What is a Household Inventory? A story of Right-sizing your Circle

Want to know something about me? I hate running errands. 

So I started what I call a Quarterly Stock Up. Here’s the story.

This idea was born when we moved to Spokane in 2019. One of the reasons we moved to Spokane is because it has a lot of beautiful, compact, pre-war neighborhoods that allow us to walk, bike and bus most of the time and rely less on a car for our main mode of transportation. (Want to know something else about me? I love urban planning and I’m passionate about safe multi-modal transportation!)

We walk/bike/bus to our son’s schools, our library, our grocery store, the pool, loads of parks and downtown. 

And since everything is so close and compact in these pre-war neighborhoods, I consider anything farther than a 7 minute drive FAR. (This is especially hilarious given that I spent the first 26 years of my life in the Phoenix area where everything is spread out it seems you can’t get anywhere in less than 15 minutes.)

So once I realized I could easily engineer my life here so that I hardly drove, I was on board!

When my oldest son was born, we were living in Georgia at the time and the closest grocery store was the Walmart Neighborhood Market. And, about the same time my son was born they started offering Grocery Pickup. Seeing as how I love a good experiment, I tried it out and unsurprisingly, I was a fan. 

Fast forward to our move to Spokane, and the Walmart was 15 MINUTES AWAY! 15>7 minutes. AND I HAD TO DRIVE ON A FREEWAY TO GET THERE. I was torn. I loved the ease of ordering online and picking up my order. I loved the prices. I even got attached to some of their in-house brand items. But I was unwilling to drive 15 minutes with any regularity (dramatic I know). 

So I hatched this plan: I would stock up on all of my non-perishable food items and household essentials every quarter. 

I placed my first “Quarterly Stock Up” order in….March 2020. Yes, right before everything shut down due to COVID (talk about good timing!) Can you imagine how happy I was to have a full 3 month supply of all the essentials like toilet paper, cleaning wipes and canned goods?

This is a classic example of how Right-sizing your Circle can be an effective strategy to save you time and energy.

When I’m thinking about household tasks, I like to visualize them as a circle. Let’s take shopping as an example. 

At the top of the circle (12 o’clock) your shopping is “done.” You’ve procured the items, brought them back to your house and put them away. Through the course of living we consume the food/products and make our way to the bottom of the circle (6 o’clock). This is when you find yourself needing to “go shopping” again. This may happen on a schedule (shopping is done on Saturdays) or when prompted (shopping is done when we run out of something we need, like milk or other key ingredients.)

If you have a bigger circle, you are going shopping less often, but it takes more time and energy to get it “done”. If you have a smaller circle, you are doing the shopping more often, but it takes less time and energy to get it “done”. 

Essentially a “Quarterly Stock Up” is a VERY LARGE shopping circle for non-perishables/household items. I tried it out and found that it dramatically reduced the errands I had to run and the time I spent shopping. This system works so well for me that I’m still doing it 5 years later. And I’ve realized there are a ton of benefits beyond running fewer errands.

1. I save time. 

1. When we’re meal planning and populating the grocery list we only have to consider if we need more produce, meat and dairy because the non-perishable ingredients are covered. 

2. Shopping is faster because we are getting less items and we can completely avoid the middle aisles of the supermarket (although, when I say we I really mean my husband - he does the weekly shopping at our house. This is the strategy of sharing in action!)

3. Putting away the food is easier and faster since we have less to put away. 

4. We avoid last minute grocery store runs (or Target runs) for that one item we forgot. We never run out of non-perishable ingredients. 

5. I’m not driving 15 minutes away every week to buy stuff that I can buy at the grocery store right around the corner. 

2. I save mental energy

   1. I’ve created lists in the Walmart app that makes it easy to reorder items. This reduces decision fatigue while I’m shopping. I don’t have to decide which cereal or dishwashing detergent to buy. I’ve already made that decision and I keep making it again and again. 

3. I save money

1. I reduce impulse buys since I’m shopping less frequently and avoiding a lot of the store. 

2. I save money. Walmart's prices on non-perishable items are quite good and much cheaper than buying them at the supermarkets close to me. 

Some cons to this system.

1. It does take me about 50 minutes to put everything away. For me it is worth the trade off for faster weekly grocery shopping. 

2. My quarterly order is not a small amount of money, so you have to have the money saved ahead of time. I do believe I spend less money overall. 

3. You have to have somewhere to store the items. For several years we stored all of our Stock Up items on a shelving unit in our basement (it was 5 ft tall, 18 inch deep, 24 inch wide.) It was tucked away in our utility room and that worked for us. 

I do think there are ways to get a lot of the benefits of a Stock Up while mitigating some of these issues. You could do smaller, monthly orders. You could just stock up on a smaller subset of items like canned goods or household products only. 

Do I think this will work for everyone? Nope. Because everyone’s situations and problems are different. I was trying to solve for a very particular issue: I hated running errands and wanted to minimize their frequency in my life. 

This is exactly what I’m trying to help people do with their own household systems. Identify your pain points and use the strategies outlined in the RESET model to discover solutions that will work in your life. 

If you want to learn more about the RESET model, my workbooks walk you through my proven process to find solutions and create systems that work for you.

I also offer live workshops and one-on-one support. 

If you specifically want support with setting up your own Household Inventory System, book a call with me to get started.