Collecting grocery shopping lists

My 18-year-old daughter works part time as a grocery store courtesy clerk. She bags at the checkout stand, stocks shelves, helps customers find things and walks customers to their cars to load their groceries.

Last night, Emily showed me a plastic baggie filled with a colorful assortment of folded up notes. "I have been collecting shopping lists," she said. "We're supposed to throw any litter in the trash." But she collects the shopping lists instead.

"You can learn a lot about people from their grocery lists," she explained. One by one we examined them. About half were written on lined paper from notebooks big and small. One short list was written by someone with a shaky hand on a Post-It note with a drug company logo. "She was probably old," I said, assuming that it was a "she" because the shaky handwriting was like my mother's before she died at age 85.

Another list was on of NASCAR promotional literature. "Is beer on the list?" I wondered. Nope. Most lists were on one side of the paper. One had only four items. "Couldn't someone remember only a few things?" I asked. Then I thought that with my lousy memory I might bring along such a short list.

The blue ink on one shopping list was smeared and the paper wrinkled. "I got it from a cart that had been in the rain," said Emily.

It was pretty obvious that one long list was for Thanksgiving supplies -- Dressing, gravy, cranberries, marshmallows, etc.

Sadly, there was a lot of bad spelling. But I suppose even if you spell tomatoes wrong you still know what to buy. It's not like you're writing for a large audience.

I asked Emily if all the lists were written in English. She said, yes. I told her that if she worked in Southern California it would be a different story. "I bet half of them, maybe more, would be in Spanish."

Yup, it's interesting what you can learn about people by looking at their shopping lists.

Read Emily's blog.