Original in Spanish: Punto de stock sin calculadora
2020-04-30
Everyone thinks of:
- Checking what you want to cook during the week
- Buying whatever you need to make it.
Well, somewhere on the interwebs, which I wish I could cite if only I remembered, I read a previous step that has been very very useful to me:
- Take inventory of the things that are not “pantry bedrock”.
Let me explain:
Before deciding what to cook you should look at what’s left over from last week and think of using that before anything else. If it’s left over, it means you didn’t feel like cooking it, so unless you pay attention it will end up expiring.
Between that little tip and knowing the stock point of the things I always keep, the way we engineers do it, I have the easiest, most painless grocery runs on the planet.
2020-04-30
Okay, let’s see: stock point without a calculator, for A.
Why it matters in my home: I live in a tiny house, and besides, having too many options short-circuits me.
There are two basic ways to manage this:
1.- when I’m running low on an ingredient, I go buy it. 2.- every time I go shopping, I refill the space I reserve for that ingredient.
Since my house is tiny, my stored stock is expeeensive (at least in space), and I also can’t be bothered to shop more often than I could, so deciding how I manage stock matters.
I prefer method 2, but both are about doing what you say: “syncing” the kitchen rolls with the milk. Every time I go shopping, I do a quick review of what’s in the pantry and check how much I need to buy to complete the stock of whatever is missing (coffee, milk, toilet paper…).
For that, the thing is to first fix how often you’ll shop. Every month? From there, think about how much you consume in that period and add something reasonable “just in case”, which we’ll call safety stock, and which depends on how much of a pain it is to run out of that thing and how variable your consumption is. Reserve the space you decided for that ingredient and don’t fill it with anything else. In companies they even paint on the wall how high the pile of sacks must be, as a visual aid for counting.
It sounds like common sense, but I bet you a hand that if you take a walk through your pantry you have way too much stock of way too many things. We humans tend to go three towns over the top with safety stock.
For example: I aim to have one month of home-time stock of things I consume habitually. I use half a roll of toilet paper a day and that’s very regular across a whole month, so I’ll never use more than 20 rolls in a month. When it’s time to shop, I buy the smallest pack that gets me back to those 20 rolls given what I have left.
How do I know I use half a roll of toilet paper a day?
Well, if you shop online you can check how much of it you’ve bought in recent months, or if you think your estimate is bad you can write down the date you open a pack, and when you finish it, see how long it took. Once you decide your stock point you keep adjusting it by experience from one month to the next, but trial and error is much easier having decided a stock point than changing it every month.
(Facebook, 2020-04-30)