Grocery Shopping with ChatGPT
I struggle to find use cases for automations within the ChatGPT desktop app or ChatGPT Work beyond just telling me that I have emails. The whole email thing and the “chief of staff” automations all feel like just a separate place to read my emails, and I don’t find a whole lot of usefulness in them.
Last night I was sitting on the couch and I thought, “What if I could use the shopping list that I have in Apple Reminders as a source for where to get groceries from?” I have HomePods all around my house, so I can easily add something to the list whenever I think about it.
Then I thought, “Well, what if I could have the ChatGPT desktop app look at that list and, from there, go onto the Walmart website and not order the groceries, but add them to my cart and let me know that they’ve been added?” That way, when I actually go to Walmart to order my groceries, those items are already sitting in the cart.
So I added some things to the grocery list. Some were typical stuff like milk, and then some were a little more vague without specifying the brand or anything.
I had the ChatGPT app just honestly try to go for it and see what happened. After a few minutes, I checked the Walmart app and it had gotten the right oat milk brand. I put “water” on the list and it knew to get water bottles instead. We put “Gatorade blue,” and it got the size that we usually get because I guess it just looked at the Walmart history of what we usually order and noticed, “Hey, you got this five times, this is Gatorade and it’s blue, and this is the oat milk you normally get. I’ll just add these ones to the cart."
I thought it was just a pretty cool little automation that saves me a little bit of time every week. It took like two minutes to set up, and now it’s set to run once a day to check that list and see if there’s anything new added.