How to Automate Your Grocery Shopping and Save Time

We all want to automate our lives and save time. Here's how!

Automatic bill paying is so last decade. Helpful yes, but it's time to take it further. It's time to automate your shopping.

I hate grocery shopping, just ask my ex-girlfriend. After we broke up, I found myself with the "daunting" task of doing all the grocery shopping! As a card-carrying lazyman, I searched for ways to make grocery shopping more efficient and less time consuming. Online grocery shopping-where you place your order online and the grocer delivers your foods to you--seemed like a nice convenience for a mere $10 fee, but it wasn't the winning solution. You can read about my complaints about onine grocery shopping here, but the keys were that there was no backup system for when your item was out of stock-leaving you without many of the things you need and forcing you to...go to the grocery store to get it-and you had to be home for long periods of time to receive your delivery, which were often hours late...not good for the busy among us.

Fortunately, Amazon.com has come to my rescue with its subscribe & save program. The idea is that instead of putting in a normal order for your item, you make your order regular - for example, I'd like 10 widgets sent to me every 3 months, please.

I began my experiment with a simple test item - microwave popcorn. I actually found that the subscribe & save price was much cheaper than the grocery store price. Prices are hit or miss; some products are much cheaper on Amazon and some are comparable to the grocery store. I haven't found much that's been more expensive than the grocery store, which is nice. Coupon cutters, however, may be disappointed.

It was great! The popcorn was identical to what I'd get in the grocery store, but it was delivered straight to my door. And with the subscribe & save program, there's no shipping or delivery fees. I've since expanded my subscription list to anything that comes to mind - canned goods, bags of rice, peanuts, batteries, even toilet paper. And I plan to add to the list whenever something comes to mind.

Now, I only go to the grocery store for meats, fish, frozen foods, fruits, and vegetables. Grocery shopping is so quick and easy, I don't even mind it any more!

Strategies

The idea behind subscribe & save is to determine how often you need a product and have it sent to you regularly. If you're not comfortable with that or if you don't use products at regular intervals, you can just set the product to be sent to you every 6-months (that's the longest interval) and, whenever you're running low on that product, simply log on and click "send me an extra delivery." I don't think the program was intended to work that way, but it seems like a good system and something that Amazon should consider implementing formally.