Any of my close friends will tell you how much I hate grocery shopping, and I’m always on the hunt for whatever makes it less of a headache. I’m also trying to learn how to cook healthier meals and live a healthier lifestyle in general, so I take time every Sunday to choose a few meals to make that week that I can feel good about (i.e., meals that are healthy enough to cancel out the guilt I feel when I eat two cookies afterward), and then I make my shopping list.

When I discovered that Publix had a shopping list tool on their website, I jumped for joy. Is the interface awesome? No, but it’s good enough to the get job done with minimal headaches. The best part is that I can email the list to myself or someone else, and the email has checkboxes for each item so I can mark them off as I move through the store. Brilliant! It even tells me which aisles everything I need are on so I can finally curb the habit of going down every row and picking up things I don’t need, like Dunkaroos (OMG, yum!).

While it’s great to have this shopping list in an email, it’s even better to have it within the mobile app itself. That way, when I realize I forgot to add something to the list, I can quickly search and add it from my phone without having to get to a computer to use the website.

All of these are reasons why I will drive farther to pick up groceries. The time I save in the store doing something I despise makes driving a few extra miles to Publix worth it. I’m thankful Publix looks out for horrible (but healthy!) shoppers like me, and I’m thankful I spend as little time as possible within the confines of the grocery store each week!