How I managed to buy 23 items from a store in under 15 minutes
Shopping Hack
15 minutes is all I had. I had to buy 23 things from a store I hadn’t been before. Also I needed to buy it on the same day, I did not have the luxury to order it online and wait for it to get delivered as I needed it the same day .
It is in situations like this that you are pushed to think out of the box.
Whenever I am faced with a problem , I start thinking if this had happened in Toyota ,what would the solution be?
You got it, I decided to plan it out .
I looked up stores which provided information about aisle numbers of the products stored in the shelves. Luckily for me I found two such stores. I narrowed in on one. I already had a list of things I needed. I pulled up a spreadsheet . Made a note of the exact item I needed after glancing at a couple of brands. I also noted the aisle number and price of the item so that it is easier for me to look for them in the shelves. This is what my spreadsheet looked like.
Note that I sorted the aisle column in an ascending order , so I do not go back and forth (Spaghetti diagram to the rescue, lean thinking 😎). If you are lucky you can get a friend to help you too.
I also made some prioritization in case we were running out of time , the red ones , just had to be picked up. Even if your excel skills are average this entire exercise will take you less than 15 minutes .Now I will tell you the value of those 15 minutes I spent in planning.
#1 Met the target. 23 items in less than 15 minutes!!
#2 If you are anything like me , you cannot go to a store and stop yourself from looking at things which were never on your list. The stores have these wonderful tricks of how they place items to lure customers to buy things they don’t even need. Though I am well aware of it, it is hard to resist it some times. But if you go with a spreadsheet like this, you are a warrior on a mission and there is no distracting you!
#3 The sooner you get out of the store, lesser is your chance to get exposed to COVID!
Now that is reason enough to adopt this method.
With the time you saved by using this tool, feel free to leave a comment for me 😁