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Once in a while, my wife sends me to a REAL supermarket, with a shopping list (she writes me an a piece of paper, or texts me a message).

I was wondering is there a fast way to for-fill the list, without iterating the whole super a dozens of times, till I believe I've got everything.

(I found this question very helpful in life: pair-socks-from-a-pile-efficiently, and hoped I can use the community's help in my own situation)

I don't know/remember where each item is located in the supermarket, and the list I'm given is never sorted (for example, vegetables are listed all over the list, and not one after the other). Also, usually I get continuously text messages with more and more items to buy, while I'm still in the super.

My approach is planning a path that would assure me I iterate the whole supermarket, and pick items from the list while walking that path.

Two ways I was thinking about:

  1. foreach item in the super (n) I pass: check if I have such item in my list (m), will give me an O(n*m) complicity, which not so efficient.
  2. "dividing" the shop to rows (p): standing on the beginning of each row I can read the sign or see which sort of items I should find there, than iterate my list, trying to remember all items in list I should find in that row. than walk that row and add those items to my cart, should give me O(p*m) complicity. but this never really happens: I can't remember more than three of four items from my list I'm expecting to find in that row, and even if I do, I often forget an item and have to use this algorithm again (lets say q times), which comes to: O(q*p*m).

A couple of comments I'd like to add:

  1. when getting to the vegetable section for example, I found myself going over that section many times, cause my wife is a great cook and adds all kinds of vegetables in the list (v). Sure I can't remember all those veggies, and rather not stop next to each vegetable in the market (or should I?), to check if I've got it in my list.
  2. Crossing out each item I put in my cart (or making a new list with all items I still don't have) is very time consuming for me, so I rather just go over the whole list each time I try to find if I still have an item to add to my cart.
  3. Another case is the second you get in your car before going on a family vacation. You remember you forgot to take this that and though, running back to your house, getting some of these items, forgetting others and going back again. Is this a similar case?
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  • If you can get the shopping list ordered corresponding to the store's layout, that's a massive help (I'm talking real-life here, not necessarily algorithmically)
    – kaveman
    Jun 11, 2015 at 19:10
  • @kaveman. sure it will be helpful, but supers usually change their layout in order to get us wonder all around the shop. Jun 11, 2015 at 19:15
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    As long as you don't forget what to get in each aisle once for each item in that aisle, then your O(qpm) is still better than O(nm). Also provided there are at least one aisle with nothing you need, p (aisles you visit) will be less then P (aisles that exist), possibly negating q entirely. IF you go down one row and forget something ten times, it will still be more efficient than walking down ten rows, checking n/p items, to confirm you don't need any of it.
    – Will
    Jun 11, 2015 at 19:41
  • +1 just for mentioning the pair-socks-from-a-pile-efficiently. First time I came across it, made my day. Jun 11, 2015 at 20:19
  • Real life answer: Shop online (like walmart.com/cp/food/976759 for the USA). Otherwise constraints like having items added while you go, memory limitations of three items at a time, etc. really make this difficult. I am saying this because I have the same issue... Jun 11, 2015 at 20:24

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Looking up rearrangement time here, my initial idea of putting in the time to map you usual items would be useless. (they re arrange aisles pretty often).

For any ideas going down that road - not going to work...

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