I’m usually a very organized person. I enjoy those small leather-bound notebooks with lined paper where I may jot down notes in my very illegible penmanship and then attempt to decipher them later during times of dire straits. I simply relish the process of recording information, for the simple sake of writing. However, when it comes to practical list-making, like mothers with mischievous children make for groceries, I often forget to bring the list, or have to root through my cool but impractical leather bound notebook with my chicken scratch writing. I would hope other people are more effective at writing and bringing grocery lists than I am, particularly since I normally run blind in the store, eyeballing the packaged macaroni and cheese and completely straying from my original intentions of loaf of bread and salad, but it seems I run more often into people who dawdle than those who religiously navigate the aisles with a preset course of food in mind.

However, Shopper by MidCentury Software aims to please that busy mom or those anal-retentive types, with its grocery list app. Shopper basically is just a digital shopping list. Instead of writing you select items for your shopping list, and can save multiple lists at a time. The idea is sound enough, but borders on excessive. When inputting items, Shopper searches its fairly limited database for items that match your query, and then you click on the name to add to your list. For example, if I search for “yogurt,” Shopper finds me yogurt, plain and simple, and I add it to my list. Unfortunately, the choices are limited in the sense that the options are all generic, and no brand names are given with this app; in other words, it isn’t as customizable as simply handwriting a list. If my boyfriend asked me to buy Gorilla Munch cereal, Shopper would just offer me the blanket term “cereal” for any breakfast accommodations. Shopper does give a “note” option once you select an item, and I very well could write “Gorilla Munch” so it appears next to “Cereal” on my list; however, this is slightly cumbersome since I have to click on several tabs and then type out words. Pretty inefficient, when other apps like Lose It! contain huge databases of supermarket and specialty brands.

A nice attribute of Shopper is you may customize item prices as you shop. You may have created the list prior, but once inside the grocery store, you may record prices per quantity and size (i.e. pound, can, bag, even the odd and probably unused millimeter). The drawback of this is you must re-customize the quantity size and price when creating a new shopping list, because Shopper will save any price information attached to a particular item; sorry, but not every carton of orange juice will be the same $2.60 everywhere. While shopping, though, it does give you an idea of what your total price will be, and you even have a cute Checkout button to wipe out your entire list once you’ve actually checked out. You may also customize your items by taking pictures of them for Shopper to save for identification purposes. Unless you’re not familiar with a chicken breast, I found this feature to be excessive and unnecessary.

The buttons along the bottom of Shopper denote the various things you may do: the shopping cart shows what is actually is your cart (I like how you check items off your list as you find them in the store); the file cabinet allows you to search by aisle, whether that be meats, produce, beverages, pharmacy, canned goods, etc, a pretty fun navigation ability; the cross sign searches for any items, which effectively cancels out the need for the aisle search feature; and then the next symbol is the universal email tab that allows you to email either your list or shopping cart.

I would say the best feature of Shopper is its ability to use a store near you, which would be amazing if it recognized the grocery store as soon as you stepped foot inside, and gave you a digital compendium of all that store has to offer. Too bad the feature failed to work each time I turned it on. Oh well, at least I can still turn on the “calculate tax” ability even though I could easily approximate how much that would be.

Shopper has the potential to be an incredibly useful app, especially for people who heavily rely on their phones as a source of organization. Having a digital list on your phone and checking off the items is great, but entering in information and searching for items seems to take more time than simply writing it on paper. If the Store Locator feature was less buggy I would use Shopper simply for that, but in the meantime, I think I’ll stick with my leather-bound notebooks and haphazard wandering around the supermarket. Isn’t sticking to a list less adventurous, anyway?