Hacker News Reader

Comment by axaxs | Hacker News Reader

Grocery shopping was one of my guilty pleasures. Gets me out of the house, walking around, thinking of combinations to cook, etc. Since March, I've been 100% Instacart, and notice them all over my neighborhood each day, so certainly I see the mentioned explosion.

That said, I miss shopping and to be honest, Instacart is both expensive and unreliable. I'll go back to in store once things die down, and I'm sure many others will too. Meaning, I think this is more of a spike than a long term trend.

View on HN

The curbside pickup at Walmart is surprisingly good. You pay the same price as in-store shopping and the grocery selection is very good. Instacart is just too expensive. I like honest pricing.

And for $90 a year, they’ll drop it off at your house. Never been a big Walmart supporter, but I’ve been impressed with their online grocery delivery.

Wally is very good. They got hosed like every other grocer but were quick to retool and revamp, especially online. When the supply chain changed, they changed. We graduated from curbside once delivery became available. My wife and I, each on our own Chromebook, work over the order for a week kibitzing, questioning, suggesting and sometimes ridiculing. Definitely beats pushing a cart around to endless elevator music...

Since the riots and looting at the beginning of June, all of the Chicago Walmarts have been closed. So that's out for me.

Walmart really fails at providing quality food that isn't highly processed. I find much better quality, and often better prices on the grains and legumes that make up the bulk of my caloric needs, and their selection of organic produce is very lacking.

While I'm happy people have affordable, convenient, and socially distanced access to food, most of what is in the Walmart grocery section are things I wouldn't personally consider food.

Whole foods can't be faked. An apple is an apple. A whole chicken is a whole chicken. There are different farming techniques, pesticides etc but the less processing there is, the less opportunity for quality slippage as well. And it's up to the consumer to fill their cart with highly-processed or minimally-processed items. And like any other grocer, Walmart offers the same spectrum of options.

As I recall, Walmart fills their meat with water, increasing the weight and decreasing their costs.

Found it. "Wal-Mart, for example, says a majority of its fresh offerings are enhanced with a 6 to 12 percent solution of water, salt, sodium phosphate and natural flavorings."

That's very common, not unique to WalMart.

Salt water is definitely cheaper than meat...

Assuming you're willing to pony-up the money, Walmart offers a wide variety of USDA Certified Organic goodies. From meats to beets. And I personally take great comfort in knowing that only carbon-based compounds appear in my comestibles...

I would think that most of the processed food overlaps a lot with other grocery stores, although it's possible that their suppliers provide lower quality stuff just for them.

I know someone whose go-to for organic stuff is Wal-Mart, because she lives in a somewhat rural area without a lot of options, and Wal-Mart is actually the best.

I’m experiencing almost the opposite.

I am enjoying being able to reflect through out the day, being able to add items to my cart anytime in the day or the next).

I like how much time and gas is saved. I don’t have to change from my pj’s in the weekend, so it reduces some physical and mental overload as well! It’s been an unbelievable boon for me, and it’s worth every extra penny that delivery costs.

It also helps you hold yourself accountable to healthy eating (if that's a goal of yours). I'm surprised how much I like Instacart delivery, and am planning to keep using it after pandemic.

I used to eat pretty much exclusively a mix of fast-food, restaurants, and the occasional frozen meal. Now I'm 100% delivery until there's a reliable vaccine, and I have been since February.

I'm also brand new to cooking and baking, and never really "shopped" at a grocery store in any meaningful sense, so all the things I'm buying from instacart are first-time purchases. I've never made a grocery shopping list. This is all new to me.

I'm having an exact mix of both of your experiences.

I just expect that about 10% of the order will be wrong somehow. I'm sure it's very annoying if you're shopping on a budget, but given that I'm learning to cook and bake and make use of whatever is around, precision isn't super important to me for most items.

I'm also using instacart as my shopping list, which is great, but it's a shopping list tied to one specific store, which is less great.

Here's some free advice for instacart's product team:

* Let me set all items in my order to "no substitutions" and toggle it on for items I absolutely can't be without. Or toggle "all substitutions" and don't nag me to approve each one as they happen. This is the most annoying part of interacting with the app. Just add a "mark all as no substitution" button in your next build, please, I know you can do it quickly.

* Help me shop better. Your "Explore" interface is laughably bad. Cart management is hard. I don't have a solution for you here, other than do it better. Browsing large stores on a mobile device is hard, but this is what you should be working to solve. Improve the UI of shopping as a whole. Spend some innovation tokens here. What you should be trying to do is help me map the universe of products in a way that lets me express my preferences, so you already know which items I consider acceptable substitutes. With enough people doing that, you have seriously valuable ML data. Once you know what I want to buy and what realistic substitution preferences are, you should be shopping for me across every store in my area to find the best overall deal for my cart that fits my requirements.

* Why is the shopper texting me at all? Using the service makes me feel like I'm tethered to my phone or I'm a bad person. If I don't stay connected, your shopper is going to be stressed about my order, and I'm going to end up getting the wrong thing. Your goal should be to remove anxiety from using your service, not increase it by keeping me tethered to my device while I'm visualizing someone else plucking items off the shelves. I've had 1 shopper that didn't text me at all and we communicated entirely through the "approve/deny" substitution buttons, which was still annoying, but less bad than the messages I get from other shoppers.

* WTF is with your fee structure? The app tells me the prices are higher than in-store AND there's a service fee AND there's a tip. This shouldn't be so complicated. I want to see "cost of items in store - cost of items on instacart", "amount paid to shopper", and "amount paid to instacart". The item cost can be savings or marked up due to increase demand or heavy weight or whatever, just be honest about the actual difference between going to the store and ordering on instacart. I know instacart should be paid, just show how many dollars go to paying instacart. I know the shopper is getting paid something already, show me how much, so I can tip accordingly, and you'll probably see a dramatic increase in tips.

Instacart is one of the more broken products that I use because it still delivers value. I get that they'll survive without fixing any of the stuff above, but it's a shame to see the opportunity wasted to build something really great.

Especially through much of the current situation, I found stock in grocery stores to be sufficiently sporadic that it made more sense to do things myself so I could substitute and change plans on the fly. And going to a local (non-urban) store early-ish isn't a big deal.

It's better now but the one time I used grocery delivery a long while back (Peapod) because I had a broken foot and had trouble doing a full grocery shopping, it was better than the alternatives but still lacking. I would usually still end up going to the grocery store but that was OK so long as I just needed to put a few items into a shoulder bag.

I also like going grocery shopping for certain items. But only when roads are empty as I visit 4-5 places. I only buy fish from one store in town. Buy my bread from a bakery I really like. A few other things at a small mediterranean store, etc. But I still order many dry things online since it can be cheaper (esp at large quantities) and the selection is great. Things like quinoa, dates, etc.

> Instacart is both expensive and unreliable. I'll go back to in store once things die down, and I'm sure many others will too.

I can't stand Instacart but I begrudgingly use it (for now) because it's the safer option for everyone involved. I also haven't forgotten that they were stealing shoppers' tips for a long time.

Once this is over I'll never use it again.

I’ve been going shopping at 6am. Most grocery stores in my area open up at 6. Stores are empty, for the most part clean, and typically stocked.

Some stores have senior/at risk hours but then there are some that are open to general public.

> Since March, I've been 100% Instacart...

I'm not sure what your circumstance is (you might be at-risk for covid-19 complications), but I think a lot of people have been doing the same thing, and I wonder if the risk of going to the grocery store is really so high that it's worth stressing over. Edit: I don't mean go be stupid about it, but between the time you're in the store, people keeping apart and wearing masks, and the lack of news about grocery store outbreaks, it doesn't seem that risky to me.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com