Things I Used to Hate: Grocery Shopping

I used to hate grocery shopping. Not because of it can get expensive, or that I usually end up with more things in my cart that weren’t on my list than were originally on. And that’s where my hate came from: I hated making shopping lists. It never seemed like Lindsey would like what I put on, or she didn’t care for my list. It usually turned into a fight, and nothing is more unpleasant than grocery shopping while pissed off.

I came up with a solution to fix this problem though.

Wednesday night, I told Lindsey we were going to go to Mcallister’s to eat. It was getting colder, and I wanted a sandwich and soup. I got little objection, but she insisted that we go grocery shopping afterwards. I tried to finagle out of that by saying we didn’t have a list, and we would do that before going. She was not about to go through the door without a list, thus a fight was in the fix.

But not this time.

I grabbed a notepad and two pens and said I would explain later. After our meal, I tore the sheet into two halves and gave Lindsey a pen. The plan was this: we would each make out a list. We would then start at the top of this list and then take turns reading what was listed. If we each had the said item listed, we would put a check mark next to it. If it wasn’t, we would talk about whether we really needed it or not. Not only did this give us a fun approach to making the dreaded grocery list, but it gave us both equal say in what we were going to be buying. If one of us wanted something that wasn’t on the the other’s list, we had to state our case about why we couldn’t live without said item. We then went shopping with this new list of compromises and had fun picking out the goods.

I still don’t like grocery shopping, but at least we enjoy making the shopping lists.