The primary purpose of Living Cookbook's store feature is to support multiple prices for the same ingredient. For example you might buy ketchup at both Safeway and Costco. Most likely the same product will have different prices at the two stores. Also, Safeway might sell regular-sized bottles in its condiments aisle and jumbo-sized bottles in its bulk food aisle. Living Cookbook's store feature takes into account the fact that one ingredient might be purchased at multiple stores, at different prices and in different grocery aisles.
In Living Cookbook, stores represent locations where you purchase grocery list items. You can create as many stores as you like. When you create a grocery list you can specify where you intend to shop and Living Cookbook will price the grocery list ingredients accordingly.
When you install Living Cookbook a "Default Store" is created. The default store contains price information for a large number of ingredients. Default store data is used when price data doesn't exist for other stores (or if there are no other stores). The default store can't be deleted.
If you upgraded Living Cookbook from a previous version then you will have a "Living Cookbook 2003 Store". Many users entered a lot of ingredient price information in the old version. This price data is preserved in this store. If you did not enter price data in previous versions then you can delete this store at any time. However, deleting stores with many ingredients takes a long time. You might want to do this over night, while you are having dinner, etc.
You can configure your stores such that each has its own grocery aisles. You can also change the order of the grocery aisles to match the order in the physical stores.
Each store can have any number of store ingredients. A store ingredient is actually an association between a store, an ingredient and a measure. For example, one store ingredient might be Safeway's (store) milk (ingredient) in the 1 gallon jug (measure). Store ingredients have two properties: cost and grocery aisle. So you can specify that Safeway's milk in the 1 gallon jug cost $3.59 and can be found in the Dairy aisle.
In some cases the same ingredient will appear multiple times in the same store. For example, you might additional Safeway milk store ingredients for other measures such as quart and pint. Living Cookbook does its best to choose the correct measure (and therefore the correct price) when adding recipes and meals to grocery lists. For example, if a recipe calls for 2 gallons of milk Living Cookbook will choose the price for gallons. However, if a recipe calls for 3 cups of milk (1 1/2 pints) then Living Cookbook will choose the pint price.
When you create a grocery list in Living Cookbook 2005 you must also specify where you intend to shop (even if it is the Default Store). Living Cookbook will choose the correct prices based on this information.
If you choose more than one store for your grocery list, Living Cookbook will associate grocery list items with stores based on the store ingredient information it has. For example, if you have a milk store ingredient for Safeway and a ground beef store ingredient for Costco and you create a grocery list for Safeway and Costco, Living Cookbook will correctly tell you to buy your milk at Safeway and your ground beef at Costco.
The preferred store for an ingredient is the location where you prefer to purchase an ingredient. This information is rarely used so you normally won't need to set it. However, it is used in one important case. If you create a grocery list for more than one store and a grocery list item is available at two or more of those stores, Living Cookbook will use the preferred store information to determine where to buy the item.