Americans, it turns out, would rather visit a store than buy food online
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
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.
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".
Playing double-devil's advocate:
1) Most people have no problem buying ugly food. Much of the standardization of produce comes from packaging and packing requirements. Non-standard produce is still consumed in other forms: juice, frozen, soup, etc.
2) The vast majority of food waste comes from unsold restaurant food and food that goes uneaten at home (goes bad before you can consume it). This has nothing to do with ugly food.
3) The bruised part on apples tastes like crap. It's mealy and sour and fermenting and off-flavored. It's not my responsibility to eat bruised apples because a store can't be careful in handling. Blame the supply chain and grocery staff, not consumers.
If I'm making pie or apple sauce, I'll seek out bruised apples—and pay less for them. Paying normal prices for bruised apples? No thanks.
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.
https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/2/26/18240399/food-waste-...
I find that once an apple gets a small bruise, it typically grows larger very quickly. If you eat it immediately, you can just cut out a small part. But if the grocery delivery comes with 50% of the apples bruised, that means you’re having to cut out (waste) a fair amount of your apples.
I’ve read that one reason we get so many e-coli infections from lettuce is that there is no secondary market (no lettuce juice) so the farmers drive it to the livestock farms and track back germs to the lettuce farm on their wheels.
that's a fair point, but it's not hard to come up with a counterexample where the produce is meaningfully different. I usually buy limes for their juice, and if I get a lime that produces less than 1oz of juice, that means I have to cut another one open and juice it. not only is this annoying, since limes are priced by quantity at my grocery store, but it means that I'm probably going to waste most of the second lime (or use cellophane to wrap up the second half, creating plastic waste).
I don't care too much about the aesthetic appeal of limes, but I'm definitely going to pick them all up to select the heaviest ones. these usually yield just a bit more than 1oz of juice, perfect for most of my use cases.
It's said to be 31% of the retail and consumer food in the US[1]. While that is enormous, I don't think it necessarily should be considered unacceptable. The food supply chain is a system we want to have a lot of slack in.
So what level of food utilization would we have to have for someone to deliberately buy a very bruised apple at full price? I don't know, but I'm guessing it's too high to prevent a food security issue in a crisis.
[1] - https://www.fda.gov/food/consumers/food-loss-and-waste
This isn’t true at all. It’s literally a myth made up by people who want to sell ugly food to consumers. Ugly produce is used as animal food, sold to food service companies where it’s ugliness wont matter after they prepare it, or occasionally tilled back into the soil as fertilizer.
https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/2/26/18240399/food-waste-...
Price them down, ppl would consider the deal. It's a market, isn't it?
Or, well, it's a supermarket being part of super-chains... Potatoes by pound priced like fruits.
I love my local CSA box, dirty root veggies and all. I know that our CSA has seen a huge business increase (to the point that they had to refuse new customers for a while) so I hope this change persists.
And you have to eat them fast, because they get bad more quickly compared to non-bruised apple. And that is big difference, between apple that I can eat next two weeks and one I can not.
Citation needed.
I don't believe this is actually true. The food industry is much smarter than you think.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/food/article-2693000/Forg...
In London there's a startup which sells such rejected, ugly fruit and veg: https://www.oddbox.co.uk/ (no affiliation beyond being a happy customer)
https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/2/26/18240399/food-waste-...
well, is that not a valid reason to want to pick out produce myself? How do I know the store working will have the same preference as me? What if I prefer my fruit to be under-ripe, and the store worker thinks I prefer over-ripe fruti?
I think the first company to offer automated (or just standardized manual) grading and pricing on produce could be a big winner; I know I'd use it. It'd be especially good if the process distinguishes produce that's just ugly, from produce that is flavour/texture- or nutrition-compromised; eventually the latter could become well-defined enough that it goes straight to the compost heap rather than waiting with the produce that will actually sell at some price.
The first one that comes to mind for me is brussels sprouts: there is a huge variety in flavour/texture, nutrition, and beauty, and sometimes I really care about what they look like, often I do not, but also often there is a big difference in other qualities.
There are also other similar companies doing this.
I try to pick fruits and vegetables at various levels of ripeness, so that I can have ripe produce throughout the week at home.
I don't want only green bananas or only super ripe ones; I need some ripe ones for today, and then some greener ones for later in the week.
OK, I'll bite- where else could a farmer get [chicken] eggs from besides their own chickens?
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?
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.
That one is really important with fresh food. Maybe the lettuce looks good or the cucumbers, who knows?
If someone orders 3kg of bananas or a dozen avos - mix it up with some ripe now and some on the green/firm side.
The biggest issue we had was out of stock items. If you're in the store and a key ingredient is out you decide on a replacement meal which just isn't possible online, as there was no guarantee that what you ordered would still be available when they got through to your delivery.
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.
Give me an option where the cost of convenience is obvious and straightforward and I’d come back.
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!)
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.
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.
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 :).)
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!
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?
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.
https://www.nytimes.com/article/expiration-dates-coronavirus...
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.
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.
I don't think Sucralose is a sugar alchohol. You can spot those because they end with "ol" - Mannitol, Sorbitol etc. I find it pallatable myself.
It's fine on eggs I suppose.
I'm obviously just one data point, but my Instacart experience was pretty mediocre. Because of how the substitutions work (and there's no live inventory), you pretty much have to be alert and ready to context switch into "grocery substitution" mode the whole time the shopper is picking your food. I don't remember what the fee was, but in the end it wasn't "I absolutely prefer to go to the store myself!" but rather "That was a painful enough experience that next time I'll just go do it myself"
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.
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).
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.
If they want to make it easier, they can give me the list of items they would consider as substitutes, and allow me to add/remove items. And they can remember the choices I've made in the past.
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.
I am a vegetarian. :/
Typically you have the option to indicate that you do not want any substitutions.
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.
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.
Most delivery services I've used have a "don't substitute" option as well if you need that for sensitive items.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Which was OP's conclusion so I'm not sure why understanding the nuances of the pricing is helpful
FWIW you should "powerwash" all the groceries at home anyways.
Also last I checked, Walmart has free delivery and same price as in store. But I've heard their employees just grab anything for you...so quality of produce is YMMV.
cool links though! thanks for sharing
What’s the github project you were trying to find, or some other relevant links? I’m interested in this topic broadly and always looking for interesting niches.
So then you have to go out to the grocery store yourself anyway.
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.
I agree. People definitely want online/delivery grocery shopping. The problem thus far has been product misses on giving the customer what they want. Ordering online today is too much of a crap shoot. You'll get 80% of what you want with 15% replacements of a dubious nature, and 5% unfulfilled.
I haven't even tried in the current situation. If I go relatively early on a weekday, I find it pretty manageable and uncrowded.
The one exception was that you couldn't choose your own substitutions, but you could toggle whether to get the substitute or just not get that item (so at least you don't waste food if it's something you really don't want).
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Or was the difference in the text just intended to make your brain pause to consider whether there was actually a difference in meaning?
Every moment you think about it is one more moment that the marketers have your attention.
"Design" is very subjective. Whether it is "good" or not all depends on the goals of whatever it was designed for.
Take a physical IKEA store for instance. If you want to make it quick and easy to shop, it's a horrible design. If you want to keep someone in the store for a long time, it is very good.
Even more reason to ensure the more expensive items are viewed first.
> And I still don't understand difference between featured and store pick btw.
Cynic it me would say: there might be no difference, and this may be just intended to confuse people who would otherwise just ignore "store pick".
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
yea no thanks. My trust in these companies is diminishing.
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.
The issue is that YMMV with the worker you get on any particular occasion.
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.
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?
- 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.
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.
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?
I’m fine buying things off Amazon because if I order something I know I’ll almost certainly get what I ordered.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Would anyone at Amazon turn my raspberries over and make sure the bottom ones look as good as the top ones?
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..."
Doesn't seem petty to me, but if you feel that, there are other things you could do to get other human contact, like taking a walk and chatting with (socially distanced) neighbors.
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.
Edit: If anyone knows of any good vegetarian/vegan meal kits that do better on plastic, let me know.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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
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.
I don't know many younger folks who don't try to automate every aspect of their lives including grocery.
Besides, Amazon has become so erratic with their deliveries that I feel like I'm back in the days of mail-order catalogs.
I would be ecstatic if there was a privacy friendly alternative. Order groceries with bitcoin!!
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
We love Shipt. They've solved the stated problems. Shame they don't get more attention.
I ordered multiple times from PrimeNow, and 50% of chance, the strawberries have already gone bad.
Maybe, I'm neurotic?
* 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.
At least for me, having to go a store is not a big deal, it’s just overcoming “inertia to leave home”. I would much rather: order directly from the store, have the store pack everything up, express pick it up from the store, and have a confirmation expected=actual for the order.
The abstraction to having a third-party like instacart do all the - for lack of a better word - “order management” just seems to create an extra layer of bullshit to deal with.
Going to the store, picking everything normally, and going through checkout myself, while not as convenient, has still consistently yielded the best results - so there is still a lot of catching up to do for store/third-party services to reach that level of performance(?).
My store (Kroger) does exactly this, and I've been very pleased with the service once they worked out the kinks in the first few weeks of quarantine.
Costco & Whole Food stores have especially declined in overall shopper experience. Clueless store staff, shoddy inventory levels, incompetent employees who cant be bothered to educate themselves on elementary details, rude and crass shoppers, shoppers who dont return their carts to the corrals, thinning variety of offerings, long lines at checkout, lack of adequate number of self checkout terminals .... the list goes on.
I recall even 3-4 years things weren't so bad at these two very different stores. Now they're almost uniformly bad.
I just wish they had large refrigerated silos outside the store in the parking lot, where they could let you pick up your online orders like Walmart does.
I tried using a different grocery delivery and about 30% of what I ordered was out of stock. This was especially frustrating because delivery slots were in short supply here, so I felt rude making another small order immediately to fill in missing items. With WF/AF I at least know what is out of stock when making my order so I can choose my own substitutions or not bother trying to get ingredients for a recipe if something critical is missing.
Most of the main supermarket chains have followed suit and have similar services
EDIT: Their other robotic platform [1]
In Netherland, the largest supermarket chains all deliver to your home. (Used to be to your kitchen, but Corona changed that.) We've had our groceries delivered by Albert Heijn for about a decade now, and it's generally pretty good. You pay about EUR 5-10 for delivery depending on the time of day you want it.
Two issues: when they don't have an item, you just don't get it. I'd prefer to get an alert a day in advance so I can select a replacement item, but that's apparently not an option for whatever reason. The other is of course perishables. Usually it's fine. Sometimes the bananas are a bit greener than I'd like, sometimes they're a bit yellower than my son likes (he likes them green for some reason). Sometimes the use-by date is in two days when we were planning to use it in 3 days. Never got anything moldy, though if something's moldy, broken or otherwise wrong, you get a discount on the next purchase, no questions asked.
Not having to lug groceries around is great. Sometimes we still need to go to the supermarket to get one or two items, but that's no big deal.
But now I have to do it.
I totally sympathize with the Instacart shoppers. Even with direct access to my wife via text including pictures, it's still hard to find exactly what she wants, and it takes a long time and a few passes through the store.
They're not getting paid enough to care or do it right. Instacart needs to pay their pickers a lot more if they want it done right, but then of course they don't have a viable business model anymore.
* Using your own money to buy something for yourself: price and quality matter.
* Using your own money to buy something for someone else. Price matters, not quality.
* Using other people's money to buy something for other people. Neither price nor quality matter.
It's one of the explanations for how we end up with so much waste with governments and organizations. They use other people's money to buy something for other people.
That said, I'm really looking forward to doing my own shopping too. Sometimes stuff comes to mind that I didn't think of to put on my list, or I have an idea for a meal, looking at other things.
And InstaCart keeps your history, so if you want to buy those same items somewhere else that is cheaper, then InstaCart makes that easy.
These are not problems for the customer, but they are problems for any store. Any store worth doing business with should want to fully own that relationship.
InstaCart is also not tied into the back end inventory system. They know, from previous shopping trips they’ve done, what is commonly stocked where, and what might be low on stock. But they don’t know for sure until the shopper gets there and starts going down the aisle.
So, a bad experience for the store, unless you really can’t do anything better. And not a great experience for the customer.
HEB has recently started doing curbside service in our area. IMO, it’s much better than InstaCart. If they could hook that up with a delivery service, I think they’d have a goose that lays platinum eggs.
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.
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.
This happened with my last Costco purchase. I don't know how the produce was even out on the floor let alone being picked up by the delivery person who clearly didn't use their sense of vision (nor smell!). The previous time they picked some random substitution for something I explicitly marked as "do not substitute" due to allergies. I think I'm done using that service.
When people are paid by quantity not quality you don't take time to inspect or smell the merchandise. You grab what checks the box and move on. Its a numbers game not a quality game and the quality is deferred to the store supply instead of the shopper. Why is anyone surprised by this? Its the same reason an Uber driver may drive recklessly to pickup more fares. Your safety isn't their concern.
She said the store closed before she could do the shopping. The store was already closed when she selected my order to pick up. Setting the tip amount before the service is rendered is a horrible idea as well.
Shop local at independent stores. The service and knowledge of the workers is worth it.
The whole checkout experience can be automated, and the final items only need to be picked up and delivered.
1) You're depending on & supporting an oppressed segment of the labor force (people who need multiple jobs to make ends meet, because no 'gig economy' startup pays a living wage), 2) You're fighting with "surges" of use and paying wildly varying prices, with wildly varying levels of service, 3) You don't even get the items you're looking for half the time (in my experience), 4) It's more expensive!, 5) you don't actually need groceries delivered to you instantly.
Since COVID-19 I have switched to buying from local businesses and getting food from Co-ops and farm shares (and growing my own). I can schedule regular deliveries of produce to my door in bulk (in reusable containers), which not only reduces waste, it actually helps me plan my week/month better, I still get all the things I wanted, the price is fair, and I'm helping local farms and businesses.
I'm pretty sure the reason most people don't do this is that they're lazy, selfish, greedy and entitled. My evidence is the last two weekends I've ventured out into the world to look at apartments to rent, with the occasional jaunt to a hiking trail. I found virtually nobody was wearing a mask or socially distancing, unless they were forced to by a greeter in front of a business like a grocery store (many customers were trying to walk in without a mask, and thankfully were rebuffed). Many probably could have ordered online the same way I did, but would rather the immediacy of 'do it yourself' - even during a pandemic.
Sadly it's the poorest and most vulnerable people that need grocery delivery the most, because they have the hardest time getting to a store. A poor person in a food desert may need to spend over two hours round trip on transportation in order to get food, and an elderly person may just not be mobile enough. I doubt we would ever fund a public delivery service for them (though in theory the postal service could).
another perspective
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.
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.