63 ms·

Americans, it turns out, would rather visit a store than buy food online

• elmerfud 6y ago
  It's not that I want to visit the store it's that I can't trust the store people to properly pick out fresh produce or good meat. When the stock person just takes a bucket of apples and dumps them in without care so most of them are bruised, why would I want that same person selecting which apples to send me? Often times to find 3 apples I have to examine 10+. Most of the produce selection is this way. Meat selection is not much different. Selecting chicken without careful examination you'll get broken legs or wings. Now you have to consider the automatic substitution of equivalent items when something is out of stock. My dibetic friend was telling yesterday that they substituted regular mt dew for his order of mt dew zero sugar. Until the store starts employing people who care about product selection as much as I do, then I'll continue to make time to go to the store and pick it myself.
  • hvs 6y ago
    We've been doing curbside pick up for groceries for the past few months and fresh food and produce are definitely the biggest problem with the substitutions being the second. The substitutions would probably be better/less often in more normal times, but the fresh food selection problem is always going to be there. For now we do it because our health is more important than our fruit quality, but we won't continue it when things achieve some level of normalcy again.
  • briefcomment 6y ago
    Additionally, there have been times when perishables like non pasteurized juice, and milk have gone bad when I had them delivered. I realized that I do a good job of picking those items last during a trip to the store, and I drive home immediately afterwards, while the picker/delivery person is probably not incentivized to do the same.
  • karatestomp 6y ago
    All those things, plus: 1) concern that prices online are higher so the delivery option's more expensive than it looks (food delivery services do this), 2) concern that some or all sale prices won't be used online—a lot of my shopping past my immediate needs consists of checking the canned and frozen sections for any actually good sales.
    • lostapathy 6y ago
      This is why I’ve backed away from it. I don’t mind paying for delivery, but the fact that I oy both a direct few and a variable extra markup per item, and that markup seems to vary so much per item makes it hard to swallow for me. It just feels like scummy enough that I’ll go to the store. Give me an option where the cost of convenience is obvious and straightforward and I’d come back.
      • hckr_news 6y ago
        Delivery fee + Tip also. Best option is probably pick up as you save some time without getting charged other fees or needing to to tip anyone.
  • bdcravens 6y ago
    > Now you have to consider the automatic substitution of equivalent items when something is out of stock. My dibetic friend was telling yesterday that they substituted regular mt dew for his order of mt dew zero sugar. Typically you have the option to indicate that you do not want any substitutions.
    • alleyshack 6y ago
      They don't always respect this. I've had multiple Instacart shoppers replace items without marking them as replacements, including replacing some of them with things I explicitly indicated I did not want as replacements.
      • thejynxed 6y ago
        A company I do contract work for banned Instacart from one of their local stores entirely due to customer complaints to store management about unapproved substitutions.
        • wool_gather 6y ago
          Purely out of curiosity, how do the store police this? (I'm not very familiar with how Instacart operates, but I thought it was just a person going to the store as a normal shopper in your stead.)
          • applecrazy 6y ago
            I’m pretty sure the shoppers pay with a special card. They probably just tell the employees at the check out counter to refuse service to anyone with an Instacart branded credit card.
        • alleyshack 6y ago
          I'm curious what metrics are driving that behavior by Instacart shoppers. In my (entirely amateur/armchair) opinion, it would seem like the time you'd save by making an unapproved substitution wouldn't make up for the potential for negative reviews, which could get you driven off the platform entirely. Maybe a majority of customers don't care enough about unapproved substitutions to review poorly? Though reading through this thread suggests otherwise. Maybe there's some other internal metrics which shoppers or Instacart have access to that incentivize poor substitutions in the name of speed? Honest questions - I don't know anything about this business and it's interesting to me that it appears to be such a pervasive issue.
  • asiachick 6y ago
    i think you're right. It's certainly my opinion that I don't want a USA store clerk picking my produce. On the other hand here in Japan most produce is much more cared for, probably to the detriment of the environment but still, far less bruised or bad produce. And yet, AFAIK, it's the same in Japan. People don't seem to want to order their groceries. Which makes me wonder if there aren't other reasons. One is that there's no good way to deliver. You have to be home to receive. They can't put your milk, butter, yogurt, ice cream some locker. You have to be home to receive, at least for people the commute to work, means it pretty much has to come between 6pm and 10pm. How many grocery delivery services can handle that? -- On the other hand, my mom says she's driving to the grocery store and everyone is doing pickup. The groceries are already chosen and packed up, you just drive up your car and the load the bag. So if that's true then people are willing to let others choose the produce.
    • Enginerrrd 6y ago
      I'm inclined to agree. I think you're up against some deeply rooted human behaviors of wanting to sift through and gather/select their food. Those behaviors rapidly scale based on hunger... but frankly, no one in the income bracket that can afford to buy their food online ever gets really hungry in today's world.
  • kerkeslager 6y ago
    Playing devil's advocate: an enormous amount of food waste is caused by people simply refusing to buy ugly food. It's literally less wasteful to shave off most of a carrot so that it's a baby carrot, than to try to sell the same carrots as-is. There's nothing wrong with the ugly carrots--but they'll rot on the shelves. Bruised apples are perfectly edible. Maybe you just don't like them, and that's fine--there's no accounting for taste. But I don't think it's outlandish for someone to give you a bruised apple. Broken bones in chicken aren't harmful--the traditional way of preparing jerk chicken involves chopping the chicken with a knife that just cleaves through the bones. Again, your preference here is valid, but it's your preference, not something that's objectively better. And these are some of the less extreme examples--being involved in my local CSA, I've heard people complain about potatoes with dirt on them, and literally heard someone refuse to buy eggs because they farmer got them from her own chickens. A lot of people's preferences around food aren't just arbitrary, they're downright illogical. Substitutions and expired food are obviously problematic--there's lots of room for delivery services to do better. But I am not convinced that the average person does a much better job selecting their food based on "quality".
    • simonebrunozzi 6y ago
      Check out Imperfect Foods (I am not affiliated; simply a happy customer) - they send you a box with "imperfect" food that otherwise would have gone to waste. There are also other similar companies doing this.
    • denimnerd42 6y ago
      You don't get any discount in this case though. You're still paying $2-3/lb for bruised apples that are like you said literally waste at that point and $2-5/lb for chicken that if you picked out yourself would be of higher quality. Even if they did give you a price break for lower quality food. They'd still do things like give you a pineapple that will never ripen before it rots like we received last week.
      • kerkeslager 6y ago
        What I'm saying is that your perception of quality is not actually objective quality.
  • basseq 6y ago
    Even if quality is there, how ripe do you want? Are you going to use those avocados tonight, or later in the week? Do you like green bananas or ones that are turning brown? Let alone the "what looks good today?" or "what's on sale today?" method of shopping! Even packaged goods are tough. When I'm in a store, I know quickly which product I want. I may not remember the brand name, but I can scan the shelf and find it. Online, I have to sort through a myriad of options, not to mention sizes and variants. BBQ sauce, for instance, returns 58 results on Peapod. Sweet Baby Ray's, which I like, is 22 of those. There are 13 different variants (original, hickory & brown sugar, honey, buffalo sauce, sweet'n spicy, honey mustard, honey teriyaki, sweet teriyaki, sweet vidalia onion, maple, sweet chili glaze, honey chipotle, no sugar added) and 7 different sizes (14oz, 16oz, 18oz, 18.5oz, 28oz, 40oz, 80oz). Holy crap! I know what the label looks like, and I know the bottle is about yea-big. The images online are 200x200... I can barely SEE the label. Then, what if what I want isn't in stock? Is it going to appear on the page? Am I just not going to get it? Would I get a substitute, as I might if I was in the store? By the time I do that mental exercise for 50 items, I might as well drive to the store. These are hard challenges. One thing that might make a difference is integration with club cards. Giant knows what I buy down to frequency and UPC. Why haven't they done better integration to link my in-person buying with encouraging me to buy the same items online?
    • Ididntdothis 6y ago
      "Let alone the "what looks good today?" or "what's on sale today?" method of shopping!" That one is really important with fresh food. Maybe the lettuce looks good or the cucumbers, who knows?
    • ISL 6y ago
      For me, the wish is for scripting. Most of my buying is algorithmic, but the filters don't match my algorithms. It is difficult to express, "Please give me the cereal that I like the most that is under $X/lb. If there is an exceptional deal, buy more." without an API or scripting.
      • basseq 6y ago
        Which, if you break it down further: 1. Everyone's "algorithm" is different. Even if you could bake every possible filter into your eGrocery product, can you imagine the UX nightmare? 2. The "that I like the most" is a tough thing to quantify. Who is "I"? Me? My wife? My kids? My mom who's coming to visit this weekend? What do I like? Specific brands? Things I've bought before? From that store, or a different one? Things I might like because they share characteristics?
  • ISL 6y ago
    Our local store, QFC in Seattle, has been doing a great job of selecting produce for our curbside delivery. Quality has matched or beaten what I normally select myself. I don't know where they're finding such huge broccoli crowns, but they're consistently doing so (we're ordering per crown, and paying per-pound, so the incentives are aligned there). On substitutions -- they require customer review of every substitution. (We take the errors in stride -- a global pandemic is a time that we can be glad to have such reliable high-quality food at all. The best fail was the day that Anjou pears got substituted in for garlic, but somebody found the garlic, so we got garlic too :).)
    • altoidaltoid 6y ago
      Your local QFC is really a Kroger btw
      • alexilliamson 6y ago
        Maybe technically in terms of ownership, but the QFC brand stands from Kroger IMO. I've never felt such joy in a grocery store.
  • fossuser 6y ago
    I would hope that grocery stores become warehouses and the only people allowed in are delivery. You could redesign the entire stores to optimize for this which could reduce the likeliness of damaged goods. Amazon would be in a good position to do this (the Whole Foods near me already has part of it set aside for something like this).
    • wool_gather 6y ago
      This would be sort of funny, since many operated like this in the (not recent) past. Customers picking their own products off open shelves was an innovation at one point (and it was greeted by some people with similar disdain as our current self-checkout lines).
    • twic 6y ago
      Where online shopping reaches sufficient scale, that happens: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_store https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_store
    • philwelch 6y ago
      Amazon Fresh works this way already.
  • thomk 6y ago
    This brings up another question in my mind. You are examining 10 apples, well, so is everyone else. So all that fresh fruit has been held, bare handed, by the person who picked it, the person who loaded it and x number of customers who've examined it. Not that ordering fruit online eliminates that problem but it seems like it would be a little more hygienic. One picker, one loader/examiner. Maybe we need a better way to see germs so we know when we are done removing germs.
    • hombre_fatal 6y ago
      The solution is to simply wash your produce. I'm not sure how the examination can be done at a later time than picking. Either you want to pick it or you don't. And different people have different standards. The picker should just always choose the best available. Running low on selection is what naturally forces suboptimal picks.
      • mattkrause 6y ago
        It depends on what you want too. For eating as a snack, I want small-to-medium sized apples. For cooking, I'd rather have a few giant ones so the peeling is easier.
  • tzs 6y ago
    I don't know how standardized layout is within a chain, but at my local Walmart superstore the area immediately to the right of the entrance closest to the grocery section is produce, baked goods, and deli. Just past that is the meat section. Immediately to the left of that entrance is check out, starting with a bunch of self-checkout stations. This makes it quite reasonable to do a quick extraction mission for produce and meat that has you in the store for only a few minutes, with good avoidance of other people. The interior of that section is just short low aisles that you can easily see over, and square tables of baked goods, so even if there are a few other people there it is usually easy to keep track of them and arrange to have an obstacle between you and them. My current approach is to get most of my groceries by their free contactless pickup service, and get produce and meat via in-store quick raids. If while on a produce raid I see that there aren't many people shopping and they are doing a good job with masks and distancing I might expand the mission to grab other things while I'm there.
    • bobthepanda 6y ago
      Generally speaking, I find that at most supermarkets dairy, eggs and meat is at the back, because they are intentionally designed to make you walk through other things to try and squeeze in more purchases when things catch your eye. And this was true when I've lived in the NE and in the PNW.
    • sjg007 6y ago
      I agree, I've actually found that Walmart has been the best online grocery experience. My local supermarket is Ok but HyVee has been wildly inconsistent.
    • yellowapple 6y ago
      Yeah, pretty much every Walmart here in Reno is the same way, except sometimes they'll be flipped around (i.e. grocery area to the left instead of the right). Similar deal with Costco and Sam's.
  • hinkley 6y ago
    You also can't substitute one brand of salsa for another. That'll start fights in some circles.
    • klyrs 6y ago
      Recent substitutions I've seen (where I specified "no substitutions"): Ice cream flavors: my favorite for something I'd never pick (still ate it, annoyed) Margarine instead of butter -- the heck? Won't use it. Vanilla yogurt in place of plain yogurt. Slowly eating it for breakfast, annoyed; can't use it in savory dishes which is what it's for. Juices: I can't stand sugar alcohols, and got a ton of crap full of sucralose. Won't touch the stuff... Not to mention the half-rotten veggies that I'd never select for myself / won't survive a few days in the fridge.
      • hinkley 6y ago
        Not justifying it, but try dewatering the yogurt and see if that does anything for your savory dishes. I don't think I have the right gauge of strainer and end up using leftover coffee filters.
        • darrylb42 6y ago
          Dewatering is not going to remove the flavor and sugar in vanilla yogurt.
        • klyrs 6y ago
          It's the sugar and vanilla flavoring that I find offensive -- are you suggesting that both would be addressed by dewatering? I can imagine it taking care of the sugar (with several washings, I suppose?) since it's water soluble, but I think that the vanilla would be irredeemably dissolved into the milkfat. Alas, I've gone back to shopping due to these experiences, so I've got a tub of the good stuff already. So on one hand this is all academic, but you've caught my academic curiosity :)
          • hinkley 6y ago
  • nmstoker 6y ago
    This is why I avoid online for fresh food, instead getting them to do the heavy lifting items and resilient commodities (eg they can't mess up a bag of flour, bottles of wine, beer, Coke etc; if they're damaged too badly they'll obviously be unable to supply them). Deselecting the substitution acceptable option is also wise. This was a major obvious flaw even back in 1999 when Shatner was pushing Priceline - obviously they'd have an incentive to pretend they had to substitute a certain percentage of the premium brand stuff for cheaper items and do it sparingly enough that they made more profit whilst trying not to lose you as a customer. My experience in the UK is that Ocado always tries to substitute items with a worse cost to weigh ratio - it's particularly silly because they think I won't notice (feels like they should detect that I'm focused and dial it back!)
    • gramontblanc 6y ago
      Seems like a bold prediction that most (maybe any?) grocery stores have the level of corporate organization or even level of education to even consider a "secret order substitution to prole cart-pushers who will then have to answer customer service calls asking why their order was amended to add a more expensive item". Someone down the line has to actually act out the 'evil algorithm', and will then have to actually interact with the aggrieved customers. In a third party delivery service I imagine it would be trivially easy to get the line workers to betray the customer / rest of the organization, but there are also none of the incentives to, for example, try to dump low velocity items through deliberate substitution errors.
      • nmstoker 6y ago
        Maybe we have different experiences but you talk as if substitutions are not a regular part of the process - I'm not a massive delivery shopper but in the pre-Covid era it was almost unheard of to get a delivery without at least one item substituted when you forget to deselect substitution. I switch amongst three of the major chains and the experience is basically the same. Also I don't think your approach need be how it's enacted. You could quite easily run a set of adjustments against the restocking priories to see which had the least negative effect on profits and that would likely result in this kind of substitution the way it's observed. This wouldn't even need one to put on a "let's do evil hat", couched in these terms it comes across as perfectly reasonable.
  • skywhopper 6y ago
    Yep. This has been our experience as well. Not only do the pickers have no incentive to do a good job (and often aren't even trained in how to judge the produce and meat they are selecting); and not only do mind-boggling substitutions take place sometimes; but in just about every online grocery order we've made in the past two months (so about 10 times by this point), we've gotten some items that were just plain wrongly chosen--ie we asked for one thing and got something entirely different that might have been nearby in the store, and was rung up as what we ordered, but we didn't actually get the item we ordered. Lots of these problems could be improved through better technology (there's a running joke on Twitter about accidentally ordering a single banana or fifty avocados, and it's amazing how truly bad the grocery websites are at representing what it is you're even ordering) and by optimizing the product selection for online ordering and delivery distribution (versus today where most grocery delivery seems to be done by store staff walking the store and building a cart by looking for the things on a print-out of the website order), but what grocery company is going to invest in those sorts of fundamental changes when the CW is that we'll be past this pandemic within a year or two at most?
    • jandrese 6y ago
      Oh yeah. We tried the Costco delivery thing once, but discovered that the "substitutions allowed" option is basically "fuck my shit up Fam".
  • charwalker 6y ago
    I'm super picky about my apples after growing up near an awesome apple orchard. I only buy a few types unless making a pie or similar. Each type has certain features I look at. I like eating crisp Fuji apples the most and usually only buy those based on coloring, shape, and the sound it makes when I pop it into my hand like one might a baseball into a baseball glove. The sound is critical to finding a crisp vs soft apple. No way I'm leaving fresh produce/meat selection to a random staffer, especially not apples.
  • darrylb42 6y ago
    Not to mention expiry dates on products. A store is happy to give out a 12 pack of KD that expires tomorrow. Shopping myself I know it will take a couple months to finish and won't by something about to expire. I also won't pick defective packages. Both of these things happened ordering from Amazon before this crisis and I have not tried them since, or likely ever again.
  • stormdennis 6y ago
    I always check use-by and best before dates. When milk can have a date that's over a week away, I really hate it when someone buys milk that's use by tomorrow. Same for for bread, cheese, eggs, butter, fruit and veg, any number of items. Supermarkets naturally want to sell you the soon to expire stuff so how can you trust their pickers? The answer might be buyers and deliverers independent from the shops.
    • mattkrause 6y ago
      A lot of the use-by dates are more like quality suggestions or even outright marketing (how could salt go bad?!) https://www.nytimes.com/article/expiration-dates-coronavirus.html https://www.nytimes.com/article/expiration-dates-coronavirus...
      • stormdennis 6y ago
        You're right but, illogical or not, given a choice I'll always take the fresher one.
  • tonetheman 6y ago
    This this this. In our area you cannot get good pickers. I am sure they are tired or bored or something... but it is most of the time not worth the hassle. So I get it... but it is not a good experience at all.
    • sethhochberg 6y ago
      Tired, bored, or perhaps the reality is that the business model simply wouldn't work if the wages paid to Instacart shoppers were high enough that they could reliably get labor who cared. As-is it feels like a desperation gig and the results match.
  • xivzgrev 6y ago
    Exactly. Online grocery ordering still has a significant problem: accurately delivering on a customer's wishes. It's a complicated problem. Customers have various "squishy" preferences - your bruised apples may be fine to me. Customers also have dietary restrictions that they just can't have. In-store inventory (esp fresh items) is constantly changing and may not be up to date. Items can easily look similar but are actually different in grabbing the wrong item or substituting. When you go to the store, you can get exactly what you want. Until that problem is solved, grocery delivery will always be a minority.
  • PretzelFisch 6y ago
    Oh the automatic substitution non organic to organic is not much of an issue. But I have had food items like oatmeal auto replace with ice or a sponge. I don't know what is worse honestly the fact ai is so bad or that a real person will buy the insane replacement.
    • hansvm 6y ago
      People are complicated though, even for seemingly safe issues like swapping non-organic for organic. I never make that substitution myself, except for the few times a year I'm shopping for somebody else who would make that substitution. As a consumer I don't enjoy paying higher prices for lower quality produce with an extra helping of e. coli, and it's frustrating to see disinformation campaigns demonizing GMOs while ignoring "organic" mutagenesis or trying to masquerade organic farms as being pesticide-free just because they use undisclosed/unregulated amounts of "natural" chemicals which repel/kill pests rather than regulated amounts of chemicals which are definitively classified as pesticides.
  • bsharitt 6y ago
    I used Kroger's clicklist when it first started, and it was find but got worse. It wouldn't have been so bad if I got the occasional piece of produce or meat I would normally give a pass too, but as time when on, it started to seem like they were actively starting to dump their worst meats and produce on clicklist shoppers. I also found myself having to go inside the store almost every time to go get the items that were allegedly unavailable. In the end if I'm going to go inside anyway I might as well not pay the extra fee and not get the worst the meat and produce departments have to offer.
  • anjakefala 6y ago
    They substituted veggie soup cubes with chicken ones. I am a vegetarian. :/
  • yellow_postit 6y ago
    This was a point of price differentiation at some of the online grocery retailers I used while living in London. Some folks will be willing to pay more for “perfect” produce — even for bananas as an example there’s a need for a slider of green to yellow that is really relevant.
  • rs6 6y ago
    My wife doesn't even like the produce I pick when I get produce and meats so it's unlikely some store person or contractor from a delivery service app will do the same.
  • herenorthere 6y ago
    As a person who used to work in produce in the US, just wanted to say the visual image of a produce clerk dumping a box of apples to the display is ungodly. Where are you shopping? A few discount stores might do that, but there's no way any prominent stores do that. I mean, first of all, virtually all brands of apples don't just come loose in boxes, they are layered with cardboard trays. So you couldn't just dump them all out at once even if you wanted too. Unless you want to have cardboard trays flying everywhere. That's just not a simple or quick way to unload even if you are being careless!
  • adrianmonk 6y ago
    About substitutions, I'm guessing they haven't explored what all they can do with that and there are probably some easy wins still available. Right now it seems to be pretty capricious and up to the whims of someone who is in a hurry and whose primary responsibility is pulling things from shelves. They could use software to make educated guesses. Random ideas: (1a) Allow customers to rate substitutions after the fact as bad, OK, or good. Then learn which substitutions customers generally like, and try to do those. The goal should probably be to avoid bad substitutions, so 10% bad / 60% OK / 30% good is preferable to 25% bad / 25% OK / 50% good. (1b) If I myself rated a substitution as bad in the past and you need to substitute for that same item again, try something different. (2) Look for safe choices in order history. If vanilla yogurt isn't available today, but blueberry and coconut are, and in the past I've bought cherry and blueberry yogurt several times but never coconut, then give me blueberry. (3) Get fancier and try to model features of products that a customer does and doesn't like. You've got metadata like keywords from product names, ingredient lists, brands, packaging type, and size. I bought this ice cream, those bagels, that coffee creamer, and that applesauce, and cinnamon is the common thread in all four. So when you're out of brown sugar oatmeal, give me cinnamon spice even though I've never bought that before because it looks like I like cinnamon. (4) Model based on similarity to other buyers. I often buy these 5 items, and someone else also buys those same 5 items, but they often buy a 6th one that I don't. So maybe I'd like that 6th product too as a substitute (provided it's already on the short list of reasonable substitutes).
    • gregmac 6y ago
      I think substitutions are way, way more complex than that. Just from my own experience: I eat low carb (keto). Recently I had vanilla yogurt (22g carbs) substituted for Greek yogurt (5g carbs), which I basically can't eat. There's a handful of other things where the carbs can vary wildly between brands such as sausages, salad dressing, and BBQ sauce. Not to mention that many people think the "low fat" version of anything is basically interchangeable (reality: less fat, but 10x the carbs (sugar) to make up for it). My kid is allergic to peanuts. There's a shocking amount of things that "may contain peanuts or tree nuts" including things you wouldn't necessarily expect like pita breads, meatballs and chicken fingers. We stick to the same brands generally, but always read the label whenever buying something new. Food allergies are probably possible to handle (though you really do have to check everything), but I don't realistically expect the pickers to follow the more specific/crazy diet restrictions. We've only done online pickup a handful of times but have stopped allowing substitutions on most things for the above reasons.
  • 2OEH8eoCRo0 6y ago
    I eat bruised apples. Who cares?
  • thayne 6y ago
    > Now you have to consider the automatic substitution of equivalent items when something is out of stock or, as my local store handles it, simply not getting an item that is out of stock that I would be ok with a substitution.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • jasondigitized 6y ago
    My wife and I use Shipt and we always get a guy named Matthew. If we order apples, Matthew takes the time to find the good apples. If he doesn't like the apples he will text my wife and ask if we want to nix the apples in our order. Matthew always gets a very generous tip and I think there is an opportunity for a service to take a white glove approach to grocery shopping that busy people will pay a premium for.
  • ahallock 6y ago
    I agree that choosing in-person is better, but I find the experience good enough while keeping out of harm's way of the pandemic. A bruised apple is not going to ruin my day. Most delivery services I've used have a "don't substitute" option as well if you need that for sensitive items.
  • philwelch 6y ago
    Doing home grocery delivery by hiring people to shop at the grocery store for you is like doing e-commerce by hiring people to go to the mall for you. Grocery stores are deliberately designed in the exact opposite way that fulfillment centers are; even “warehouse stores” like Costco are adapted to exploit consumer psychology rather than optimize picking throughput. I have never had substitution problems with Amazon Fresh because “substitute one ASIN for another” is an absurd use case if you can reliably track your inventory and allow people to choose products based on availability. I’ve also been pleased with meat and produce quality; maybe I’m lucky, or maybe grocers have been getting away with stocking shoddy produce for years on the expectation that the customer can do the QC work for them.
• nemacol 6y ago
  "Allow substitutions" is the risky click of 2020.
  • nemacol 6y ago
    Not to mention the whole experience made me feel terrible. For the workers involved being overworked and under paid. The wrong products I received. The added expense in not making a trip to the store. My feeling of selfishness and laziness.
  • copperx 6y ago
    Yes, but that's the "I'm feeling lucky" button if you often buy the store brand.
  • SloopJon 6y ago
    Whole Foods amusingly substituted hot sauce for baking powder. Less amusingly, Peapod (Stop and Shop) substituted Diet Coke for regular. What am I supposed to do with that? Maybe I'll order some Mentos next time.
    • nemacol 6y ago
      I had an order that asked for "firm tofu" and ended up with mukimame. Which, ya know... pretty close but still pretty far. :P
  • kirykl 6y ago
    Maybe online dating sites will follow this pattern
  • jandrese 6y ago
    I love it when you have two 10lb bags of sugar on the list, and because you left "allow substitutions" checked you get two 50lb bags instead. I can understand if you have to sub in the more expensive organic version, but the complete inability to use common sense drives me crazy.
• allengeorge 6y ago
  I like going to the grocery store.
  • holler 6y ago
    me too, it's a reason to get out of the house, to see other people, to get exercise, and to look at all the food :)
  • redisman 6y ago
    Me too. I've been using pickup during covid but it's just one more thing missing in my life. I really don't mind browsing the aisles at 9pm listening to a podcast while I do the weekly shopping. I go to very large and dull grocery stores and they have a weird charm.
    • zwieback 6y ago
      Me too - we have a large employee-owned no frills supermarket and I've been going there for 25 years. The calming, trance-like experience of picking out my items is something I don't want to miss. I like the walls of cereal, the bulk food bins and the excitement when an item moves to a new location.
  • sszz 6y ago
    Same--going to a market feels like a very human experience.
  • dehrmann 6y ago
    Not just that, I'm surprised at all the people here who switched to a delivery service. I'm sure some of them are high-risk--and I get it--but I bet a lot are generally low-risk, and the way things are looking, grocery shopping with 6 feet of distance isn't a particularly risky activity.
• supercanuck 6y ago
  Once Amazon sucks all the margins out of grocery, what are people to do when 3rd world countries are drop shipping food to American Customers in 10 years? How do you return food to a paper shell company based in Montana? yea no thanks. My trust in these companies is diminishing.
  • Spivak 6y ago
    There are margins in grocery? Walmart and Kroger put a pretty swift end to that.
    • barbecue_sauce 6y ago
      While margins are low in shelf-stable grocery staples, profit on that side of the store is usually driven by volume and careful management of labor and process. Margins are also higher on private label goods, so promotional energy is spent on driving consumers to those products. At the store level, most grocery chains have started to increase their food service and perishable offerings, which traditionally have much higher (and more stable) margin which augments the profitability of any individual outlet.
  • kube-system 6y ago
    I don't think there have been margins in grocery in my lifetime.
• bpodgursky 6y ago
  I know it's pandemic-anathema, irresponsible, whatever... but I find myself going to the grocery store more often than I did before the lockdown, just because I'm so bored (mostly subconscious at the time I do it, but clear in retrospect). If going out to the grocery store is my only non-family human contact during the day, I find myself finding pettier and pettier reasons to go out and buy things. "Oh, I guess I'm running low on milk. Oh, I'm running low on cheese. Hm, maybe I'll just get a sandwich..."
  • WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
    I mean, are you wearing a mask? There's nothing particularly wrong with going to a grocery store if you're keeping social distancing and wearing a mask.
    • bpodgursky 6y ago
      Seattle, so yeah.
    • ping_pong 6y ago
      Social distancing is another myth. In a place like a supermarket, microdroplets with SARS-CoV-2 will linger in the air for 10 minutes. Social distancing is meaningless.
      • leetcrew 6y ago
        okay, I'll bite. you're ignoring a lot of important variables here. the total volume and circulation of air, number of people in the store, your distance from other people, and whether you and others wear masks all affect the probability that you get infected when you go to the store. if you, the other shoppers, and the store do everything right, the odds of infection are pretty low.
        • ping_pong 6y ago
          I said social distancing, not wearing masks. Everyone wearing masks is very, very effective in stopping the spread. I've been saying it for months even when the CDC and WHO said the opposite, and some sheeple started to parrot that malicious misinformation. Regarding social distancing, which I specifically mentioned, someone put in the effort to calculate a model and simulate it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vv9JQ0iPfgE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vv9JQ0iPfgE Have you done the same or are you just guessing?
• ideals 6y ago
  For the same reason I don't like ordering from Uber eats, I just can't justify pissing away all that money on something I can go do in the same amount of time. Online grocery shopping works great if you have a lot of disposable income, but I just can't justify my grocery bill going up so much to cover the tech salaries at Amazon and Instacart for a delivery service.
  • slouch 6y ago
    We just started ordering curbside pickup at the grocery store and there might be a fee but it's nothing compared to delivery.
• drwiggly 6y ago
  Uh tried to order stuff from a "service". Nothing was ever able to be scheduled two months ago. Would rather kinda goes out the window if you can't even get delivery service.
• somebrody 6y ago
  The way brands package, label, and market their goods is not compatible with online shopping. In the store, a person can quickly evaluate value and buy different options on sale that they enjoy less than another product, but are a good bargain. Online, however, that type of shopping is a rabbit hole of overthought. It takes too long. The only way to speed it up is to remove the idea of evaluating options for value. Make everything a good value. If you can't do that for some product, then let it go out of stock. Online shopping needs consistent pricing. People want to order what they like, at a fair value, and at prices that could only change every 4 to 6 weeks. If you're in the supply chain, figure this out please.
• ping_pong 6y ago
  I've been using Whole Foods delivery about 3 times a week, and it's been fantastic, I may never go back. Sometimes the fruits aren't the greatest, but the rate of that is low. Compared to the amount of time I save, it's totally worth the risk.
  • hkmurakami 6y ago
    This is how I feel as well. I don’t even mind the shopping part but for a mass grocer, the checkout experience has become unbearable.
  • code_duck 6y ago
    I was puzzled when this article mentioned Amazon and Walmart, saying Amazon had a disadvantage in providing fresh foods, and then said nothing about Whole Foods. I have gotten about five orders delivered from Whole Foods. I definitely like that they operate their own service versus using instacart. While there have been some issues with the website, such as losing cart contents (and one would think that Amazon, of all companies would have their site perfect) I haven't had any significant problems with substitutions, quality, or the delivery itself. It was difficult to arrange a delivery slot at first. They seem to have fixed that. The sizes were unexpectedly small on a few things. That's about it.
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
• Ididntdothis 6y ago
  I am generally a little down on online shopping. With fresh food you definitely want to see it first (not all tomatoes are the same). I have tried Instacart a few times but almost very time I was disappointed with the quality or the replacements so I won't do it again. With other things it's the same. I have bought backpacks online that had a weird fit. In store I would just have tried the next, but online it's an ordeal to return things. Same for watches, phone cases, clothes and a lot of other stuff.
• dx87 6y ago
  My problem is that if I order online, there may be a few ingredients out of stock for a few different meals, and I end up having to go shopping anyway because I have 3-4 meals without all the ingredients. If I went shopping in the first place, I could see that some ingredients for a meal aren't in stock, and get ingredients for a different meal.
• analog31 6y ago
  My experience with online food shopping has been mixed. They actually did a good job of picking veggies for me. My family doesn't eat a lot of meat, so that's not super important. The headaches are in ordering and delivery. The ordering systems have the look and feel of having been bought from one vendor, while their inventory system is from another, and never the twain shall meet. Bar codes were invented for inventory control, and it's a highly refined science. Even produce has a code. But you can't enter a bar code number into the ordering system. Time slots for picking up your order, that fill up and are unavailable. For many of us who are working from home, our time is flexible. Just tell me an estimated lead time and text me when it's ready. I'll hop in my car or bike and pick up my order in a jiffy. Now, depending on how the covid pans out in the next year or so, food delivery might have to mature a bit. I could even imagine delivery-only stores, which could have much better inventory control.
  • bpyne 6y ago
    I had the same thought about delivery-only stores. Honestly, I'm in support of it. I hate driving. But grocery stores are not up to the task right now with order and delivery systems.
    • thejynxed 6y ago
      Or enough people willing to do the actual delivering for the usual shit pay.
      • bpyne 6y ago
        No doubt. Even if we increased the pay or found another way to attract people as deliverers, grocery stores need to solve inventory and order picking. They won't keep delivery customers when they can't fulfill 40% of items that a customer requests for delivery. For anything they can fulfill, people picking orders need to understand acceptable substitutions without having to be trained by the customer like an ML system. My family used grocery delivery for 5 years with a lot of satisfaction. We had two people picking and delivering. One of the two people was a former chef and the other grew up on a family farm. They selected produce and made substitutions on an expert level with little feedback from us. We paid $5 for delivery and they never accepted tips.
• trynewideas 6y ago
  Great timing, just had an online grocery order botched for the fourth straight time.
• dougmwne 6y ago
  We have been having a good experience with the Walmart grocery pick-up app, good enough that I would consider still using it after social distancing is over. There's a few factors that go into this. First and most importantly, it's completely free with no markups, tips or extra charges. I can edit the order right up until the night before, so it's quite convenient to add things as I think of them throughout the week. I dislike shopping at Walmart but their prices are significantly better on most things than other stores in my area. Their stores are so huge and inconveniently laid out that waiting a few minutes in the pick-up parking spot is massively less time. And though the grocery pickers don't do a great job selecting produce, there's a fast refund process in the app when I receive something that's damaged/rotten. But all that is only a plausible replacement for a store that I hate. I generally enjoy grocery shopping, especially at higher-end or specialty stores and would never replace that with an app. Even Aldi is a delight in comparison with interesting rotating imports and close-outs.
  • cableshaft 6y ago
    Wal-Mart has the best pickup/delivery web experience out of the four that I've tried as well (the others being Meijer, Target, and Instacart). They're not my first choice of places to shop, but being able to reserve a slot a full week in advance before you even have to start putting together your order, being able to choose which items can be substituted and which cannot, and being able to add to the order up until about 12 hours before it's scheduled to happen are all pretty nice features that the other places don't seem to have. And the prices not being any more expensive other than a small flat fee (and tipping the delivery driver if you choose delivery) is nice.
• bane 6y ago
  We decided to order a bunch of things from Costco a few weeks ago through instacart. Actually we decided to do it before then, but the site was broken for a bit. It was crazy expensive. Not only the delivery fee, the tip, etc. But every item was marked up significantly over the in-store price, with no indication that was the case. We even pulled out some old receipts to verify this price difference. Apparently part of the business model is to basically double charge both a delivery fee as well as hidden fees for products. The total bill was a full 30% higher than going to the store. On a $200 bill for a Costco run, that's a $60 upcharge. No thanks, I'd rather go myself in a hazmat suit and then powerwash all the groceries when I get home.
  • JoshTriplett 6y ago
    Some stores sell on Instacart for the exact price they sell for in-store. Fred Meyer / Kroger, for example. Instacart has a notice at the top of each store's page that gives each store's pricing policy. For Costco, it says "Costco sets the price of items on the Instacart marketplace. Prices are higher than your local warehouse. Costco members also do not earn 2% executive reward on Instacart.". For Fred Meyer and several others, it says "Everyday store prices" and links to a policy stating that the prices are the same as in the store.
    • somebrody 6y ago
      If I read all that, do I get my $60 back? No? Then I don't care. It's The Wrong Way.
      • strictnein 6y ago
        Huh? No, you'd read that and then not order it in the first place.
        • somebrody 6y ago
          > not order it in the first place Which was OP's conclusion so I'm not sure why understanding the nuances of the pricing is helpful
• seanwilson 6y ago
  You can always do both. Order the big heavy stuff online that keeps for ages (e.g. beans, rices, canned tomatoes, flour, sugar, spices) and go into the shop for a few extra perishable ingredients you need for a meal when you need them for a less stressful experience. This applies even more if you don't have a car. For balance, 90% of the item substitutions I've had have been fine (most stores in the UK email you the substitution list before delivery, and you can give substitutions back to the driver when they arrive) and the picked fruit + veg have been good for me too. I had a quick look, but is there any data on store food delivery being better for the environment? Wouldn't it save a lot of car trips if done properly?
• gnicholas 6y ago
  We had a Whole Foods delivery yesterday with poultry that was delivered without any cold bags. Who knows how long the driver was out and about before he delivered to our house, but the food wasn’t very cold when we got it.
• bpyne 6y ago
  We had grocery delivery for 5 years pre-pandemic. When the pandemic started we tried to continue grocery delivery. However, we found several key issues. 1. A large number of people decided to move to home delivery. We couldn't get a delivery slot for weeks. 2. I was able to get a delivery once. We had to submit the order the night before. Then I had to wake up early the next morning and continually hit refresh on the delivery scheduling page until a slot opened up, probably due to someone canceling. However, 40% of the items we ordered were no longer available. When we go to the grocery store the items are there. For some reason, they show as out when ordering online. We gave up 6 weeks ago. People who were willing to put up with scheduling weeks in advance and not receiving important parts of their order are finally giving up. It's not really a preference. Our grocery stores are not setup to handle the volume. Fortunately, we're moving into farmers' market season so we can avoid larger stores to some degree.
• neonate 6y ago
  https://archive.md/wsonA https://archive.md/wsonA
• ramoz 6y ago
  This study needs more skepticism. Who are the consultant's clients? Who were the population polled? I don't know many younger folks who don't try to automate every aspect of their lives including grocery.
• rasfincher 6y ago
  We've been using Instacart more during the pandemic and we've found that it makes shopping for substitutions much harder. Instacart has about as good of a system for replacements as possible IMO but I still prefer to be able to adapt and change what we're planning to eat on the fly, in the store. On the other hand we have started to widen our recipe horizons by being forced to use unexpected replacements.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• hinkley 6y ago
  Friend of a friend was a UX expert at Homegrocer before they flamed out. There are dark patterns in grocery store layout that I'm sure you've heard of, about where products are on shelves and what products are near them/in a favorable position compared to them. They do that to increase profits. In a way, all of the 'boring' products you want to buy are soft loss-leaders. They might not sell them below cost, but they sell them below a sustainable margin, so your price for that item is subsidized by other items. When you make a web site you have to do the same thing, which he struggled with ethically and logistically. How do you make website dark patterns as subtle as putting something on the top/bottom physical shelf? Obvious patterns start to piss off a lot of people.
• elicash 6y ago
  I still think the design of these apps can be dramatically improved. I just fired up Instacart now for my local grocery store and searched for eggs. Featured was a dozen eggs for $4.59 (why featured?), and I'm not sure why that's featured when it's a terrible price. I see my normal eggs at $1.99, but then I can get the "store choice" (not sure what that means... it's not that the grocery store owns the brand) 18 count for $2.89. So unlike at the store where it tells you price per egg, I have to do my own math. Okay, math done, let me check American cheese next. There are three "featured" cheeses plus one "store choice." Again, I don't know what those mean. Then I see the deli sliced, but the deli slice is per pound not in ounces like the pre-packaged cheese. Okay, that's the same as in-store, too, so I'll give it a pass. Then I see a giant list of other brands, but they're grouped in a seemingly random way. It's not grouped by brand, or by count. Is it popularity? Why is there no way to sort by cost per ounce? I can sort, it appears by total cost, except it's not actually sorting by that, either, bc it still has those weirdly labeled featured four items up top. Could go on, but will stop there.
  • kube-system 6y ago
    > Featured was a dozen eggs for $4.59 (why featured?), and I'm not sure why that's featured when it's a terrible price. That's exactly why it's featured. This is no different than being in an actual grocery store. All the high markup items get the premium shelf space too. And stores often have the same meaningless signage on their shelves as well: "Look!", "Wow!", "Special Offer!", heck even some just literally say "Promotion!". They want you to look at that product, and you did, so it worked exactly as they intended.
    • elicash 6y ago
      > This is no different than being in an actual grocery store. On a phone, you've only got a couple inches to view at a time. It's TOTALLY different. If all you do as a designer is take things in store and literally transcribe them to a phone, it won't work. It's a terrible way to design. And I still don't understand difference between featured and store pick btw.
      • 6y ago
• moogly 6y ago
  Not American, but I started using online grocery stores about 5 years ago. I have not stepped inside a physical grocery store since. Sure, sometimes I can get a few wares with a crappy expiration date, but that's not a huge deal, I'll just eat that thing first.
• camelNotation 6y ago
  I would pay for a personal shopper who is working for me, towards my interests, and not in the interests of any particular store. We can't trust store employees to give us the best products because not all grocery items are created equal. An apple is not just an apple. There are good apples and bad apples. I don't trust someone whose incentive is to sell all the apples to give me a good apple when they can give me a bad apple that won't otherwise sell. I also don't like that a store employee only works for one store. I would rather pay a personal shopper to go to grocery store #1 and then grocery store #2 if necessary to get the brands I prefer. Having someone in grocery store #1 tell me "Brand X is out of stock, so we substituted brand Z" is not preferable.
  • Larrikin 6y ago
    This was always my issue with using a service provided by the store. But after talking to friends and finally being convinced to try it turns out that: Grocery store workers are almost never stock holders in the company that are trying to push up their profit margins at all cost in spite of the consumer. Grocery stores either have multiple competitors in an area or face an area where it will become a food desert, people will prefer a grocery store but their existence is no way guaranteed. They also can get their money back on products that didn't sell in certain cases. It's almost always in their interest to get you the best product. Grocery store workers tend to fall in the category of teenagers getting their first job that aren't trusted with anything meaningful, slackers trusted with the same responsibilities as the teenagers, and butchers/produce specialist/etc that take their job extremely seriously that care about what they do. It was surprising at first talking to them over years but there alot of people that take their role in the food chain extremely serious and really love what they do. The majority of food is mass produced, including the produce, so most stuff you have atleast a week left to consume if it's out on shelves. Getting something you didn't want usually ends up being as likely as getting something yourself you didn't want. It's almost always an oversight from someone that is actually intimately familiar with the items because that's their job. This is in stark comparison to a delivery app employee that really only cares about getting as many deliveries in a day as possible. If you get a single bad onion, they don't care so long as the person getting their shirt from Wal-Mart rates them well and they can just work for multiple services averaging out their numbers. Plus you aren't going to be a dick and not tip them right, what with the whole culture surrounding how you have to tip anyone doing a delivery for you?
• Animats 6y ago
  The current big problem with online food shopping is that it's being done by sending low-wage people into ordinary supermarkets. This is inefficient, but until recently this was a niche market. The trouble with doing it that way is that the ordering system doesn't know the inventory. You get some subset of your order. That's no good. Webvan tried to do it right 20 years go, with local fulfillment centers and automation, but they had 3% market share in 30 cities, instead of 30% market share in 3 cities. Cost per order was too high. The Webvan execs went on to Kiva Robotics and Amazon Fresh, and Amazon will probably try this again. They have the market penetration.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • majormajor 6y ago
    Amazon does this sort of direct fulfillment under the Prime Now name. They don't do a great job of keeping a consistent set of things in stock, though. Kroger brands also do this. But you can still get inventory problems - something the system thinks is in stock on Monday at noon when you place the order can be gone by Tuesday at 6 when they're packing your order for you. Both of those have been way better in my experience than Instacart, though.
    • kube-system 6y ago
      > Amazon does this sort of direct fulfillment under the Prime Now name. Do they? When I order, the food comes from my local Whole Foods in a passenger vehicle, and I get the same OOS issues as Instacart. How is the process any different than how Instacart works?
      • _n_b_ 6y ago
        I guess this varies by location. Prime Now for me (in Paris) comes from one location in the city in a delivery van.
      • majormajor 6y ago
        Prime Now gives me three options, one of which is simply directly "Amazon" and comes from an unmarked building that I've happened to drive past a lot.
• dmode 6y ago
  I only go to store because it costs $15 in fees to order $40 of groceries/food
• floatingatoll 6y ago
  I actively mistrust grocery delivery, because between when I place my order for items in stock and the hours-to-day when they pick my items off the shelf, I'm seeing on average 10-20% of my items being listed as "out of stock" or being offered inappropriate substitutes. This issue is compounded by the delivery service I'm using refusing to handle "replacement items" requests — if 'garlic' is out and they offer 'garlic salt', you can't request 'twice as many shallots' or 'garlic powder', because their worker doesn't have the freedom to make judgment calls and doesn't get paid enough to have time for that conversation and can't make substitutions that add any new items to the list. I am being significantly undercharged for delivery groceries and I am getting significantly poor service, and so I will stop using delivery groceries as soon as the pandemic winds down in my area. In the past I used third-party delivery services (e.g. Instacart) and they were much better equipped to make sensible decisions — but the cost-benefit tradeoff of paying them an appropriate wage is such that I prefer to shop in person rather than pay an hour's wages to someone else. Missing from the equation is the time taken navigating terrible online sites. Search for "eggs" and you get easter candy. Search for "salt" and you get one billion kinds of salt, ordered haphazardly. It's impossible to navigate "the fruit isle" because they present everything in a grid of tiny icons. Investing the time necessary to build a visually-attractive site would make this more plausible, but would require significant levels of effort in UI and product photos that exceed the bare minimum exerted by machine-driven listings. So, charge me too little and the service is so poor I loathe it; charge me the correct amount and the service still comes at a net loss in time-and-money, because the UI consumes the hour of my life that I could have just driven to the store and shopped with instead, and then I pay a fee for having my time wasted on top of that. I imagine this makes more sense for others who have more complicated lives and need to be able to prepare an order during store-closed hours, but it doesn't make much sense for me.
  • kube-system 6y ago
    I've had Instacart workers make pretty good substitutions that weren't even in the app's automated list of replacements. They marked my original item OOS and added the new items as an "adjustment", so these judgement calls are at least something that is possible for them to do. The issue is that YMMV with the worker you get on any particular occasion.
• pdx6 6y ago
  I enjoy going to the store too, I want to see what I can make and the quality of the food before I get in line to buy it. I don't think online delivery has changed much since the days of Webvan. When I order on Instacart, Postmates, etc, I get the worst produce, wrong cheese, and just like in the article -- a single banana instead of 1 bunch. Like others have said, the apps need a lot of work, particularly around out of stock items. Unfortunately, during the pandemic, the lines at the stores were long due to social distancing and overall panic, so I went back to online delivery. The problem was that no where delivered and times were weeks out if anything was available at all! The delivery companies weren't even working the one time in history they should shine and take the grocery market by the horns. The upside to all this is I ended up going to locally run stores, bodegas, and farmer's markets, which didn't have everything I wanted because they are small, but going to 2 or 3 isn't hat much of a hassle. As a related side note, my elderly parents did "curb side pickup" for groceries out in Nevada. My mom told me that she often got to "try new foods". It made me laugh, but made me think that for the immuno-vulnerable, do they want to go on a forced diet selected by a low-wage personal shopper?
  • ghaff 6y ago
    I have a local farm meat place and a farm stand a couple miles from me (the latter of which is just getting started for the season). I definitely can't do all my shopping at these places but I anticipate they'll be a lot of my non-dairy perishables over the coming months. Much easier/quicker than dealing with the supermarket.
• makerofspoons 6y ago
  I have decreased the amount of choice and the amount of shipping required for my food by switching to powdered nutritional shakes like Huel and Soylent. No need to worry about the picker getting the wrong thing and there is less need to worry about the colossal amount of plastic waste my weekly shopping used to create. I feel great and I only wish that there were some way to buy various 'lents in a reusable container I could ship back to them, or better yet pick up locally.
  • Invictus0 6y ago
    Are you using Soylent as your only source of food? I have Soylent for breakfast most days and it has done nothing to decrease the amount of choice in my groceries; it replaces cereal and milk but I still have to go shopping for everything else.
    • makerofspoons 6y ago
      I get a meal kit too for variety- three to four meals a week from Green Chef depending on the amount of leftovers. Edit: If anyone knows of any good vegetarian/vegan meal kits that do better on plastic, let me know.
• jhfdbkofdcho 6y ago
  It costs more, it’s inconvenient, I often can’t get the items I want and won’t know about it until it’s too late, and the in store shoppers aren’t great at their jobs. I’m fine buying things off Amazon because if I order something I know I’ll almost certainly get what I ordered.
• charwalker 6y ago
  Ordering online is incredibly difficult and each time I try via a different site/store I end up dropping it after investing almost an hour to sort things out. I am in the Seattle area so it's been a big deal. My recent example is the Safeway site and trying to make an order for pickup or delivery. Initially I picked delivery, gave it my address, and it let me add things to my cart. I built out my entire cart normally, avoiding items listed as not in stock, then when I went to check out it gave me 0 delivery openings for like a week. I then swapped to pick up and it attempted to reconcile out of stock items in my cart with alternatives but for many I had to go back in and find alternatives. Items not reconciled where dropped from my cart so I ahd to manually check that against my list to see what was missing. On checkout, it gave me 0 times to pick up going out a week. So I swapped locations again and went through reconciling my cart again and picking out new items when needed. Again it dropped some items without alternatives so I had to check my cart against my list and again go through finding missing items. hen I went to check out, it again listed 0 openings for the next week. Trying to pick a new option reset my cart in some ways to the point I dropped it altogether. I went to one of the Safeway locations that day and a bunch of out of stock or similar items were actually there and I was checked out in half an hour, mask and gloves on, just fine. Maybe instacart or other premium services have this figured out. I haven't tried amazon fresh much too. But if they work anything like the Safeway systems then I'll risk the store run to save myself an hour of pointless online shopping and save on the premium or cost of delivery.
• RaRaMama 6y ago
  I like to pick my own avocado.
  • sigjuice 6y ago
    Picking my own avocados is my favorite thing. OTOH, I have had 7 Whole Foods orders in the past few weeks with avocados and they were all great. So I am not going back to the store any time soon.
• noetic_techy 6y ago
  I think this has a technological solution, but it will be far more complex to solve. Imagine a virtual store shelf. I for one like to see competing products and prices for those "inner isle items". That could easily be digitized. Fruit and meat selection is another matter entirely. Short of some sort of remote surrogate system that lets you login and see the shelf at your local market real time, I'm not sure how this could be solved. Sometime I go looking for specific cut of meat and find a better deal on something else. Sometimes I'm curious to see what else is available and/or on sale. I think the capital investment to get something going would be a lot but not insurmountable. You may have to change the way items are displayed, have some high powered cameras to zoom in on meat prices. Fruit, I cant imagine anything short of a robot arm that allows me to login and inspect myself, and even then how do you gauge "softness" without some sort of tactile feedback. Possible but expensive to implement.
  • MattGaiser 6y ago
    Eh, why bother? Move the consist goods online and have corner grocers with the fruit and meat. They are probably only 15% of the grocery store
    • noetic_techy 6y ago
      Good idea. That would be ideal.
• vmchale 6y ago
  I feel like with various things being restricted, people were desperate for that social outlet at the beginning of lockdown.
• linsomniac 6y ago
  I guess I'm in the minority, but I've been chomping at the bit for curbside pickup of groceries for years. Our local stores finally started offering it around 6 months ago and it's been our primary method of shopping since then. We've had pretty good luck as far as produce goes. I think 4-5 things have been bad, to various degrees. But even then, it has saved a TON of time, even if I go in and pick the things I'm particular about. I'd say 95% or more is to the quality I would pick, 4% is "passable", and 1% has been "straight into the trash". The stores have never had a problem crediting us on any mistakes. It saves me probably an hour a week, plus there's reduced "impulse buying".
  • pgrote 6y ago
    >I guess I'm in the minority I am there with you. We've used instacart and walmart for deliveries and sams's for curbside pick up. Sam's has been wonderful without any issues. Their inventory is spot on 24 hours out. Walmart is hit and miss with inventory, but it is probably due to lead time. It takes 3 days to get a spot and by then some items are sold out. Learned early to not use substitutions. The more disappointing has been instacart with aldi. Our first time using them was a dream. Shopper texted while shopping, asked about substitutions and communicated. The next 2 times no communication. Things were substituted even when we asked for no substitutions in online orders. Both times items arrived damaged. Crushed bread and smashed tomatoes in first and an opened bag of pretzels the next. Instacart costs more, too.
• linsomniac 6y ago
  One huge cognitive benefit of it is: When I'm in the kitchen and use the last of something, or it's getting close, I open up the app, scan the barcode (or search if I don't have the code), and it just shows up in the next grocery run with no further thought.
• linsomniac 6y ago
  I wonder if stores are finding that they have lower shoplifting now that their staff are walking purchases out to cars.
• lowwave 6y ago
  Of course! I want to go to the store and see the item and buy it! The whole idea of shopping on a web page may be convenient, but sometimes just seem very boring and inspiring for buying food cooking or having new ideas!
• TurbineSeaplane 6y ago
  I shop everyday and cook everyday. It's one of the joys of living to me. I have zero interest in someone else selecting my fresh foods and delivering them to me.
• sjg007 6y ago
  I prefer to buy online but a lot of the time when I do, especially for fresh stuff like meat/dairy/juice, they won't fill it. But if I do go in store, I find it. This is despite the online ordering having refrigeration space for example. So it can be hit or miss. For vegetables and sundries it mostly works out ok. It mostly depends though on the picker I think. My local won't even substitute even if I tell them. So a lot of time I will actually pick a more expensive vegetable then I normally would because I know it is more likely to be in stock. In my town the organic equivalent tends to be in stock vs conventional. I do feel that with robotics, ML, and automation we will get a robust warehouse delivery option... even perhaps farm to table. The Ocado model should work in the USA.
• wffurr 6y ago
  I don't think food shopping, at least for produce, dairy, and meat, aka perishables, is something that even should be online. Why does it need to be, anyway? I can see groceries, i.e. shelf stable items, moving largely online. That's already more convenient for bulk items (e.g. 40lb bag of cat litter).
• zajio1am 6y ago
  Interestingly, the article does not take into account prices. I thought about using online food services, but found that prices are about 20-50 % higher than in a supermarket, so it is supermarket for me.
• jimmaswell 6y ago
  Besides cost, I like looking around and a trip to the store can be enjoyable on its own. Might see another store I want to stop at, get some nice views, or see a nice old car, and it's a good chance to have some thoughts without distractions. It's also the only time I really end up listening to local radio.
• ChuckMcM 6y ago
  Somewhere the former CEO of Webvan[1] is rolling around laughing on the floor. [1] https://groundfloorpartners.com/lessons-from-webvan/ https://groundfloorpartners.com/lessons-from-webvan/
• trophycase 6y ago
  Duh?
• MattGaiser 6y ago
  I would happily purchase all non-produce and non-meat items online. The problem is that produce and meats are not produced with a consistent quality. A steak that expires tomorrow and an apple with a bruise on it are both commonly found in grocery stores and less valuable than the price would indicate. Normally these would just be left on the shelves to expire. Your strawberries may be nice and firm or they could be turning mushy. A container of strawberries is not a container of strawberries. In these cases I am not so much selecting an item, but also inspecting the item to see whether I want to purchase it at all.
  • bmcahren 6y ago
    My shoppers usually select BETTER produce than I do.
  • kyteland 6y ago
    My (admittedly limited) experience with curbside pickup seems to be that a dozen eggs is really 11 and you'd better thoroughly sort your produce after you get it. Expect a few losses.
  • dntbnmpls 6y ago
    > I would happily purchase all non-produce and non-meat items online. I've only ordered heavy packaged bulk items - cases of poland spring, snapple, coke, etc. I just can't bring myself to order perishables ( meats, fruits, veg, etc ) and packaged items that can be crushed like potato chips.
• chooseaname 6y ago
  I trust Publix more than I trust Amazon. Maybe that trust is misplaced? I dunno, but that's where my trust lies right now. Would anyone at Amazon turn my raspberries over and make sure the bottom ones look as good as the top ones?
• koolba 6y ago
  If these companies cannot turn a profit and provide sustainable employment during a mandatory lockdown then there is no hope for this business model. I’d love to have a maid come by and fold my underwear for $1 a day but unless VC decides to dump a couple $100M chasing that pipe dream it’s not going to happen either.
• noneeeed 6y ago
  It's interesting watching discussions about this from the UK. The last stat I can find was that around 25% of people do some or all of their grocery shopping online. Most of the time it works really well. Here, most of the supermarkets now do their online fullfillment from warehouses, not the shop floor, using purpose built delivery vehicals. One, Ocado (who are doing amazing tech work with robots and planning) are entirely online, while also whitelabelling their logistics for another supermarket. On the whole the quality is perfect, it's not "bottom of the barrel", fruit is fresh, things tend to have long dates on them. While you do get substitutions from time to time, they seem to have got rarer as they have got better at predicting demand. The main downside for my wife, who insists on shopping in person, is that you don't get the really good deals on stuff, as it's always on the short-dated stuff they want to get off the shelves.
• marcinzm 6y ago
  I use freshdirect and I can see why people prefer their own shopping. With the pandemic a lot of products are perpetually sold out and there's a week long wait for delivery slots. More importantly, the produce and meat they deliver will often be a day from going bad. I've gotten mushrooms that had more black spots than not on them. So I don't even bother anymore to order perishables.
  • dsjoerg 6y ago
    Came here to say how good freshdirect is. Been a happy customer since 2008 if not longer.
    • marcinzm 6y ago
      I was happy pre pandemic. With the constant out of stock, delivery waits and us cooking more (thus needing fresh produce) it's actually become used less by us rather than more.
• tanilama 6y ago
  Well...trying to buy strawberries from online store. I ordered multiple times from PrimeNow, and 50% of chance, the strawberries have already gone bad.
• yalogin 6y ago
  I don't know how the delivery makes sense to people. We ordered approximately $200 worth of products from Costco and the instacart fee at the end came up to almost 80 bucks. That is something I am not willing to pay.
  • dylz 6y ago
    Instacart's price gouging is a bit of a special case (compared to many supermarkets that do curbside or delivery)
• frogpelt 6y ago
  There are a few problems with online groceries. 1. Out-of-stock substitutions. It depends on which low wage workers is picking the substitutes. They always pick items that are either bigger or more expensive than what we ordered if they can but that doesn't always mean better. 1a. Out-of-stock, no substitutions. I suspect that this also depends on the worker. Before the pandemic, I just don't believe that the store is completely out of the items and any suitable alternatives. I think the worker just got lazy. 2. Shopping by pictures can be deceiving. We once ordered greens from the produce section. What we ended up with was enormous 2 foot stalks of greens rather than the "normal-sized" product. It wasn't the store's fault. It's just hard to tell the difference from a picture. 3. Not receiving part of the order. There have a few times from different places that we did not receive our whole order and we had to return (45 minute drive one way) to the store to get it. It was just store error and we weren't that diligent about checking every single bag before we left the store. All that being said, I think it is generally better than shopping in store. I think it's less emotional and more planned and therefore almost always cheaper.
• monadic2 6y ago
  I have had so many bad experiences with instacart: * shopper buying yams rather than potatoes (note: this was not a replacement, they seemed to genuinely believe they had bought potatoes.) * shopper going to checkout before I can suggest a better replacement for an item. * shopper buys obviously moldy fruit. * shopper buys five roaster chickens as a replacement for five cornish hens. * shopper gives up really easily on trivial things like a common chip brand. It’s frustrating because I can both understand the shopper, but I then need to give instacart more money to actually get the food I’ve verified by phone they have in stock. Furthermore, about 80% of these omissions are most easily fixable if I just drive to the store and buy it. So yea, I just do my own shopping again so I don’t spend $30 on delivery fees and tips and end up spending $5 on furry strawberries. I don’t understand why instacart can’t work with the store to pack the inventory by people who know where shit is, can identify products, and can inquire about inventory. Other delivery services do just fine with a two-legged approach.
  • zitterbewegung 6y ago
    I've ordered items from Starbucks and when I walk in to get the order they state that the item is not in stock. The ability for grocers to know exactly what is in stock and what isn't in realtime isn't something they are designed to do and isn't a trivial ask.
    • monadic2 6y ago
      Right, but they could pack the food and ask me to verify before delivering, same as at starbucks. In fact at starbucks I’m rather shocked this is an issue—you don’t have the weird issue of products being in someone’s cart while they appear in inventory, let alone blatant theft! You’d think they would be able to provide an accurate inventory in realtime. EDIT: also, to clarify, “by phone” in my previous post meant I called the store to ask if they have the item my shopper couldn’t find. They put me on hold to check the shelves.
      • vbezhenar 6y ago
        Another solution is to allow to made a purchase days before. I can plan my cart for a week and most of items are recurrent. So they know what they need and they can fill those orders in advance.
• badrabbit 6y ago
  I loved using things like instacart but they're shameless about correlating my real life purchase history. I would be ecstatic if there was a privacy friendly alternative. Order groceries with bitcoin!!
• knowaveragejoe 6y ago
  I'm blown away nobody has mentioned Amazon Fresh yet. There was a few weeks early in the pandemic when delivery times were a crapshoot, but it's worked flawlessly for me ever since. Produce and meat have all been good quality. Meat is obviously in high demand so availability of certain cuts or types of meat(mainly chicken) is variable. If I had to give a criticism, it's that some items are shown as in stock, but on the day of delivery when they pick your order(which is evidently in a warehouse) it turns out it's not available. They automatically refund you the price in this case.
• ashtonkem 6y ago
  I’m in the other camp; getting delivery has massively reduced my impulse junk food purchases. I couldn’t care less about convenience or cost differences; the reduction in impulse sugar consumption alone has been worth it.
• gcheong 6y ago
  Before lockdown I would walk to the store almost everyday or every other day buying only what I needed for meals for that day or two. After lockdown I've only ventured to the store once and have since switched to ordering from Instacart for most things but now I feel compelled to either buy more non-perishables in larger quantities or things I can readily freeze in order to meet the order minimums. It's been mostly fine overall and I basically just chalk up any mishaps, which have been minor, to the cost of the privilege of being able to wait out this pandemic from the comfort of home, but I do know that when this is over I I'll be glad to be able to shop in-person again for most things. I might still buy toilet paper and paper towels in bulk though.
• benibela 6y ago
  I would buy it online, if it were not more expensive In the store I spend between 10 to 20€/week for food. The online shops have an almost 5€ shipping fee. That is a 25% food expense increase, at best
• deeblering4 6y ago
  I guess I’m an outlier. My local grocery has their own delivery service and I’m very happy with it. Sometimes things are out of stock and I’ll make a 10 min trip to the store for a few items. Sure beats shopping for an hour and loading a full cart, unloading it for check out, reloading it, unloading into my car, then loading into my fridge.
• lifthearth 6y ago
  H-E-B Groceries In Texas has been doing an incredible job with their cubside service. It costs about $5 and takes less than 15 minutes to drive up and get all your groceries put in your trunk. This article was surprising to me because my impression has been the opposite and curbside service is an awesome luxury that's come out of this. Only downsides are having to schedule a pickup time usually for the next day and sometimes they have to substitute items that are out of stock. I wish I could link items so if they don't have bread don't get me peanut butter and jelly too.
  • monadic2 6y ago
    Related article (cannot vouch for quality): https://www.texasmonthly.com/food/heb-prepared-coronavirus-pandemic/ https://www.texasmonthly.com/food/heb-prepared-coronavirus-p...
• thrower123 6y ago
  Unless I'm buying cases of canned goods or other completely fungible items, yeah. Besides, Amazon has become so erratic with their deliveries that I feel like I'm back in the days of mail-order catalogs.
• niftylettuce 6y ago
  If you're in NYC try out our service, OurHarvest. https://ourharvest.com/?coupon=HACKERNEWS https://ourharvest.com/?coupon=HACKERNEWS Coupon code HACKERNEWS
• ummonk 6y ago
  It's probably safer to shop in person from the store than to order form a delivery person / or instacart shopper who is exposed to a bunch of people.
• yellowapple 6y ago
  For me, I just need to get out of the apartment every once in awhile, and grocery shopping's a reasonable excuse to do so. Plus I gotta run my car every few days to keep the battery from dying (I have a battery tender, but it'd involve either parking in a garage I'm currently using for storage or running an extension cord from said garage to wherever I ended up parking).
• unemphysbro 6y ago
  As much as I hate grocery shopping. I like having control over the entire process. Maybe, I'm neurotic?
• codyswann 6y ago
  Two take aways: 1) All of the issues are definitely and easily solvable, especially through learned behavior 2) Karen's are going to Karen.
• alkonaut 6y ago
  I started shopping online during the pandemic and so far I really like it. We (I’m not in the US) have multiple huge sites that deliver directly from warehouses (all the big food chains + a few independent). Selection is massive, almost everything seems to be in stock most of the time, and prices are like supermarkets or lower. I’m especially impressed by the quality of fruit & veg. It’s like they think “we can’t deliver anything that’s less than perfect because it might turn users away from our service”. It’s the correct line of thought but I wonder what happens to all the less-than-perfect produce. I’ll probably continue to use online shopping forever but I’ll go to the store too closer to the weekend and to get inspiration, see what looks good, buy things I can’t get online and so on. I enjoy shopping but I don’t enjoy carrying home a weeks worth of heavy basics. I’ll get that delivered to my door and just get fresh fish, fresh bread from the bakery etc myself. Reading about the US experience here it seems like it’s a market ready for disruption and I’m surprised none of the big US grocery chains has succeeded.
• sabujp 6y ago
  ohh have we vaccinated everyone yet? i'll stay home and order as much as i can still thank you. R0 is still probably over 2 even with the increased temps.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• code_duck 6y ago
  Grocery shopping has been one of my main forms of entertainment and socialization for the past decade. I tended to go to the market at least once a day, sometimes three or four stores. However, given the concerns about the pandemic, I have switched to delivery and curbside pickup. I knew enough from reading the instacart subreddits to know that I didn't really want to use instacart. I don't like the idea of paying a delivery fee in addition to higher prices, for one. So I've gone with stores that operate their own curbside pickup or delivery services, such as Safeway and Whole Foods. I've been quite satisfied with both. As much as I enjoy going to the grocery store, it feels very convenient to do things this way.
• kbos87 6y ago
  I see a lot of commentary about experiences people have had with grocery delivery services. I think this may be part of it, but it isn’t why I never have and likely never will use one. I think there’s a large number of people who don’t mind, and sometimes actually enjoy grocery shopping. It’s a relaxing activity that fits into my week. For me, it’s a chance to be out in the world, using my senses, exploring new things to incorporate into my daily life. Convenience is often what people optimize for, but not when it’s outweighed by entertainment and other beneficial factors. When it comes to grocery shopping that may not be the case for everyone, but the opposite is far from representative of everyone, despite the reality that many tech CEOs and press put forward. Edit: I’m talking mostly about grocery shopping under normal, non-COVID circumstances.
  • fergie 6y ago
    Totally agree, even under COVID circumstances. If it wasnt for the weekly shopping trip I would never have realised that for a lot of people life was carrying on nearly as normal. Online shopping feels too much like work (as in it feels like I am at work). I find that wondering around grocery stores is a good way to reset my brain.
• gniv 6y ago
  I just realized that the "UI" presented by the supermarket shelves as you walk by them is very dense and yet we are good at identifying things quickly. Short of a full VR experience, I haven't seen a similar UI on a computer. My problem with shopping for groceries online is that there is no easy way to browse and discover new things. Especially nowadays when some favorites are out of stock I keep finding new things in store that I like.
• beebmam 6y ago
  Speaking entirely from my own experience as an American: I've had no problem at all with ordering food online, other than some shortages of certain products. Quality of produce has been high, no mistakes, with quick and kind service. I think I'll be sticking to ordering online for the foreseeable future
• gwbas1c 6y ago
  I tried a local restaurant produce delivery service. The quality of the food was good and the prices were fine... But the problem was I had to place the order over the phone, which was excruciatingly slow! Even though I go shopping with a list, I often make a lot of impulse buys which is just harder when ordering groceries for delivery. I like going to the store in person better. The grocery store is very close to my house and well stocked, compared to all the various niche items I get on Amazon.
• inamberclad 6y ago
  Much harder to discover new foods via a computer screen.
• eries 6y ago
  A lot of the issues being reported in this thread are thoroughly solved by Good Eggs. They’ve been much better for us during the pandemic, although obviously under heavy load
• rglover 6y ago
  Of course. Sometimes the convenience of ordering is great, but good lord, I don't want to live in the dystopian hell where you never go to the store. It's fun to joke with people. Flirt with the cashier. Bump into a friend unexpectedly. Human stuff.
• Noos 6y ago
  I think the real issue is probably the store hires all of one or two people to deliver food, who make really low wages and have to do a lot of orders. You guys are expecting concierge level service from minimum wage people. Grocery stores can really only do the minimum possible usually, even with the fees
• whyenot 6y ago
  I did the Whole Foods delivery through Amazon a couple of times, and it was fine. The only problem was that it became almost impossible to get a delivery window. Eventually, I just gave up on it. What I have been doing more recently is ordering a box of fruit and produce (+ cheese, other stuff) from the Milk Pail drive-thru in Mountain View and then every couple of weeks I go to a grocery store and buy whatever else I need. I've only been to a grocer store twice in 8+ weeks of shutdown. That's a pretty huge change for me -- I used to go several times a week.
• makecheck 6y ago
  The really impressive thing about ordering groceries online is that they actually provide multiple ways to never receive what you asked for: - The web site shopping cart can just decide to remove things silently when they go out of stock. (Dear Amazon: This is the stupidest imaginable thing you could do, please stop it!) - The delivery person can miss a bag (and of course it’s the one containing something you really wanted, like milk). - Someone can steal things off your porch. - The shopper can come up with something completely unreasonable as a replacement; or they just misunderstand the order (e.g. pick a weird size or different item). I once ordered a single tomato to have nice slices for hamburgers, and I swear they found the tiniest tomato I have ever seen (I thought it was a grape). Having said this, especially in a pandemic, it’s all been pretty reliable but still frustrating at times. A long way to go, yet.
• ryanmarsh 6y ago
  Instacart sucks therefore Americans prefer to shop for themselves? I think not. We love Shipt. They've solved the stated problems. Shame they don't get more attention.
• sesuximo 6y ago
  Americans have nothing else to do
• madrox 6y ago
  Our household does all our grocery shopping online, and I'm pretty convinced people wouldn't rather visit a store. Rather, the online grocery shopping experience is broken. Online grocery shopping mimics other online shopping UX, and that simply isn't how people shop in grocery stores. Grocery shopping is a communal thing. Kids ask to add things to the cart (or just toss it in). There's a lot of aisle browsing. You talk to the butcher to find out what's good. Right now, you buy meat online the same way you buy a vacuum. No wonder people would rather go to the store. In our home, there's no way for me to browse the store without borrowing my wife's login, and browsing the store kinda sucks. Instacart is notoriously bad, and there are way better services out there (Good Eggs and Thrive are probably the best), but there's still usually one or two things wrong with every delivery. Having to talk to customer service every week gets exhausting. Whoever cracks grocery UX will win.