Getting groceries is hard enough: Shopper eases the pain

Growing up, I remember my mother kept a small file of coupons she faithfully clipped from the weekend paper. To keep her grocery store trips organized, my mom would write her list on an envelope and place the relevant coupons inside. This system worked great… until the day I lost her coupons during one of these ventures. (You can imagine she wasn’t thrilled.)

Gone are these days. The advent of iPhone has brought many organizational apps to the masses, a new favorite of mine being Shopper. A $0.99 application, Shopper does much more than create grocery lists. I used it last week while shopping for ingredients to make homemade guacamole, and found it a great way to keep track of everything I needed.

Adding an item to a list is easy, as shown by this screenshot:

I was surprised, however, that “avocado” wasn’t an item already in Shopper’s database. No matter, I was able to add it to the list myself. The final product looks like this:

You can add quantities of items to each category. The little people dancing to the right of each item are Shopper’s nutritional guides. The more stars next to an item, the better its nutritional value. It’s almost like the calorie counts posted in New York City fast food restaurants!

Shopper’s best feature is its barcode scanner. This morning, I had a small bottle of apple juice. Another item not in Shopper’s database, I created it as an item and added it to a new list. Touching the item, and then touching “barcode” activates the scanner. Scanning my apple juice entered the brand (Tropicana) and returned results of which stores near me are selling that exact product.  Pretty much the best way ever to find your favorite foods.

Other items of interest: You can set Shopper to automatically calculate tax (no double-guessing your mental math) and it also includes Home and Garden, Clothing, Electronics and many more categories to suit all of your shopping needs. And if Shopper recognizes nearby stores, it will automatically organize your shopping list to reflect the store’s aisle layout and prices.

Take that, paper envelope and coupons.