Jess and I have been in a routine of shopping for up to five households a week for quite a number of weeks now. Her role is to drive the car and take one trolley round the shop. I don’t drive (well, I do a bit but it’s complicated!) so I organise the lists, take another trolley and do all the talking. We now have the task down to a fine art and have compiled the following bullet point list, which may or may not help others!
- Request the shopping lists from friends and family at least a day in advance. Most people will change their minds about what they want a few times, or write down items which are not clear – ice-cream (any particular flavour?), grainy mustard (French or English?), organic chicken (will free-range do?)
- Insist on lists being e-mailed to you, as you can then copy and paste onto sheets and print them out. Our system is that I do our own shopping, plus one friend. Jess does her grandmother and one or two friends. You need to be able to attach your list in a single sheet to your trolley. We used to get given hand-written lists (saves paper apparently! Oh no it doesn’t and it is just a faff! One week Jess had three hand-written lists attached to her trolley!)
- Make sure the car you are using is not full of bags of recycling that you need to take to the tip when it reopens! If it is, just dump the bags into another car or a shed!
- To go back to lists, your clients need to specify if they are not happy with substitutes for particular products. If they don’t specify, just buy them something similar! This is so much more flexible than shopping online, when I think you have to either say substitutes or none – not specific to each item! The first week we went shopping after lockdown, we bought quite a few alternative vegetables , as there was not much available! So people had to put up with sweet potatoes when they had asked for ordinary maincrop! Cabbage will be fine instead of broccoli of course?! Coconut flour was all that was available that week! Today one friend asked for either self raising flour or sultana scones. Neither were available, so I used my initiative and bought her plain flour, bicarbonate of soda and cream of tartar.
- Only two forms of payment should be acceptable. Either they pay you online afterwards, or you take their credit/debit card. Am I really going to be dishonest with someone else’s card?! Cheques are an absolute no no. I don’t have time to go and cash them and I want the money now!
- Use quick check with a scanner taken round the shop. In fact, gather together all the My Waitrose cards you can, and get lots of scanners – one for each client! (other supermarkets are available!)
- One new trick we tried today was putting a named sticker on each scanner; it saves getting the scanners muddled up! It is a good idea to remove the stickers afterwards.
- Using quick check means that you can pack the bags as you go. You can allocate different bags in your trolley for each person. With my own trolley, I start off very organised and then have so much shopping for our own household that I end up with a complete mess that I have to reorganise in the car afterwards.
- You must go to the shop not being stressed about having to queue up. Treat it as a fun outing. Sometimes we chat or shout across to other people in the queue. Jess usually brings a book. You can always catch up on facebook and bring a cup of coffee in an insulated cup.
- If you are shopping for several households, by all means queue up with the other member of your family who is helping you. If staff ask why there are two of you, it is simple enough to explain. We then tend to split up and take our trollies when we get towards the front of the queue.
- Make sure that you are not going to end up starving hungry, so pick your time for shopping. We usually go mid-morning and end up having a late lunch at about 2:30 when we get back, but that suits us fine.
- Another trick with the list is to take a clip or clothes peg to attach it to your trolley.
- If you are going to forget items on a list, make sure that it is your own list. I hate failing to buy someone’s complete list of groceries.
- Always talk to the staff and greet them with a smile. I always chat to the staff on the fish and meat counter and comment on how good the supplies of meat and fish have been during this crisis. It is also tremendously helpful to let it be known that you are shopping for several households; otherwise our trollies can make us look very greedy!
- If you take a young person with you and they have alcohol on their list, make sure that they have age ID with them! You can read my other blog piece all about what happened when Jess forgot to take her ID – not fun!
- Lastly, if you are buying items for the food bank, make sure you drop them in the crate at the end of your trip. Twice now we have forgotten to do this, so have to store them in the car for the following week.
So there you are, my slightly tongue-in-cheek guide to shopping during lockdown! I think I am going to miss these trips in a funny kind of way when this is all over….