Does Instacart use TJ's/Safeway's prices, or do they set their own prices for each item?
That's more than made up for in the convenience factor. There's a huge difference between being available to take a delivery during a 1-hour window today vs a 4-hour window tomorrow. For 1 hour, I can do highly interruptible activities (checking email, tidying the apartment, reading a book, etc.) without a significant negative impact on my overall productivity. It's a lot harder to find a 4 hour block of activities that offer the same kind of flexibility.
I hadn't heard about that before, so I looked it up. I couldn't find any TJ delivery site, except an unofficial one from 2011, but it looks like they got sued by TJ.[1] The official TJ website says that they don't sell online.[2]
1: http://domainnamewire.com/2011/08/14/trader-joes-sues-grocer...
I wonder if, as a consumer, I would resent seeing a "service fee" as opposed to seeing higher priced goods. Perhaps, subconsciously, people ignore the item price and are looking for the "fee". In this case, their pricing is their marketing.
I'd be quite interested in whether they A/B tested the two strategies.
ORIGINAL POST:
I'm looking at some $30/lb ribeye steak right now. The same "extra value" package at Safeway was $10/lb.
Price-tripling is unacceptable to me.
Except oops, no it's not. Instacart does say "per lb", but if I add it to my cart, the final price is actually $15.74, not the expected $23.61. Which compares to Safeway's club price of $14.99. That's a 5% increase, which seems quite reasonable.