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Comment by jeffrallen | Hacker News Reader

Here's another solution. Next time you run out, buy two bags of dishwasher soap. Then when one bag is done.... wait for it... USE THE SECOND BAG!

All that's left is to put one bag of soap on your shopping list and you have 5 to 20 days to manage to buy it before you're back in fish soap and baking powder hell.

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A related strategy - always keep a spare of crucial household items like this (dishwasher soap, toothpaste, etc). Don't buy a new one when you run out entirely, buy a new one when you use up your primary and switch to the backup.

eg, I'm about to "run out" of toothpaste, in that the tube on my bathroom counter is almost empty. I have a full tube sitting in one of my bathroom drawers. When I pull that one out, I add toothpaste to my shopping list, and the new tube goes into the drawer as the new backup.

Another related strategy: Pay an extra month on any recurring bills at the start (for services that allow you to maintain a credit balance). Then, just pay your bills as normal, except that you have an automatic one month of grace period for everything because you have a credit balance. This has saved me numerous times because of absentmindedness.

>This has saved me numerous times because of absentmindedness.

Aren't you costing yourself tens of dollars per year in lost interest by doing this? You're essentially giving them an interest free loan. A calendar/reminder app doesn't have this problem and is more reliable (on the off chance you forgot twice in a row, for instance).

I used to do this until I became competent with that sort of thing.

If you're the sort of person for whom this is a bandaid, a calendar won't fix it, and you're also not the sort of person who cares about $15/year. Hell, I haven't missed a bill in well over a decade, and I don't care about $15/year.

I think you might be overestimating what the opportunity cost is. A $100 loan to a utility at today's interest rate (say a high-interest savings account) is probably $1-2 per year.

Only worry about lost interest after you have maxed out all your investment and are holding no cash. Once you run out of cash to invest, then you can tap into these reserves. Most people though keep cash on hand anyway, accruing no interest.

Also, you might want to use the shelf space for something else. And the apartment may have a high cost per square meter so it would cost thousands in storage space.

Or better, have all your bills paid automatically.

That only works well if you're diligent about reviewing them. If the power company suddenly thinks you owe them for a new $2000 power meter, it's good to know that before the money comes out of your account (or onto your credit card).

I'm not that diligent so burden of manually making sure bills are paid is a great way to force me to check that the bill makes sense!

Just came here to say this actually happened to me. About 10 years ago I lived in a high-rise apartment in Chicago. One day we got a bill in the mail for ~$50,000 -- turns out, I got billed for the entire building. It took weeks to sort that out.

3 weeks prior to the automatic payment, the power company sends me a notice of the exact amount that's going to be taken out. I review it every month.

You are far more diligent than me! If I know the bill is getting paid, I have a tendency to put it off.

I do the same and wait until all the bills arrive at the beginning of each month to do them in one batch and do not like the cognitive overhead. Now wondering whether it would be possible to set up semi-automated payments. You get a notification about your bill and if you click/tap through it gets paid. Still in control but less manual steps. Maybe there are services for this use case already?

Also, buy in bulk and when it's on sale. Those things usually last a long time, and there is a very very low chance you'll end up not needing those items anymore in your household, and even then you'll have bigger problems than 5 tubes of toothpaste left over in your drawer.

It's like Toyota's kanban cards. When there's only N left the card says get M more of these items.

> I buy like 4 or 5 packages at a time, just to make sure we don't run out.

It sounds like that's how they normally solve this too.

But this pandemic has messed with a lot of our supply chains. Things we counted on being there on the next visit or order just aren't there. Automatic Amazon orders that we've been auto piloting for years and years aren't so automatic anymore.

So any hack around not having something is still something I think most of us should keep in a back pocket ;) Even for the most prepared of us.

Don't let amazon drive your supply chain. Figure out what you need to operate for 120 days. Buy whenever you're below 90 days.

Then make zero mistakes in your planning, and have no accidents or unseen needs. Sounds easy for a family.

As nitrogen pointed out, that's what the buffer is for.

You're right, you can't individually run a just-in-time supply system for your family. (Well, you could, but it meant a lot of grocery runs every week ;)

What I'm saying is that you do not want just-in-time. Neither by yourself, nor by people who are really good at it. Systems are resilient by having built-in slack. Remove the slack, you've optimized the well-lit path. And become much more susceptible to failures.

Ask people in the Northeast who just had a week of power loss how redundancy helped them. The ones who have a backup power source will nod vigorously. Ask midwesterners how they prepare for winter (especially in rural areas). Having that buffer is helpful.

It doesn't need to be 90 days, that's my personal threshold.

And yes, it's easy. "Hey, I need X" -> "Go get it from storage, and put it on the list". It'll take a while to flush out unseen needs, but the same is true for a standing Amazon order. I'm not saying drop ordering/shopping on demand right now - just order a decent supply next time you order, instead of one pack.

And sure, you can keep Amazon as your supplier, but we've just proven out that they're a single point of failure. (Remember ordering in April/May and getting delivery dates for August?). Having local alternatives is valuable. Support them even if they aren't immediately necessary.

The 90 days is a buffer to handle mistakes, accidents, and unseen needs.

Huh, for the first couple of weeks here in the UK some things were harder to find, but since then I've noticed no items not in stock at all - Where are you based?

It's also not a surprise when cleaning supplies run out, they're used at a fairly steady rate; like you have weeks of notice if you see the bottle/box is running low.

Yeah resource management is really not that difficult for this kinda stuff.

1. Do dishes

2. Oh there’s fewer than 7 tabs left

3. Buy new pack on your next weekly trip to get groceries

You can eyeball the number 7 and you even get a daily reminder.

The problem is the gap between 2 and 3 -- unless you keep a list (and follow it when you're at the store), you may still run out.

Online shopping has helped me with this -- I usually add it to my online cart as soon as I'm running low.

I think this is the problem the Amazon Dash buttons were supposed to solve -- keep a Dash button in the cabinet with the dish detergent, and when you see that you're running low, hit the button to order a new one.

Kitchen chalkboard + mobile phone camera. Bonus points if your wife sends you the picture of the shopping list with a cute emoji.

Adulting: it's not that hard, but it's not kid stuff either.

Yeah, there are lots of ways to do grocery reminders, I'm just pointing out that when the OP said "resource management for this is easy", he omitted the hard part. "Buy more when you're low" is the easy part, the hard part is how do you go from "I need more" actually buying more.

Yeah this is the solution my family has restored to, after trying all kinds of grocery list apps etc.

Pro-tip for folks with multiple adults in the household - Google Keep makes for a super easy way to manage shopping lists.

I created (over time) a list of things we buy, in order of how you'd shop for them and shared it on Keep. Basically me or my wife can pull open the app, check a box.

Get to the store and just go down the list as you walk through the store.

I'm sure others have better ideas - this one works for us!

We do the same thing. Keep is superior to a written list - you can organize it, so apples don't end up near the top of the list, and oranges at the bottom, and you end up walking back and forth through the store.

You can have sub-items in Keep, by dragging items beneath a "heading" item, and so we have a bunch of major items (meat, fruit/veg, breads, paper, cleaning, etc.) that stay on there, and we add subitems to the list. It makes it much easier to shop, and as we shop, we check items off.

It's too bad Google separated Keep from their assistant function. You used to be able to say "ok google, add cheese to the shopping list" and it would go in the Keep shopping list. Now it goes in a shopping list that is somewhere else, that I can't share. Not very useful. Keep is also easily replaced by a variety of open source solutions, whenever Google decides to deprecate it. It is simple, and it works for now.

FWIW, Google Assistant can now use custom list apps (and Keep is an option), so "ok google, add cheese to the shopping list" is a thing again. Under assistant settings, it's in the Services / Notes & Lists heading.

We have a similar system!

I know you can also do it through Apple Notes. It's a bit clunky to share the note with someone else, but once you've done it, it works very similar to Keep.

In my house I'm the one who cares the most about running out of things so I keep a list on my phone. When my fiance or I notice something is low, it goes on that list. Since it's on my phone, I'll almost always have it at the store.

> You can eyeball the number 7

Supposedly, Henry Ford ran F by eyeballing the height of various stacks of papers on his desk. GM made fun of him for doing so (because they had "scientific management"), but I wouldn't be surprised to find out the numbers on the pieces of paper in each stack were generally for the same order of magnitude, so he really could get actionable "Business Intelligence" by comparing stack heights.

(Are there any other practices on which astrophysicists and Henry Ford could agree?)

Another option is to do things on a schedule. E.g. you work out how much of something you need per month, and make sure that you order that much every month (if you order/buy every month). Sometimes you use less, sometimes more, but then you just take one order to "skip" if you have too much, etc.

Also, it helps with consumption on some level. You start adjusting your consumption based on how low/high you see your stocks. Other than that, make sure you always have a bit of a buffer and you'll be fine. Especially now with the pandemic, lockdowns and supply-chain irregularity.

Another solution is to stock up on such commodities - most people have enough space to store toilet paper, detergents and the like since you are anyway going to use them sooner or later. You might as well stock them up, just in case, as you never stop needing them.

As a bonus, when the next pandemic hits and everyone is panicking for a roll of toilet paper, you can rest easy knowing you have enough for a year or more.

Thank you Costco.

> As a bonus, when the next pandemic hits and everyone is panicking for a roll of toilet paper, you can rest easy knowing you have enough for a year or more.

And make money on Ebay :)

Well done for never running out of any household item

This technique worked fine for me for decades, until semi recently.

Do you Kanban? Because that's exactly how kanban works. The signal to purchase is the empty bag/box of detergent.

Literally addressed in the article...

That trick only works if you have lots of money. And lots of space.

Do you apply it to other things too, like garbage bags? Or olive oil? What about hand soap?

All of a sudden you're spending 2x normal for a while. Not a lot of people can do that.

That's a fair point but if you can afford two, buying twice the amount is actually cheaper since you can buy it at Costco, etc. I do have two rolls of garbage bags, etc. but I also recognize it's not doable by everyone. GP's tone is a bit off putting even if it is a valid suggestion for some people.

> All of a sudden you're spending 2x normal for a while. Not a lot of people can do that.

Then stagger it—an extra box of dishwasher tablets this paycheck, an extra box of garbage bags next paycheck. Overall consumption doesn't double.

The space concerns are very real though and probably harder to solve…that's my bottleneck

Yes, that's the reason why shopping at Costco isn't the solution to everything. I don't want to store 300 toilet paper rolls.

Also, Costco isn't always automatically the best price per unit anyway. Especially for staple items, I find that Fred Meyer (Kroger) is frequently less expensive on a per-unit basis for really common household items. It's deeply ingrained that buying in bulk must be cheaper, but pricing in grocery stores isn't always that intuitive.

Don’t know how it is in America but here in Norway, stores are required to list per-unit price on the shelf for all articles. Makes it quite simple to compare stuff. So for example milk has the price for a carton on the shelf along with the price per liter, toilet paper has the price for a pack along with the price per meter, detergent has the price for a box along with the price for the portion required for running one machine, etc etc.

This makes it trivial to spot cases where the bigger bag is actually more expensive per-unit when you’re at the store.

I guess to compare between different stores you’d still need to make note of the per-unit prices that are listed but still it is helpful even if you went as far as that. I usually buy everything I need at the store closest to my home because they are very competitive on average even if one or two items might be cheaper downtown.

I am not certain what the law is, but stores here in the U.S. routinely list the per-unit price on the shelf tag. Costco certainly does, Kroger does, but I don't know if all stores must. I wouldn't be surprised. I don't often look at per-unit when going between stores, I more often use it to gauge the value of upsizing at the same store, or comparing to other brands of the same product that are on the shelf nearby.

Costco shoppers know that they don't always get the 'best' price, but it's a good enough price and it's likely to be good quality, so it takes the hassle out of the shopping and decision making process.

Ah, the garbage bag. This elusive luxury item which throughout history has been reserved only for people who have lots of money.

I did grow up in poverty and indeed garbage bags were one of the luxuries I "treated" myself to when I started living on my own as a teen.

I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic or not. But yes, waste disposal has been done much better for the rich historically than the poor.

I listed garbage bags specifically because I've noticed recently that the "good" ones (like, large, or strong) are actually quite pricey and often only are available in large quantities (40 count or something). So the price to buy trash bags might be like $20 or something. Buy 2 at once? $40 on garbage bags while grocery shopping? I mean that's a lot, no? To get the good version of something, twice? Not exactly an item for the poor to double-up on.

And suggest the poor buy the less good trash bags that are cheaper? Well then we have shown that garbage bags can indeed be a luxury item even today.

If $40 to buy two is a lot of money, then $20 to buy one is also a lot of money (since, after all, it's the same price per unit), are you sure you can afford to spend 50 cents/bag for garbage bags?

We buy the big store brand box ($15 - $20 for 200). The box is a bit too big to put under the sink, so we put half in another smaller container under the sink. When we refill that container and the box is empty, then it's time to buy more.

You do realise that your consumption of garbage bags does not double because you buy two rolls at a time. If you are wealthy enough to save up for a one-time investment of 1 roll of garbage bags, you are able to implement the scheme suggested by the original poster.

Yes I realize that consumption does not double simply because you buy double. I am not commenting on garbage bags (the topic is detergent); I am commenting on the strategy being used for more than 1 thing. If you use this strategy for 1 item, okay, I get it, the expense is fine. But if the trick is used for other things (as seems logical) then the initial expense of starting to do this could be large.

You're not making any sense here.

Nothing is forcing you to go buy double everything each time you shop.

If cash is tight but you want to implement this scheme, buy an extra unit of one household item (e.g. laundry detergent) your first trip. Hext time, choose another item (e.g. trash bags).

Eventually you've got a backup unit of every item, and you're now just buying your one item on the same consumption schedule, except now instead of replacing the item you're replacing the backup.

You are arguing against yourself. You made up this idea that if you buy extra detergent (because you keep running out of it) you also need to buy more of everything else.

Its not twice always, its just twice once. Its like getting ahead of the usage schedule.

When you start, buy one. You assume its good for 20 days. Buy next one on Day 10. Voila, you have the backup now. Now buy next ones, one at a time on 30th, 50th, 70th day. You are 10 days ahead of usage, you always have at least 10 days of runway ahead of you.

Yes, I do it for Grocery, Ice cream, Watet, Olive, Garbage Bags, Dryer Sheets & anything I use regularly.

The ones in use are required in their place. The spare ones can be stuffed at upper shelves, under the sink, under bed or such.

I have seen second toilet roll in many offices & homes, almost every car has a spare tyre, & many other things.

With a little planning like described it gets even better since you can buy stuff when it's on offer, which is never when you suddenly need it.

> That trick only works if you have lots of money. And lots of space.

No, detergent is cheap nowadays, and detergents are way more compact now (thanks chemistry) than they were 50 years ago. So space should hardly be an issue.

I figure I'm buying my time back with very little upfront cost. That also leaves more energy to do things like... earn more money/manage my space better.

Many poor people don't even have dishwashers! Perhaps this whole topic we should refrain from discussing.

Or take it to the other extreme - buy two dishwashers A and B and use A for dirty items whilst using B as storage for clean items. When the dirty one A is full, run it and put dirty items in the formerly clean washer B. This way you save on cupboard space which can be used to store faberge eggs instead.

At which point the frumer-than-thou will need four dishwashers...

After the eggs, don't forget space for wind-up travelling salt servers.

(We actually have one of the latter. Not as fancy as the ones in the Hermitage by a long shot, but then again, we're intending to come to a better end than the Romanovs, so we're certainly not going to just cargo cult their flexes.)

As far as I can tell, this HRE example is so posh a salt cellar that it's even useless for actually holding salt: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_Galleon

My father in law had a running gag about wanting to do this for a couple years. Replace all the cabinets with dishwashers and just cycle between them.

Yes!

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