of CD's I've sold because they're crap, so I'm not fooled again...)

Fly your geek flag high!

The problem is this only works if you always want to eat the same things. But what if you like a lot of variety in your meals and only eat some things once every couple of months?

What you need is a way to say "I want to eat these meals in the next week. Correlate the ingredients I'll need with the contents of my kitchen, and tell me what I still need to buy. Then sync the shopping list with my PDA."

I was part of a project that created some software to do this once, but you have to do the inventory correlation manually. Maybe you can extend it to connect to your bar-code scanning system?

http://egroup.definingterms.com/

You forgot about the scanner near the toilets which counts how many TP cubes left!!!!

Hey Leon, there's a rumour in this house that this system bears all the hallmarks of a certain female member of your household, one who labels the pantry shelves too ...

RFID might be nice for quick inventories though, no gates, just a hand-held reader
1. press button
2. have inventory
Maybe more effective in large, house-sized listing and labelling projects, insurance perhaps. Tag cost will be a problem at pantry/fridge-sized volumes, or we wait for manufacturers to tag. Wait, I've got it, just start ordering for your neighbours as well, and then their neighbours, and their neighbours, until you're as big as say WalMart, then mandate.

Thats not so freakish. I've used a word doc in much the same way since my daughter was born. It saves a lot of time. Until the store changed its layout..... then I was up a creek.

Deja vu, sort of. Many years ago I created a FoxPro (yikes!) coupon database. My wife and I would pick out the coupons from the Sunday paper each week and enter them into the database. We then placed the coupons in a small accordian folder. The pocket the coupon went into depended on the coupon type and the pocket number was recorded in the database.

Then before we went grocery shopping, I printed out a report of the coupons such that the coupons appeared in the exact order of the route she traversed in the grocery store, and sorted by expiration date and showing the accordian pocket number.

It worked great. We always maximized our coupon use, never had coupons expire on us, and never had a messy pile of coupons. We were actually saving up to $10 per shopping trip through coupon use.

But it took a lot of manual work to enter the coupons, and when our daughter was born and sucked all the time out of our lives, it all went out the window. It was cool for a while and I always thought I could eliminate a lot of the manual work if I could figure out how to scan the coupons with a bar code reader, but never got back to dabbling with it.

http://feeds.feedburner.comjustinking73.webhost4life.com/r/Techcrunchjustinking73.webhost4life.com/3/127890729/

Thanks for the link above, anonymous person!

It heads to: "Keep Your Fridge Stocked with Ikan" http://db.techcrunch.com/c/ikan

Which talks about IKan (http://www.ikan.net/) -- a new product that performs some of what I talk about here.

fascinating... if a little disturbing.

Why dont you post your excel list so people can take a look at it and perhaps give some feedback on it.

@HStudio
>Why dont you post your excel list...

No thanks HStud man. I don't need to share my grocery list at this point in time ;-)

Here's a movie showing a new single-purpose domestic robot that performs very valuable and noble task

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tXmGYk_A_c

The link above (one trip) is a nice mozilla app, cookie based, for simple shopping lists.

similar navigation structure to an Ipod application.

on a similar theme -- 37 signals have put out Ta Da for Iphone. (See link above)

the link above is to a marshall brain article on fast food stores where you order your meal from a kiosk.

Several years (and several PDA's) ago, I had an HP Jornada with Pocket Excel. I would use it in much the same manner as described. When we walked around the grocery store, I would update the quantity we were buying and the current price. Column to keep tabs of pricing per purchase and an overall current spending. This also took into account taxed/non-taxed items so the overall current spending included out local sales tax rates.

If we found something while browsing that piqued our interest, it went into the spreadsheet in the appropriate location.

This all works provided everyone one on the trip is a hunter and not a gatherer. I am a hunter. My wife is a gatherer. She would just as soon wander around looking for things to striker her fancy. I prefer to use my store map and get just the items we planned on and get out.

Needless to say, my wife does all the shopping by herself now :D

do you want a server farm with that bottle of milk?

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