My wife and I have a disagreement over the food shopping.  I do the shopping and she maintains the list .. on her computer.

I like the items on the list to be organized by where they are in the store, roughly.  Milk near the eggs and yogurt, vegetables and fruits in one section, etc.  Since my wife doesn’t do the shopping, she doesn’t know where things are, so I have to periodically go onto her computer and rearrange the list.

We also have different styles to updating the list.  For me, the list is everything that we could ever need from a particular store.  I go through what we have before I go to the store and cross of the things we don’t need.  My wife edits the list for each trip.

Now there was a nice little list keeping app for the Palm OS that I had awhile ago, but I lost it.  It is great if one person is the list maintainer and shopper.  When the responsibility is shared it breaks down.

What would be really useful would be a web site that allowed people to create, edit, organize and share shopping lists.  The basic service could be free with $ for alternative ways to access the data (iphone app, mac os interface, etc.)

An additional feature would be to list the average/lowest prices for each item on the list at stores in their area so someone could compare the price to what is at the store they are at.  A variation of this would be to look at the prices for the items on the list and find the store that has the lowest overall cost for the items.  If reliable, it could be an additional monthly fee.  However, these features would require some method to get the user to put the items into identifiable products and either some site scraping for the prices, or an Atom/RSS feed for the prices.  The price data would be a problem without some serious effort or buy-in from the supermarkets.