Grocery Shopping the Old-fashioned Way—Online.
While my mother was very ill and I was her caretaker, leaving the house to grocery shop was a dilemma until I discovered Stop and Shop’s Peapod home delivery service. Those of you who live in the city probably can’t relate to the rarity of delivery services in the suburbs. Finding a service where I could order online, choose a delivery time and have the items carried into my kitchen was a godsend. Since I’m usually complaining about the complexity of goods and services, I thought I should give praise where it is due.
What impressed me most was the simplicity of the process. I could browse the “aisles” online, select from lists of my past orders or search directly for an item. Although I’m not particularly thrifty, I was also delighted that I could compare price much more easily than in the real store. On store shelves, prices are scattered beneath the items and you have to move along the aisle to compare them. Online, similar items are aligned in rows and columns so that you can quickly scan the unit price and pick out the cheapest. Had I clipped coupons, I could have given them to the driver when he delivered my order and had their value deducted from the total. They also advertised their weekly specials but didn’t do so in an intrusive way.
What’s more, when they delivered the groceries, they seemed to have selected the plumpest, freshest produce and carefully separated items when bagging them so that fastidious people like me didn’t have to worry about the bleach touching the bananas. Peapod is a good example of a service that fills a need and is designed with the customer in mind.
March 7th, 2007 at 10:19 am
Anyone who has every shopped at Wholefoods at Union Square on a Saturday afternoon will gladly use online delivery services like Freshdirect or Peapod. The experience at the store is just terrible, think “the battle of the Bulge”. The store is just not designed for that many shoppers and things turn nasty quickly. So I sit relaxed at home in front of my computer and order Freshdirect, brows different categories, go through online recipes and recommendation from the staff. It complete changed what I cook, much more fresh vegetables as the ones you get from the online store seem to last forever in the fridge because they haven’t been on display for a week and much more interesting dishes because you can sit and look at a cookbook the same time you order, try doing that in a store on a Saturday afternoon…. I have the feeling in the long-run online grocery shopping with be the way to go especially in a place like New York, where most supermarkets in the city are overpriced, overcrowded, badly stocked and full of disgruntled employees.