Clever Christmas shopping

The thought of all that extra shopping at Christmas blows my mind, not to mention the budget. It’s tiring and stressful to get through the madding crowds in the run-up to Christmas, fight your way through the long queues to the tills at Checkers or Pick ’n Pay and then navigate that wobbly trolley with the stuck wheel out to the car, unpack in the hot sun and wind, and drive off home again.If the outing was for fun stuff and you had heaps of money, then I can see shopping can be enjoyable but grocery shopping? Duh, not.
Worst of all, it’s when you get home at Saturday lunchtime and unpack your shrinking pile of groceries that you realise, actually, you forgot to get tea bags and mince pies and the relatives are descending for a pre-Christmas visit this afternoon. You look through your list – that’s if you are even organised enough to even have a written-down list – and realise you left several vital items off. Soooo annoying.
This is where the SmartShopper grocery list assistant can be handy. Simply speak the name of a grocery item into this electronic device, which mounts on the wall or magnetically affixes to the fridge. It remembers and organises your list into categories like produce, drinks and household cleaners, and prints the list at the touch of a button.
SmartShopper recognizes 2,500 common household items, and more can be added. Here in South Africa I suppose we would add Mrs Balls chutney, boerewors and Marmite. At around $100 (more than a thousand rand) it’s a touch pricy for South Africans, but can you imagine how useful it would be?