All the others let you fill your cart, then at checkout tell you there are no slots available until the end of time. Waste of time, energy, and hope. F U, Target, Safeway, Albertsons, and Kroger.
My other top choice is a small (three store) chain in Western Washington called Central Market [1]. (If the name seems familiar, it may be from season 10 of "Top Chef" which was set in Seattle. Top Chef normally sends the contestants to Whole Foods for most shopping, but this was before there were any Whole Foods in the Seattle Area. They used the Shoreline Central Market instead).
They don't have a mobile app or online way to check stock that I know, but they seem to be doing the most of any grocery store I've seen to deal with the virus when it comes to in-store shopping.
1. They've got separate cart return and cart pickup areas in front of the store. Every cart returned gets disinfected before being put into the pickup.
2. They have installed plexiglass shields in the checkout lanes between you and the cashier.
3. They have prominent marks on the floor for you to stand at while inline that provide good spacing.
4. After each customer checks out, they disinfect the conveyor belt area and the credit card terminal area.
They are also nowhere near as crowded as Walmart, and the people that shop there seem to be paying more attention to social distancing.
I'm not sure where this story originated. The first Whole Foods in the Seattle area* predates the filming of that season by about a decade and is closer to downtown Seattle than any of the Central Markets.
(*the Roosevelt Square store, still at the original location)
Ocado in the UK has the best model in my experience - allowing you to reserve a delivery slot before shopping if you want, but not enforcing this. Unfortunately they have also been the worst-affected from a surge in customers from a technical standpoint and were bordering on unusable for a week.
But just today using the app I opened it and it asked me to confirm a time slot for my next pickup. No items in my cart - just choose a time, lock it in, and add my items later.
In my area at least, online + curbside pickup was not very common in the past, so it maybe was previously a non-issue because a slot was generally available. Glad to see they’ve made some quick adjustments.
There are still no slots at all available anywhere for either delivery or collection though.
Ocado has slots for existing customers. They took a while to get it right but they now have limits on orders per week and show you slots for the next few days. If they are empty just try again later and your basket is still there. I had a delivery a couple of days ago.
I hope not too many people try to subvert systems like this with a script to grab slots, because they're just contributing to the problem.
However, the 'correct' way is to pick the slot first, as that way you can see what's out of stock as you shop - this does put you on a time limit though, as the slot can only be held for 1 hour (I think).
So it's not enforced, but it is preferable.
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[1] pre-corvid-crisis
The click-and-collect as well as delivery shops are all like this around here. Terrible experience, even without COVID.
I live in the UK and most of the online stores let you pick the delivery slot after filling the basket, which is an infuriatingly poor UX, given the current circumstances.
During the Corvid pandemic the programmers are the only ones who’re gonna get fed XD
Additionally, Asda had an unticked, opt-out tickbox for its spam email ("news and special offers" etc). That's a dark pattern and illegal under the GDPR.
Fuck those people. Unfortunately, everybody else I tried to order from online is out of stock or closed, or it's Amazon where you can buy a can of beans for the price of a brand new Mazeratti (I exaggerate).