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Comment by MisterBastahrd | Hacker News Reader

Meanwhile, I would never dream of ordering groceries outside of specialty items through Amazon. They are prohibitively expensive on most food items that have any sort of weight compared to Walmart and Instacart. Granted, I don't have a Whole Foods nearby.

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Personally I don't order food items from Amazon because I worry about their whole counterfeit issues / that they really don't care about that issue.

Just you wait. Order your groceries in the morning. It will be arrived by night from a service called grocery fulfillment and distribution.

Not to beat the drum on urbanization, but I live 2 blocks from my grocery store, so that’s not really putting anything on the table for me.

Different views of the future.

Me too. But coming back with 40 lb of groceries in hand is a chore. And if I can consolidate the list to a 24-hour schedule for one week period, that hammers it out majority of cases where emergency shopping is once in a blue moon.

I have a grocery store literally downstairs, and I sometimes pay someone to deliver bags to me.

Note to self: build great stuff, advertise to ridiculous customers.

Well, it cost me $15 more to deliver food from there. I save roughly an hour of time and do something more interesting instead. Also, not walking through the isles saves me from buying random junk.

Jokes aside, I save money by using grocery delivery.

Instacart already delivers within an hour to my home from a store of my choice. This means in addition to the regular grocery store items, I can get speciality items from the ethnic Indian, Chinese, Korean stores delivered too. With the subscription ($9.99/month) there are no delivery fees either. That’s going to be hard to beat.

> there are no delivery fees either

Careful with that.

The delivery fees may not be explicit, but they definitely charge more for items at some stores, with Costco being one of the more egregious ones.

Are you sure about that? Because if so I would reconsider my use of instacart. We buy a lot of stuff from Costco and it’s a 45 min drive away so we almost never go into the store.

Check out this thread on Reddit:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Frugal/comments/1cal0ff/comparing_c...

Short answers:

- Yes, they mark up. 24%ish.

- Markup may be different when shopping on IC directly versus Costco same day delivery (via IC).

- Coupons like 50% off orders over $xx changes that math.

- Factor in tip into the equation.

Yes, no delivery fees; merely service fees for the service of delivery.

Yeah but it’s like $2-3, not terrible for the convenience.

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