Grocery Lists: Personal as Diaries : You Are What You List Informal Marketing Survey Says

Many people wad up their grocery list and leave it in the market cart after they’ve finished shopping. I began noticing these small scraps of paper and started collecting them, which gave me something more interesting than bunches of carrots and beets to bring home. It became a challenge, like a prize in a candy corn box, to find a piece of this supermarket flotsam during my weekly prowl through the food aisles.

I pictured myself assembling valuable original research of Nobel-prize caliber. I fantasized that my work would lead to a Ph.D. in being a housewife. Or, perhaps it would be judged important marketing information by some advertising agency and I’d be given a vice president’s job. Better yet, I pictured a cultural anthropologist years hence documenting life as seen by 20th-Century shoppers, crediting my collection.

But now as I thumb through the 50 unorganized and uncatalogued bits of raw material, I realize their true value is in what my imagination constructs about the authors. Each little note reveals the personality that created it. For instance, on the back of an orange telephone-message slip, a fun-loving person has scribbled, “butter, popcorn, rolls, cigarettes.” And you can’t help but admire the care taken by someone who noted just three words on a lined tablet, tore it off raggedly, and carried it to the market: “cottage cheese, salad.”

Let the Good Times Roll

And don’t you picture at once the character who wrote on the torn half of a post card, “gin, wine, gravy mix, soda, vegetables, nibbles and cupcakes?” Yet another believer in letting the good times roll wrote, “honey, vinegar, booze, cheese, fruit.”

The shortest list in my collection carries only the one-word reminder “lemon” on a rather large piece of yellow paper. The longest list covers both sides of a 3x5 card, and carefully indexes 32 needed items, including such generic instructions as “lunches--home and work” and ends with “sheets, fabric, shoes, filters,” proving just how “super” that shopper’s supermarket must be.

The only list I know for certain was written by a man consists of 28 items on paper with “From the desk of” and his name neatly printed on it. He has indulged in a rare bit of organization--each item was numbered. He has even carefully checked off each purchase with a pencil slash after tossing it into his cart.

Surely the most succinct game plan ever constructed for a Thanksgiving dinner must be the total of 14 words of planning on this list I found one November afternoon: “turkey, celery, onions, rolls, cranberry sauce, Wally will bring frozen peas, potato buds, pies.” And to think it takes national magazines whole issues to cover the topic.

Lower Buyer Resistance

I have always accepted the market experts’ opinions that some products are impulse items, placed near the check stand for when the shopping list is finished and fatigue has lowered buyer resistance. That’s why I blinked when I saw on one list, after the eggs, vanilla and sugar were listed, an item in capital letters: “one caramel apple,” obviously for someone who plans self-indulgence in advance.

Grocery lists are as personal as a diary, intended for one’s own eyes alone, so misspellings abound. But several lists are as hard to decipher as a prescription blank, due to poor penmanship and some personal form of shorthand. I can picture the poor writer in the marketplace, trying to decipher his own odd abbreviations.

It is interesting to notice the different types of paper people have grabbed for their lists--a page from a shorthand notebook, pest control company notepaper, the backs of bank deposit forms, colorful kitchen stationery with “Notes” printed on top next to a cute chicken sketch, and--most frequently--bits of inexpensive, plain paper in various pale hues. There is even one list scribbled on an old envelope, my own personal preference because it is sturdy and holds coupons. But whatever the paper used, the notes are almost without exception wadded up, almost with a vengeance, it would seem, once their usefulness is over.

The items appearing most frequently on the lists? Eggs and milk win, hands down. Another popular favorite is the vague entry, “meat,” confirming for me that most people shop as I do, without an idea in the world what they’re going to put on the table next, but hoping the meat counter will offer some inspiration.

A Snoopy Nature

Fifty bits of discarded trash, collected and cherished by a bored shopper with a snoopy nature who loves to pry into the most inviolate secrets of her fellow shoppers, and now about to be chucked out. And only because I store them at the back of my kitchen shelves, and they are pushing forward, forcing coffee cans and oatmeal drums to fall on my head when I open the cupboard.

But even I do not know for sure: Can I resist the temptation to start all over again? Why just yesterday I slipped on a piece of wet notebook paper in the rainy market parking lot. I shook it dry and read, “Lottery ticket for M,” and stood pondering, “I’ll bet M. is this woman’s son and it’s his birthday, because here’s chocolate cake,” too. Oh dear, she forgot the candles.