My wife and I are ready to solve the oatmeal problem once and for all. We have experienced a few issues with purchasing before, so we want to prevent those from coming up here, also.
In the past, when we've purchased something like four cartons at once, it was difficult to find places for the oatmeal to inhabit. This led to placing oatmeal in odd parts of the pantry just because there was room. Then, when we tried to count how many cartons we had on hand, we didn't see all of it. We ended up buying too much trying to replace oatmeal we hadn't yet eaten. We'll try to avoid this whole mess through two measures (both of them very important in Lean).
1) Buy the smallest quantity necessary to guarantee availability of oatmeal. (This reduces Inventory-related waste.)
2) Mark a place large enough to store oatmeal that is off-limits to any other foodstuff. (This is, on a very small scale, 5S.)
Based on my calculations, one carton will last us 7.5 days, so a two weeks' supply is pretty close to two cartons. Therefore, each time we purchase, we should end up with two full cartons and possibly the remnant of a third that we haven't used up yet. So the area needs to be large enough for three oatmeal cartons. I think I'll use paper and scotch tape to mark the area this evening.
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