Three quarters of people in the UK now do at least some online grocery shopping
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
[1] https://www.studentmoneysaver.co.uk/article/things-waitrose-...
Ironing water is pure water and is needed in order to not destroy your iron in areas with very hard water, which is a lot of the southern UK where Waitrose has most of its customer base. No need for the scare quotes.
And boiling in a pot or kettle wouldn't help - that would concentrate the minerals you don't want!
'Ironing water' is a marketing term designed to get people to pay far more for something than they need to. If it was sold as 'perfumed distilled water for ironing' I'd take much less issue with it.
I am genuinely surprised to see someone astroturfing for Comfort on HN. :)
I just thought it was a bit snobby to have a pop at old ladies in Waitrose who just want to keep their iron working well and possibly aren't regularly in a car shop to pick up a bottle of de-ionised water. And they like things to smell nice - what terrible people!
I think calling it 'ironing water' is pretty frank and consumer friendly really. It's water. And it's for ironing. I wish more things were named like that.
For about 6 pence a litre bottle?
https://waitrose.pressarea.com/pressrelease/details/78/NEWS_...
The original poll was apparently representative, as others have pointed out, but in any case, would that really be so surprising?
Over-60s have been advised to stay at home entirely for much of this year. Many working age adults have also been working from home mostly or entirely for several months having either never done so before or done so only rarely. Lots of people have been sitting around very bored with plenty of time to do online shopping.
Meanwhile, there were queues outside physical supermarkets that could last for an hour or more if you turned up at the wrong time, often starting from early in the morning well before a store actually opened its doors during the early panic-buying phase. Today, happily, the worst of the queues seem to be a fading memory, but where did all those people go? They presumably haven't stopped needing bread and milk and toilet rolls. And you can still have to wait to go in at relatively busy times, and then it's not a particularly pleasant experience trying to keep a reasonable distance from everyone and wondering who's previously handled whatever you're about to buy off the shelves.
It seems entirely plausible to me that 75% of all supermarket customers do at least some online shopping now. Frankly, I'm surprised it's so low under the circumstances.
Ocado have recently changed to use M&S at the backend
what does this mean? when was this? I still see a lot of Waitrose products at the moment.
The regular supermarkets don't have that luxury, your shopping order is beholden to whatever is left out in the store and the judgement of the picker. I've worked in supermarkets in the past and the pickers are horribly underpaid.
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/b985249c-1ca1-41a8-96b5-0adcc889d...
[0]: https://www.logisticsmanager.com/tesco-invests-in-urban-fulf...
I love using those services especially if it means I can avoided a crowded store on the weekend. But my wife and I are foodies and we also love browsing the aisles to see what’s new and tempting. It’s maybe one reason why packaged food brands are desperate to get onto supermarket shelves - for the exposure.
I wonder how many other societal shifts like that we’re going to see?
That is one advantage to going in person. Another is simply that you can check the quality of what you're getting to some extent before you commit to buying it.
For example, the "best before" dates on a lot of fruit and veg have been... optimistic, let's say kindly... during the recent hot spell. Shopping online, you just get that somewhat arbitrary indicator. In person, at least you can see that half the fruit in the punnet is looking past its best even though the date is still four days away, and perhaps you'll decide not to buy that fruit today and maybe to get something else instead.
The low-paid store workers rushing around with their over-sized trolleys trying to collect half a dozen different customers' orders at once while being monitored for performance are obviously never going to care as much about picking the fresh-looking fruit or the less fatty piece of meat as the customer who's going to be eating those things or serving them to their family.
It probably caused a huge amount of food waste.
People buy the newest stock they can get because the older stock on the shelves so often has a pathetic usable lifetime once taken home. When I was a child, we routinely did one family shop per week in my household. A few decades later, I consider myself lucky if vegetables I bought from a supermarket more than one or two days ago are still fit to eat, and in my household we probably average 2-3 large (but obviously not as large) shops per week if we're only using supermarkets. For these among other reasons, we often now prefer to shop locally for fresh food from the specialists nearby when we have enough time to do the rounds.
Clearly vegetables haven't radically changed; those I buy from local farm shops and the like still last just fine. But the supermarkets have now implemented such complicated logistics, presumably because it saves them money, that there have been horrible consequences for the quality and longevity of the produce they sell.
I don't know enough about the industry to fully understand the motivations behind those complicated logistics, but if it's just a race to the bottom to shave a little off the supply costs and increase the profit margin accordingly, maybe it's time our government stepped in to regulate in the interests of avoiding all of that food waste and perhaps other environmental costs.
When I buy things in a supermarket I use my spatial memory. I know the physical position of every item, when I walk through the shop I make a series of tiny decisions about whether I need such and such item.
Grocery shopping via a search interface doesn't do it for me. I always end up forgetting something because I don't have the experience of walking through the shop to jog my memory.
As of 2 days ago Amazon Fresh was still unusable. I tried ordering from them, but I couldn't check out, because they had no available slots. I was put in a "virtual queue" and they sent me an email next morning with 1 hour window to check out. I missed that because I was sleeping. I don't know how long it will take for online grocery shopping services to recover to what they were, if ever.
Even once the pandemic is over I'll be sticking to online. I don't have a car so getting to my nearest supermarket was a 2 mile walk. THis was fine going but was a pain walking back 2 miles with lots of shopping, especially in the rain.
Now I can just choose what I want in 10 minutes at the computer rather than 90 mins I would lose on a shopping trip.
Depending how much you spend your local butcher may do delivery to if they have commercial clients such as cafes, restaurants etc.
I don't understand why people would want to waste time going to a supermarket. It's like people who go to shops to buy commodity things rather than just buying online.