Americans, it turns out, would rather visit a store than buy food online

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-27/has-online-grocery-shopping-peaked-most-still-prefer-in-store

by juokaz • 6 years ago

323 461 6 years ago

elmerfud• 6 years ago

It's not that I want to visit the store it's that I can't trust the store people to properly pick out fresh produce or good meat.

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.

karatestomp• 6 years ago

All those things, plus:

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.

lostapathy• 6 years ago

This is why I’ve backed away from it. I don’t mind paying for delivery, but the fact that I oy both a direct few and a variable extra markup per item, and that markup seems to vary so much per item makes it hard to swallow for me. It just feels like scummy enough that I’ll go to the store.

Give me an option where the cost of convenience is obvious and straightforward and I’d come back.

bdcravens• 6 years ago

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.

Typically you have the option to indicate that you do not want any substitutions.

alleyshack2• 6 years ago

They don't always respect this. I've had multiple Instacart shoppers replace items without marking them as replacements, including replacing some of them with things I explicitly indicated I did not want as replacements.

asiachick2• 6 years ago

i think you're right. It's certainly my opinion that I don't want a USA store clerk picking my produce. On the other hand here in Japan most produce is much more cared for, probably to the detriment of the environment but still, far less bruised or bad produce.

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.

Enginerrrd2• 6 years ago

I'm inclined to agree. I think you're up against some deeply rooted human behaviors of wanting to sift through and gather/select their food. Those behaviors rapidly scale based on hunger... but frankly, no one in the income bracket that can afford to buy their food online ever gets really hungry in today's world.

hvs• 6 years ago

We've been doing curbside pick up for groceries for the past few months and fresh food and produce are definitely the biggest problem with the substitutions being the second. The substitutions would probably be better/less often in more normal times, but the fresh food selection problem is always going to be there. For now we do it because our health is more important than our fruit quality, but we won't continue it when things achieve some level of normalcy again.

briefcomment• 6 years ago

Additionally, there have been times when perishables like non pasteurized juice, and milk have gone bad when I had them delivered. I realized that I do a good job of picking those items last during a trip to the store, and I drive home immediately afterwards, while the picker/delivery person is probably not incentivized to do the same.

kerkeslager4• 6 years ago

Playing devil's advocate: an enormous amount of food waste is caused by people simply refusing to buy ugly food. It's literally less wasteful to shave off most of a carrot so that it's a baby carrot, than to try to sell the same carrots as-is. There's nothing wrong with the ugly carrots--but they'll rot on the shelves.

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".

denimnerd42• 6 years ago

You don't get any discount in this case though. You're still paying $2-3/lb for bruised apples that are like you said literally waste at that point and $2-5/lb for chicken that if you picked out yourself would be of higher quality.

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.

ping_pong3• 6 years ago

That's a great marketing gimmick that some companies have made, but it's largely false.

https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/2/26/18240399/food-waste-...

encoderer2• 6 years ago

Notwithstanding the baby carrots example, most ugly produced is still used and sold. It’s made into soups, salsas, juices, etc.

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.

zoomablemind• 6 years ago

Playing devil's advocate: an enormous amount of food waste is caused by people simply refusing to buy ugly food.

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.

stickfigure• 6 years ago

On the other-other hand, Instacart et al are all shopping in stores that already have this filter. So you're getting the expense, questionable selection, and all the waste.

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.

microcolonel• 6 years ago

Even though automated grading of produce is not unheard of, it's not represented properly in the market.

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.

gnicholas2• 6 years ago

Bruised apples are perfectly edible. Maybe you just don't like them, and that's fine--there's no accounting for taste.

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.

kaybe• 6 years ago

Bruised apples cannot be stored as long, so I try to avoid them.

leetcrew2• 6 years ago

Playing devil's advocate: an enormous amount of food waste is caused by people simply refusing to buy ugly food. It's literally less wasteful to shave off most of a carrot so that it's a baby carrot, than to try to sell the same carrots as-is. There's nothing wrong with the ugly carrots--but they'll rot on the shelves.

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.

darrenf• 6 years ago

Playing devil's advocate: an enormous amount of food waste is caused by people simply refusing to buy ugly food.

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)

gvjddbnvdrbv• 6 years ago

Bruised fruit goes bad much faster than none bruised fruit.

charwalker3• 6 years ago

Specifically to bruised apples, the bruising may suggest crisp vs softness and factor into quality of the product. If I go looking for crisp apples, I avoid anything with a bruise as they often feel soft anyway and aren't worth checking. They are still edible, just not what I prefer or choose. I get that is a luxury of sorts, but I'd pick other fruit before a soft apple unless it is for baking.

awillen• 6 years ago

Not really. Here's one article that says otherwise (there are a lot more): https://thecounter.org/weve-heard-staggering-statistics-food..., but ultimately the crux of it is that there are things like applesauce and canned diced tomatoes out there. Companies can pay less for ugly produce to make those products where looks don't matter, so they do that. The market works well in this case.

wl• 6 years ago

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.

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.

AmericanChopper• 6 years ago

an enormous amount of food waste is caused by people simply refusing to buy ugly food.

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-...

scruple• 6 years ago

Not even. If the produce made it to the store shelves then it is by it's definition not ugly. They should see the amount of produce that isn't sold at markets because it doesn't meet supermarket chain standards for appearance. We used to fill up the back of a pickup truck, in the late 80s and early 90s, with reject carrots for $10 from a local farmer. They were perfectly fine. We'd always keep a bunch for ourselves, of course, but the bulk of these carrots were used as bait traps. That still goes on today anywhere that carrots are grown.

trimbo• 6 years ago

Playing devil's advocate: an enormous amount of food waste is caused by people simply refusing to buy ugly food

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

petre• 6 years ago

I'll buy them. At half the price. Otherwise they can turn them to juice or stewed apples or whatever.

dwighttk• 6 years ago

one bad apple spoils the bunch

dannypgh3• 6 years ago

heard someone refuse to buy eggs because they farmer got them from her own chickens

OK, I'll bite- where else could a farmer get [chicken] eggs from besides their own chickens?

MintelIE• 6 years ago

I don't think it's outlandish for someone to give you a bruised apple And apparently grocery stores put people with opinions like yours in charge of packing produce boxes, which leads to lost sales. Nobody's arguing that they're inedible, but how much of a discount is the retailer prepared to offer me for accepting his low grade produce?

NicoJuicy• 6 years ago

France had aan ugly fruit campaign because of this:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/food/article-2693000/Forg...

crazygringo• 6 years ago

Playing devil's advocate: an enormous amount of food waste is caused by people simply refusing to buy ugly food.

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.

cortesoft2• 6 years ago

There are other things I consider when shopping, too, that pickers don't.

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.

StellarTabi• 6 years ago

My branded grocery store bundles up old veggies and sells them at a steep discount, they're really good for freezing, smoothies, or cooking same day.

parasight• 6 years ago

In general I agree here. In case of bruised apples I am a bit picky because of patulin. It is a toxic produced in rotting apples.

watwut• 6 years ago

Bruised apples are perfectly edible.

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.

lorthemar• 6 years ago

It's not just a case of buying 'ugly food' or bruised apples. When I order online, I get potatoes that are sprouting, onions that have gone soft, meat with excessive fat or skin, and goods that are close to their expiry date. I get that, these are sold in order to avoid waste, but it should be my choice to pick them up. When I'm ordering online, I don't want to pay for poisonous potatoes or milk that will go bad in 2 days.

twic2• 6 years ago

an enormous amount of food waste is caused by people simply refusing to buy ugly food.

Citation needed.

I don't believe this is actually true. The food industry is much smarter than you think.

thayne4• 6 years ago

it's your preference, not something that's objectively better

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?

sacado2• 6 years ago

Just sell ugly food cheaper and people will start to buy it. In fact I wonder if there is not a huge market for someone who would say "No need to choose anymore: with 'ugly foods', you can save money and the planet"

fmajid• 6 years ago

That’s a myth. Most ugly produce is sold to food processors:

https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/2/26/18240399/food-waste-...

simonebrunozzi• 6 years ago

Check out Imperfect Foods (I am not affiliated; simply a happy customer) - they send you a box with "imperfect" food that otherwise would have gone to waste.

There are also other similar companies doing this.

basseq2• 6 years ago

Even if quality is there, how ripe do you want? Are you going to use those avocados tonight, or later in the week? Do you like green bananas or ones that are turning brown?

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?

Ididntdothis2• 6 years ago

"Let alone the "what looks good today?" or "what's on sale today?" method of shopping!"

That one is really important with fresh food. Maybe the lettuce looks good or the cucumbers, who knows?

ISL3• 6 years ago

For me, the wish is for scripting. Most of my buying is algorithmic, but the filters don't match my algorithms.

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.

elliekelly2• 6 years ago

I’ve noticed Wegman’s has recently been separating fruit by “ripe today” and “ripe in a few days” and it’s really great. Especially for things like peaches and avocados that seem to have a pretty limited window between hard as a rock and rotten.

thejynxed3• 6 years ago

Because they instead decided to invest their tech money into autonomous floor cleaning robots, if the Giant stores near Harrisburg are any indication.

dwd• 6 years ago

This could solved with a little more thought from those doing the pick and pack.

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.

ISL3• 6 years ago

Our local store, QFC in Seattle, has been doing a great job of selecting produce for our curbside delivery. Quality has matched or beaten what I normally select myself.

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 :).)

altoidaltoid• 6 years ago

Your local QFC is really a Kroger btw

gonehome• 6 years ago

I would hope that grocery stores become warehouses and the only people allowed in are delivery.

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).

wool_gather2• 6 years ago

This would be sort of funny, since many operated like this in the (not recent) past. Customers picking their own products off open shelves was an innovation at one point (and it was greeted by some people with similar disdain as our current self-checkout lines).

twic2• 6 years ago

Where online shopping reaches sufficient scale, that happens:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_store

philwelch2• 6 years ago

Amazon Fresh works this way already.

thomk• 6 years ago

This brings up another question in my mind.

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.

hombre_fatal• 6 years ago

The solution is to simply wash your produce.

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.

tzs• 6 years ago

I don't know how standardized layout is within a chain, but at my local Walmart superstore the area immediately to the right of the entrance closest to the grocery section is produce, baked goods, and deli. Just past that is the meat section.

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.

bobthepanda• 6 years ago

Generally speaking, I find that at most supermarkets dairy, eggs and meat is at the back, because they are intentionally designed to make you walk through other things to try and squeeze in more purchases when things catch your eye. And this was true when I've lived in the NE and in the PNW.

sjg0072• 6 years ago

I agree, I've actually found that Walmart has been the best online grocery experience. My local supermarket is Ok but HyVee has been wildly inconsistent.

yellowapple5• 6 years ago

Yeah, pretty much every Walmart here in Reno is the same way, except sometimes they'll be flipped around (i.e. grocery area to the left instead of the right). Similar deal with Costco and Sam's.

hinkley7• 6 years ago

You also can't substitute one brand of salsa for another. That'll start fights in some circles.

klyrs2• 6 years ago

Recent substitutions I've seen (where I specified "no substitutions"):

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.

nmstoker2• 6 years ago

This is why I avoid online for fresh food, instead getting them to do the heavy lifting items and resilient commodities (eg they can't mess up a bag of flour, bottles of wine, beer, Coke etc; if they're damaged too badly they'll obviously be unable to supply them).

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!)

gramontblanc2• 6 years ago

Seems like a bold prediction that most (maybe any?) grocery stores have the level of corporate organization or even level of education to even consider a "secret order substitution to prole cart-pushers who will then have to answer customer service calls asking why their order was amended to add a more expensive item".

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.

skywhopper3• 6 years ago

Yep. This has been our experience as well. Not only do the pickers have no incentive to do a good job (and often aren't even trained in how to judge the produce and meat they are selecting); and not only do mind-boggling substitutions take place sometimes; but in just about every online grocery order we've made in the past two months (so about 10 times by this point), we've gotten some items that were just plain wrongly chosen--ie we asked for one thing and got something entirely different that might have been nearby in the store, and was rung up as what we ordered, but we didn't actually get the item we ordered.

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?

jandrese2• 6 years ago

Oh yeah. We tried the Costco delivery thing once, but discovered that the "substitutions allowed" option is basically "fuck my shit up Fam".

charwalker3• 6 years ago

I'm super picky about my apples after growing up near an awesome apple orchard. I only buy a few types unless making a pie or similar. Each type has certain features I look at. I like eating crisp Fuji apples the most and usually only buy those based on coloring, shape, and the sound it makes when I pop it into my hand like one might a baseball into a baseball glove. The sound is critical to finding a crisp vs soft apple. No way I'm leaving fresh produce/meat selection to a random staffer, especially not apples.

darrylb422• 6 years ago

Not to mention expiry dates on products. A store is happy to give out a 12 pack of KD that expires tomorrow. Shopping myself I know it will take a couple months to finish and won't by something about to expire. I also won't pick defective packages. Both of these things happened ordering from Amazon before this crisis and I have not tried them since, or likely ever again.

stormdennis2• 6 years ago

I always check use-by and best before dates. When milk can have a date that's over a week away, I really hate it when someone buys milk that's use by tomorrow. Same for for bread, cheese, eggs, butter, fruit and veg, any number of items. Supermarkets naturally want to sell you the soon to expire stuff so how can you trust their pickers? The answer might be buyers and deliverers independent from the shops.

mattkrause3• 6 years ago

A lot of the use-by dates are more like quality suggestions or even outright marketing (how could salt go bad?!)

https://www.nytimes.com/article/expiration-dates-coronavirus...

tonetheman• 6 years ago

This this this. In our area you cannot get good pickers.

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.

sethhochberg• 6 years ago

Tired, bored, or perhaps the reality is that the business model simply wouldn't work if the wages paid to Instacart shoppers were high enough that they could reliably get labor who cared. As-is it feels like a desperation gig and the results match.

xivzgrev• 6 years ago

Exactly. Online grocery ordering still has a significant problem: accurately delivering on a customer's wishes.

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.

PretzelFisch• 6 years ago

Oh the automatic substitution non organic to organic is not much of an issue. But I have had food items like oatmeal auto replace with ice or a sponge. I don't know what is worse honestly the fact ai is so bad or that a real person will buy the insane replacement.

hansvm2• 6 years ago

People are complicated though, even for seemingly safe issues like swapping non-organic for organic. I never make that substitution myself, except for the few times a year I'm shopping for somebody else who would make that substitution.

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.

bsharitt• 6 years ago

I used Kroger's clicklist when it first started, and it was find but got worse. It wouldn't have been so bad if I got the occasional piece of produce or meat I would normally give a pass too, but as time when on, it started to seem like they were actively starting to dump their worst meats and produce on clicklist shoppers.

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.

anjakefala• 6 years ago

They substituted veggie soup cubes with chicken ones.

I am a vegetarian. :/

yellow_postit• 6 years ago

This was a point of price differentiation at some of the online grocery retailers I used while living in London. Some folks will be willing to pay more for “perfect” produce — even for bananas as an example there’s a need for a slider of green to yellow that is really relevant.

rs6• 6 years ago

My wife doesn't even like the produce I pick when I get produce and meats so it's unlikely some store person or contractor from a delivery service app will do the same.

herenorthere• 6 years ago

As a person who used to work in produce in the US, just wanted to say the visual image of a produce clerk dumping a box of apples to the display is ungodly.

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!

adrianmonk• 6 years ago

About substitutions, I'm guessing they haven't explored what all they can do with that and there are probably some easy wins still available.

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).

gregmac• 6 years ago

I think substitutions are way, way more complex than that. Just from my own experience:

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.

2OEH8eoCRo0• 6 years ago

I eat bruised apples. Who cares?

thayne4• 6 years ago

Now you have to consider the automatic substitution of equivalent items when something is out of stock

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.

jasondigitized• 6 years ago

My wife and I use Shipt and we always get a guy named Matthew. If we order apples, Matthew takes the time to find the good apples. If he doesn't like the apples he will text my wife and ask if we want to nix the apples in our order. Matthew always gets a very generous tip and I think there is an opportunity for a service to take a white glove approach to grocery shopping that busy people will pay a premium for.

ahallock• 6 years ago

I agree that choosing in-person is better, but I find the experience good enough while keeping out of harm's way of the pandemic. A bruised apple is not going to ruin my day.

Most delivery services I've used have a "don't substitute" option as well if you need that for sensitive items.

philwelch2• 6 years ago

Doing home grocery delivery by hiring people to shop at the grocery store for you is like doing e-commerce by hiring people to go to the mall for you. Grocery stores are deliberately designed in the exact opposite way that fulfillment centers are; even “warehouse stores” like Costco are adapted to exploit consumer psychology rather than optimize picking throughput.

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.

allengeorge• 6 years ago

I like going to the grocery store.

holler• 6 years ago

me too, it's a reason to get out of the house, to see other people, to get exercise, and to look at all the food :)

redisman• 6 years ago

Me too. I've been using pickup during covid but it's just one more thing missing in my life. I really don't mind browsing the aisles at 9pm listening to a podcast while I do the weekly shopping. I go to very large and dull grocery stores and they have a weird charm.

zwieback• 6 years ago

Me too - we have a large employee-owned no frills supermarket and I've been going there for 25 years. The calming, trance-like experience of picking out my items is something I don't want to miss. I like the walls of cereal, the bulk food bins and the excitement when an item moves to a new location.

sszz• 6 years ago

Same--going to a market feels like a very human experience.

dehrmann• 6 years ago

Not just that, I'm surprised at all the people here who switched to a delivery service. I'm sure some of them are high-risk--and I get it--but I bet a lot are generally low-risk, and the way things are looking, grocery shopping with 6 feet of distance isn't a particularly risky activity.

supercanuck• 6 years ago

Once Amazon sucks all the margins out of grocery, what are people to do when 3rd world countries are drop shipping food to American Customers in 10 years? How do you return food to a paper shell company based in Montana?

yea no thanks. My trust in these companies is diminishing.

Spivak• 6 years ago

There are margins in grocery? Walmart and Kroger put a pretty swift end to that.

barbecue_sauce2• 6 years ago

While margins are low in shelf-stable grocery staples, profit on that side of the store is usually driven by volume and careful management of labor and process. Margins are also higher on private label goods, so promotional energy is spent on driving consumers to those products. At the store level, most grocery chains have started to increase their food service and perishable offerings, which traditionally have much higher (and more stable) margin which augments the profitability of any individual outlet.

kube-system5• 6 years ago

I don't think there have been margins in grocery in my lifetime.

bpodgursky2• 6 years ago

I know it's pandemic-anathema, irresponsible, whatever... but I find myself going to the grocery store more often than I did before the lockdown, just because I'm so bored (mostly subconscious at the time I do it, but clear in retrospect).

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..."

WrtCdEvrydy• 6 years ago

I mean, are you wearing a mask? There's nothing particularly wrong with going to a grocery store if you're keeping social distancing and wearing a mask.

bpodgursky2• 6 years ago

Seattle, so yeah.

ping_pong3• 6 years ago

Social distancing is another myth. In a place like a supermarket, microdroplets with SARS-CoV-2 will linger in the air for 10 minutes. Social distancing is meaningless.

rossdavidh• 6 years ago

The only difference between you and the 300 million other people in this country who did that, is that you admit it to yourself.

danans• 6 years ago

pettier and pettier reasons

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.

ideals• 6 years ago

For the same reason I don't like ordering from Uber eats, I just can't justify pissing away all that money on something I can go do in the same amount of time.

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.

slouch• 6 years ago

We just started ordering curbside pickup at the grocery store and there might be a fee but it's nothing compared to delivery.

drwiggly• 6 years ago

Uh tried to order stuff from a "service". Nothing was ever able to be scheduled two months ago. Would rather kinda goes out the window if you can't even get delivery service.

nemacol3• 6 years ago

"Allow substitutions" is the risky click of 2020.

nemacol3• 6 years ago

Not to mention the whole experience made me feel terrible.

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.

copperx• 6 years ago

Yes, but that's the "I'm feeling lucky" button if you often buy the store brand.

SloopJon• 6 years ago

Whole Foods amusingly substituted hot sauce for baking powder. Less amusingly, Peapod (Stop and Shop) substituted Diet Coke for regular. What am I supposed to do with that? Maybe I'll order some Mentos next time.

nemacol3• 6 years ago

I had an order that asked for "firm tofu" and ended up with mukimame. Which, ya know... pretty close but still pretty far. :P

kirykl• 6 years ago

Maybe online dating sites will follow this pattern

jandrese2• 6 years ago

I love it when you have two 10lb bags of sugar on the list, and because you left "allow substitutions" checked you get two 50lb bags instead. I can understand if you have to sub in the more expensive organic version, but the complete inability to use common sense drives me crazy.

somebrody4• 6 years ago

The way brands package, label, and market their goods is not compatible with online shopping. In the store, a person can quickly evaluate value and buy different options on sale that they enjoy less than another product, but are a good bargain. Online, however, that type of shopping is a rabbit hole of overthought. It takes too long. The only way to speed it up is to remove the idea of evaluating options for value. Make everything a good value. If you can't do that for some product, then let it go out of stock.

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.

ping_pong3• 6 years ago

I've been using Whole Foods delivery about 3 times a week, and it's been fantastic, I may never go back. Sometimes the fruits aren't the greatest, but the rate of that is low. Compared to the amount of time I save, it's totally worth the risk.

hkmurakami• 6 years ago

This is how I feel as well. I don’t even mind the shopping part but for a mass grocer, the checkout experience has become unbearable.

code_duck2• 6 years ago

I was puzzled when this article mentioned Amazon and Walmart, saying Amazon had a disadvantage in providing fresh foods, and then said nothing about Whole Foods.

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.

Ididntdothis2• 6 years ago

I am generally a little down on online shopping. With fresh food you definitely want to see it first (not all tomatoes are the same). I have tried Instacart a few times but almost very time I was disappointed with the quality or the replacements so I won't do it again.

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.

dx87• 6 years ago

My problem is that if I order online, there may be a few ingredients out of stock for a few different meals, and I end up having to go shopping anyway because I have 3-4 meals without all the ingredients. If I went shopping in the first place, I could see that some ingredients for a meal aren't in stock, and get ingredients for a different meal.

analog31• 6 years ago

My experience with online food shopping has been mixed. They actually did a good job of picking veggies for me. My family doesn't eat a lot of meat, so that's not super important. The headaches are in ordering and delivery.

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.

bpyne3• 6 years ago

I had the same thought about delivery-only stores. Honestly, I'm in support of it. I hate driving. But grocery stores are not up to the task right now with order and delivery systems.

thejynxed3• 6 years ago

Or enough people willing to do the actual delivering for the usual shit pay.

trynewideas• 6 years ago

Great timing, just had an online grocery order botched for the fourth straight time.

dougmwne• 6 years ago

We have been having a good experience with the Walmart grocery pick-up app, good enough that I would consider still using it after social distancing is over. There's a few factors that go into this. First and most importantly, it's completely free with no markups, tips or extra charges. I can edit the order right up until the night before, so it's quite convenient to add things as I think of them throughout the week. I dislike shopping at Walmart but their prices are significantly better on most things than other stores in my area. Their stores are so huge and inconveniently laid out that waiting a few minutes in the pick-up parking spot is massively less time. And though the grocery pickers don't do a great job selecting produce, there's a fast refund process in the app when I receive something that's damaged/rotten.

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.

cableshaft• 6 years ago

Wal-Mart has the best pickup/delivery web experience out of the four that I've tried as well (the others being Meijer, Target, and Instacart).

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.

bane• 6 years ago

We decided to order a bunch of things from Costco a few weeks ago through instacart. Actually we decided to do it before then, but the site was broken for a bit.

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.

JoshTriplett• 6 years ago

Some stores sell on Instacart for the exact price they sell for in-store. Fred Meyer / Kroger, for example.

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.

somebrody4• 6 years ago

If I read all that, do I get my $60 back? No? Then I don't care. It's The Wrong Way.

optymizer• 6 years ago

That's exactly what my experience was as well. Costco via Instacart was unreasonably expensive (30%+). We rarely use Instacart now. Most often, it's Amazon Fresh and we plan to go to Costco in person.

mdesq• 6 years ago

Shipt does the same thing for some stores they deliver from. They claim something like a 15% markup average, but in reality from our own experimentation on items we most frequently purchased, it often hit 35-100% markups and higher. (Actual examples: a $5 watermelon for $12; a dozen store brand eggs $0.99 in the store but $2.99 from Shipt). Add tips and it's rarely worth it for us anymore.

fma• 6 years ago

Yeah I used Costco for a bit, than realized is about 20% more for us. Since Costco requires everyone to have masks I feel confident going there. It would be better if they were more transparent about it...

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.

ghaff4• 6 years ago

In my experience, Walmart produce is YMMV under the best of circumstances. Meat options are pretty variable too. It's the closest grocery store to me but I can't really depend on them for a full grocery shopping.

hbhakhra• 6 years ago

We had the same experience as well. When lockdown started, we did a couple of Instacart orders and recommended it to people, until I found out about the stacked charges. If it was just a delivery fee + tip, I'm fine with that, even a transparent fixed percentage. The deception and realizing how much the per-item surcharge + delivery fee + tip was coming out to made me stop using them. Recently I've been using curb-side pickup from stores and its surprisingly convenient and no cost associated. The store workers even refused the cash tip I offered when they came to the car!

gurumeditations• 6 years ago

They’re not allowed to take tips and are paid garbage wages. Don’t get too excited.

logfromblammo• 6 years ago

Instacart also manages to "lose" the meat products out of our orders somewhere between store and front door. And all they do is refund the price of the items.

So then you have to go out to the grocery store yourself anyway.

robbintt• 6 years ago

Yep. Something every order. I just keep backstock at home.

gnulinux• 6 years ago

This was exactly my experience. Last week I suddenly needed a toiler plunger in the middle of the work day. I can't leave to go Target to get that, so I ordered it online. There is a $30 minimum you can spend to get it delivered (doesn't include service fee, tip, charges etc). I said fine and got duct tape and aluminum foil as well. It was the most expensive shopping I did since forever. A toilet plunger, bunch of duct tape, aluminum foil all added up to $50 including fee, tip etc. Thanks but no thanks. I'm not cheaping out on anything but I'm not gonna pay $50 for something I can pay $15-$20 on Amazon or in the shop.

arthurcolle2• 6 years ago

Sorry for hijacking this but what happened to DeepField? I have been looking for a decent way to do named entity extraction from news articles but havent had much luck in finding decent open source libs for this but saw an old post of yours that linked to GitHub but the repo appears to be gone.

aspenmayer2• 6 years ago

I am not OP, so sorry if this is unrelated.

https://gitlab.com/ternaris/marv-robotics

https://ternaris.com/marv-robotics/

https://github.com/regularcoder/deepfield

https://developer.salesforce.com/forums/?id=9060G0000005eHrQ...

https://github.com/deepfield

seanwilson• 6 years ago

You can always do both. Order the big heavy stuff online that keeps for ages (e.g. beans, rices, canned tomatoes, flour, sugar, spices) and go into the shop for a few extra perishable ingredients you need for a meal when you need them for a less stressful experience. This applies even more if you don't have a car.

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?

gnicholas2• 6 years ago

We had a Whole Foods delivery yesterday with poultry that was delivered without any cold bags. Who knows how long the driver was out and about before he delivered to our house, but the food wasn’t very cold when we got it.

bpyne3• 6 years ago

We had grocery delivery for 5 years pre-pandemic. When the pandemic started we tried to continue grocery delivery. However, we found several key issues.

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.

neonate• 6 years ago

https://archive.md/wsonA

ramoz• 6 years ago

This study needs more skepticism. Who are the consultant's clients? Who were the population polled?

I don't know many younger folks who don't try to automate every aspect of their lives including grocery.

rasfincher• 6 years ago

We've been using Instacart more during the pandemic and we've found that it makes shopping for substitutions much harder. Instacart has about as good of a system for replacements as possible IMO but I still prefer to be able to adapt and change what we're planning to eat on the fly, in the store. On the other hand we have started to widen our recipe horizons by being forced to use unexpected replacements.

hinkley7• 6 years ago

Friend of a friend was a UX expert at Homegrocer before they flamed out.

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.

elicash3• 6 years ago

I still think the design of these apps can be dramatically improved.

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.

kube-system5• 6 years ago

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.

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.

elicash3• 6 years ago

This is no different than being in an actual grocery store.

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.

moogly• 6 years ago

Not American, but I started using online grocery stores about 5 years ago. I have not stepped inside a physical grocery store since.

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.

camelNotation• 6 years ago

I would pay for a personal shopper who is working for me, towards my interests, and not in the interests of any particular store.

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.

Larrikin• 6 years ago

This was always my issue with using a service provided by the store. But after talking to friends and finally being convinced to try it turns out that:

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?

Animats• 6 years ago

The current big problem with online food shopping is that it's being done by sending low-wage people into ordinary supermarkets. This is inefficient, but until recently this was a niche market. The trouble with doing it that way is that the ordering system doesn't know the inventory. You get some subset of your order. That's no good.

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.

majormajor2• 6 years ago

Amazon does this sort of direct fulfillment under the Prime Now name. They don't do a great job of keeping a consistent set of things in stock, though.

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.

kube-system5• 6 years ago

Amazon does this sort of direct fulfillment under the Prime Now name.

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?

treis• 6 years ago

The current big problem with online food shopping is that it's being done by sending low-wage people into ordinary supermarkets. This is inefficient, but until recently this was a niche market.

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.

ghaff4• 6 years ago

If I could have "near-perfect" online shopping for a $5-10 delivery charge... Sure. The one time I've really tried it was when I had a broken foot and doing a full grocery shopping was a PITA. So I used delivery. I'd get most of what I needed with some questionable substitutions. But that was mostly OK because driving to the store and picking up a few things in a shoulder bag wasn't a big deal. Just a full grocery shopping was.

I haven't even tried in the current situation. If I go relatively early on a weekday, I find it pretty manageable and uncrowded.

richardbrevig• 6 years ago

Today I received my first grocery delivery from Walmart. I'm extremely excited. I chose no substitutions so only one item wasn't available. What I love about it is that the person picking up the food actually knows the store. Walmart launched pick-up service over 2 years ago and now they're extending that with DoorDash for delivery. Granted, the delivery people still have problems finding my home, but access to Walmart's inventory is a huge improvement for me. Previously I was using Shipt and half of the time they'd just drop products like bananas or frozen blueberries or something else because they couldn't keep up with whether it was in the store or not, or if the store changed brands. The past 4+ orders from Shipt all had mistakes, usually multiple. Either incorrect product or just flat didn't deliver product but charged me for it (in that case I'd get a refund, didn't mess with wrong products).

dmode• 6 years ago

I only go to store because it costs $15 in fees to order $40 of groceries/food

floatingatoll2• 6 years ago

I actively mistrust grocery delivery, because between when I place my order for items in stock and the hours-to-day when they pick my items off the shelf, I'm seeing on average 10-20% of my items being listed as "out of stock" or being offered inappropriate substitutes.

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.

kube-system5• 6 years ago

I've had Instacart workers make pretty good substitutions that weren't even in the app's automated list of replacements. They marked my original item OOS and added the new items as an "adjustment", so these judgement calls are at least something that is possible for them to do.

The issue is that YMMV with the worker you get on any particular occasion.

floatingatoll2• 6 years ago

To clarify, my negative experiences with Instacart were restricted to the shopping website/app experience (which is no better or worse than any other); the Instacart shoppers have always made intelligent decisions on the ground.

pdx6• 6 years ago

I enjoy going to the store too, I want to see what I can make and the quality of the food before I get in line to buy it.

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?

ghaff4• 6 years ago

I have a local farm meat place and a farm stand a couple miles from me (the latter of which is just getting started for the season). I definitely can't do all my shopping at these places but I anticipate they'll be a lot of my non-dairy perishables over the coming months. Much easier/quicker than dealing with the supermarket.

makerofspoons2• 6 years ago

I have decreased the amount of choice and the amount of shipping required for my food by switching to powdered nutritional shakes like Huel and Soylent. No need to worry about the picker getting the wrong thing and there is less need to worry about the colossal amount of plastic waste my weekly shopping used to create. I feel great and I only wish that there were some way to buy various 'lents in a reusable container I could ship back to them, or better yet pick up locally.

Invictus0• 6 years ago

Are you using Soylent as your only source of food? I have Soylent for breakfast most days and it has done nothing to decrease the amount of choice in my groceries; it replaces cereal and milk but I still have to go shopping for everything else.

makerofspoons2• 6 years ago

I get a meal kit too for variety- three to four meals a week from Green Chef depending on the amount of leftovers.

Edit: If anyone knows of any good vegetarian/vegan meal kits that do better on plastic, let me know.

jhfdbkofdcho• 6 years ago

It costs more, it’s inconvenient, I often can’t get the items I want and won’t know about it until it’s too late, and the in store shoppers aren’t great at their jobs.

I’m fine buying things off Amazon because if I order something I know I’ll almost certainly get what I ordered.

charwalker3• 6 years ago

Ordering online is incredibly difficult and each time I try via a different site/store I end up dropping it after investing almost an hour to sort things out. I am in the Seattle area so it's been a big deal.

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.

RaRaMama• 6 years ago

I like to pick my own avocado.

sigjuice• 6 years ago

Picking my own avocados is my favorite thing. OTOH, I have had 7 Whole Foods orders in the past few weeks with avocados and they were all great. So I am not going back to the store any time soon.

noetic_techy2• 6 years ago

I think this has a technological solution, but it will be far more complex to solve.

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.

MattGaiser2• 6 years ago

Eh, why bother? Move the consist goods online and have corner grocers with the fruit and meat. They are probably only 15% of the grocery store

noetic_techy2• 6 years ago

Good idea. That would be ideal.

vmchale• 6 years ago

I feel like with various things being restricted, people were desperate for that social outlet at the beginning of lockdown.

linsomniac3• 6 years ago

I guess I'm in the minority, but I've been chomping at the bit for curbside pickup of groceries for years. Our local stores finally started offering it around 6 months ago and it's been our primary method of shopping since then.

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".

pgrote• 6 years ago

I guess I'm in the minority

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.

linsomniac3• 6 years ago

One huge cognitive benefit of it is: When I'm in the kitchen and use the last of something, or it's getting close, I open up the app, scan the barcode (or search if I don't have the code), and it just shows up in the next grocery run with no further thought.

linsomniac3• 6 years ago

I wonder if stores are finding that they have lower shoplifting now that their staff are walking purchases out to cars.

lowwave• 6 years ago

Of course! I want to go to the store and see the item and buy it! The whole idea of shopping on a web page may be convenient, but sometimes just seem very boring and inspiring for buying food cooking or having new ideas!

TurbineSeaplane• 6 years ago

I shop everyday and cook everyday.

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.

sjg0072• 6 years ago

I prefer to buy online but a lot of the time when I do, especially for fresh stuff like meat/dairy/juice, they won't fill it. But if I do go in store, I find it. This is despite the online ordering having refrigeration space for example. So it can be hit or miss. For vegetables and sundries it mostly works out ok. It mostly depends though on the picker I think. My local won't even substitute even if I tell them. So a lot of time I will actually pick a more expensive vegetable then I normally would because I know it is more likely to be in stock. In my town the organic equivalent tends to be in stock vs conventional.

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.

wffurr• 6 years ago

I don't think food shopping, at least for produce, dairy, and meat, aka perishables, is something that even should be online. Why does it need to be, anyway?

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).

zajio1am• 6 years ago

Interestingly, the article does not take into account prices. I thought about using online food services, but found that prices are about 20-50 % higher than in a supermarket, so it is supermarket for me.

jimmaswell• 6 years ago

Besides cost, I like looking around and a trip to the store can be enjoyable on its own. Might see another store I want to stop at, get some nice views, or see a nice old car, and it's a good chance to have some thoughts without distractions. It's also the only time I really end up listening to local radio.

ChuckMcM• 6 years ago

Somewhere the former CEO of Webvan[1] is rolling around laughing on the floor.

[1] https://groundfloorpartners.com/lessons-from-webvan/

trophycase• 6 years ago

Duh?

MattGaiser2• 6 years ago

I would happily purchase all non-produce and non-meat items online. The problem is that produce and meats are not produced with a consistent quality.

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.

bmcahren• 6 years ago

My shoppers usually select BETTER produce than I do.

kyteland• 6 years ago

My (admittedly limited) experience with curbside pickup seems to be that a dozen eggs is really 11 and you'd better thoroughly sort your produce after you get it. Expect a few losses.

dntbnmpls• 6 years ago

I would happily purchase all non-produce and non-meat items online.

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.

chooseaname• 6 years ago

I trust Publix more than I trust Amazon. Maybe that trust is misplaced? I dunno, but that's where my trust lies right now.

Would anyone at Amazon turn my raspberries over and make sure the bottom ones look as good as the top ones?

koolba• 6 years ago

If these companies cannot turn a profit and provide sustainable employment during a mandatory lockdown then there is no hope for this business model.

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.

marcinzm2• 6 years ago

I use freshdirect and I can see why people prefer their own shopping. With the pandemic a lot of products are perpetually sold out and there's a week long wait for delivery slots. More importantly, the produce and meat they deliver will often be a day from going bad. I've gotten mushrooms that had more black spots than not on them. So I don't even bother anymore to order perishables.

dsjoerg• 6 years ago

Came here to say how good freshdirect is. Been a happy customer since 2008 if not longer.

marcinzm2• 6 years ago

I was happy pre pandemic. With the constant out of stock, delivery waits and us cooking more (thus needing fresh produce) it's actually become used less by us rather than more.

tanilama• 6 years ago

Well...trying to buy strawberries from online store.

I ordered multiple times from PrimeNow, and 50% of chance, the strawberries have already gone bad.

yalogin• 6 years ago

I don't know how the delivery makes sense to people. We ordered approximately $200 worth of products from Costco and the instacart fee at the end came up to almost 80 bucks. That is something I am not willing to pay.

dylz• 6 years ago

Instacart's price gouging is a bit of a special case (compared to many supermarkets that do curbside or delivery)

frogpelt• 6 years ago

There are a few problems with online groceries.

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.

monadic24• 6 years ago

I have had so many bad experiences with instacart:

* 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.

shawabawa3• 6 years ago

I find it hard to believe instacarts model is still the best way of doing online grocery shopping in America... In the UK there's Ocado that has their own warehouses and most of the selection and packing is automated. If there are replacements you're told in advance and can accept or reject the replacement

Most of the main supermarket chains have followed suit and have similar services

spaceisballer• 6 years ago

There are other options, we have Peapod in my area. It’s the same stuff in grocery stores but from the warehouse. This pandemic has them overburdened and I can’t seem to find a delivery time. I tried Instacart once and the shopper was great but with so many things being out of stock I end up having to go out anyway. That plus the markup on all the items (the receipt was $20 less than what Instacart charged me, not including fees and delivery and tip).

javiramos• 6 years ago

Ocado is an amazing company. Their warehouses are a beautiful feat of automation [0]. They have signed deals with a few U.S. supermarket chains so you should expect the Ocado experience in the sometime in the near future.

EDIT: Their other robotic platform [1]

[0] https://youtu.be/XJqsdprXF5c

[1] https://youtu.be/4DKrcpa8Z_E

walshemj• 6 years ago

And also substituting generic brand for brand gives higher ROI

zitterbewegung• 6 years ago

I've ordered items from Starbucks and when I walk in to get the order they state that the item is not in stock.

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.

monadic24• 6 years ago

Right, but they could pack the food and ask me to verify before delivering, same as at starbucks.

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.

ed25519FUUU• 6 years ago

This reminds me of the price/quality matrix:

* 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.

harlanji• 6 years ago

I’m a shopper at a grocery store and I do my best to shop like I’m shopping for myself. Am either fast or in my training grace period. I’m a terrible employee generally, too much care. I assume I’ll be fired and will do my best shopping until then. I did get the job randomly and had shopped there often prior, a clerk brought me to the hiring manager so it was easy to get hired. Of course each day it sinks in that it’s a business with managers and metrics. At least programming technical debt paid well, it seems clear that outside of boutique consulting it’s all about the numbers... good to know for sure.

blueblob• 6 years ago

Agreed. Shopper buys yellow cilantro with brown spots and bag is full of water. I plan a meal around protein and shopper gets everything except the protein. Shopper substitutes regular soda for diet soda. Everything at the store is not listed on the site.

y-c-o-m-b• 6 years ago

shopper buys obviously moldy fruit.

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.

notyourwork• 6 years ago

person who clearly didn't use their sense of vision (nor smell!)

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.

davidw4• 6 years ago

We've had an ok experience with instacart. I've tried to think of it sort of like ... when you stop at a little store in a small town before going camping, and there's not a great selection and it's kind of expensive. But you are happy to get some of the things you need, and it's ok if it's not perfect, because we're in the middle of a disaster of epic proportions.

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.

irrational5• 6 years ago

Off-topic, but do you really view that "we're in the middle of a disaster of epic proportions"? I can think of a huge number of actual disasters of epic proportions (full-scale nuclear war, 100 kilometer asteroid impact, yellowstone super caldera explodes, an actual pandemic that has 99% effective death rate arises, etc.) The current situation seems pretty low-key compared to a real disaster.

bradknowles2• 6 years ago

One of the big problems with InstaCart is that they own the relationship with the customer — all the store knows is that InstaCart shopper #76957831 bought certain items. That’s it.

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.

vmception• 6 years ago

yeah but the joy of getting fresh baguettes delivered instead of merely getting left over sustenance in an after thought after a long day at work

another perspective

siruncledrew• 6 years ago

Interacting with instacart sums up the expression: ”if you want something done right, do it yourself”.

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(?).

xur17• 6 years ago

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.

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.

wozniacki2• 6 years ago

Some places make you dread going to grocery stores. Even club stores that require membership are bad. The experience has been nothing short of a nightmare off late, even prior to these pandemic times.

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.

julianozen• 6 years ago

I think the big thing to remember is that Instacart offers a no lift in model for grocery stores to compete against Amazon/Walmart without doing anything to improve aging system. These companies do not have the expertise to become full distribution centers build a website that their customers will enjoy using. They are in bed with Instacart out of fear

mcv• 6 years ago

Sounds like instacart is independent from the shop it delivers from, and collects your groceries by hand. Is that correct? It sounds very inefficient to me.

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.

whiskyant• 6 years ago

Yeah, if the experience was an automated warehouse in which you know you're getting exactly what you want (and if it's not listed, it means they don't have it), it would be a lot better.

The whole checkout experience can be automated, and the final items only need to be picked up and delivered.

Androider2• 6 years ago

Amazon's Whole Foods delivery in my area is now direct from warehouse to home instead of in-store picking. It's so, so much better than Instacart. On my last large order of almost a hundred items, not a single replacement, I got exactly what I ordered the same day. Instacart is such a sub-standard experience, it's just fundamentally the wrong approach and we wouldn't accept it for any other type of online purchase.

krustyburger2• 6 years ago

They’re still in-store picking. It’s just that Whole Foods/Prime Now has dedicated employees for this.

sarah2079• 6 years ago

I have had the same experience with ordering Whole Foods and Amazon Fresh in the bay area. Everything I order arrives.

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.

clivestaples• 6 years ago

I've had almost the opposite experience. I got one questionable bag of onions. Otherwise, after five or six orders, I could not be happier.

iamthepieman• 6 years ago

Our local 3 store grocer offers shopping for 5$. You have to pick it up at the store but you don't have to go inside. They've been doing it for about a year. Never had a problem with it and their online interface is perfectly matched with their inventory. They text their replacements which you can reject before pickup.

tehwebguy• 6 years ago

Whole Foods / Amazon Fresh deliveries are like a thousand times better for me in west LA and come at very low cost. The chain of quality control is going to be a big reason that this moves back in-house IMO.

jedberg• 6 years ago

I'm the designated shopper in my family, since my wife has higher risk factors for COVID-19. Usually when we go shopping, I push the cart and pick the obvious items, but leave most of the picking to her because she's very specific in what she wants.

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.

jonny_eh• 6 years ago

Ha, same. I'll resort to facetime to figure out what that one thing she wants is.

peterwwillis• 6 years ago

I like ordering groceries online, but I think the idea of instant grocery shopping is flawed.

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).

mikecoles2• 6 years ago

My first, and last, instacart experience had the shopper cancel all of the items in my order and then charge me a service fee.

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.

badwolf• 6 years ago

As someone without a car, I really want to like various grocery delivery services... Unfortunately every single time I've ordered groceries has been a less than stellar experience. Even Amazon Fresh.

badrabbit• 6 years ago

I loved using things like instacart but they're shameless about correlating my real life purchase history.

I would be ecstatic if there was a privacy friendly alternative. Order groceries with bitcoin!!

knowaveragejoe• 6 years ago

I'm blown away nobody has mentioned Amazon Fresh yet. There was a few weeks early in the pandemic when delivery times were a crapshoot, but it's worked flawlessly for me ever since. Produce and meat have all been good quality. Meat is obviously in high demand so availability of certain cuts or types of meat(mainly chicken) is variable.

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.

ashtonkem• 6 years ago

I’m in the other camp; getting delivery has massively reduced my impulse junk food purchases. I couldn’t care less about convenience or cost differences; the reduction in impulse sugar consumption alone has been worth it.

noneeeed• 6 years ago

It's interesting watching discussions about this from the UK. The last stat I can find was that around 25% of people do some or all of their grocery shopping online. Most of the time it works really well.

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.

gcheong• 6 years ago

Before lockdown I would walk to the store almost everyday or every other day buying only what I needed for meals for that day or two. After lockdown I've only ventured to the store once and have since switched to ordering from Instacart for most things but now I feel compelled to either buy more non-perishables in larger quantities or things I can readily freeze in order to meet the order minimums. It's been mostly fine overall and I basically just chalk up any mishaps, which have been minor, to the cost of the privilege of being able to wait out this pandemic from the comfort of home, but I do know that when this is over I I'll be glad to be able to shop in-person again for most things. I might still buy toilet paper and paper towels in bulk though.

benibela• 6 years ago

I would buy it online, if it were not more expensive

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

deeblering4• 6 years ago

I guess I’m an outlier. My local grocery has their own delivery service and I’m very happy with it. Sometimes things are out of stock and I’ll make a 10 min trip to the store for a few items. Sure beats shopping for an hour and loading a full cart, unloading it for check out, reloading it, unloading into my car, then loading into my fridge.

lifthearth• 6 years ago

H-E-B Groceries In Texas has been doing an incredible job with their cubside service. It costs about $5 and takes less than 15 minutes to drive up and get all your groceries put in your trunk. This article was surprising to me because my impression has been the opposite and curbside service is an awesome luxury that's come out of this. Only downsides are having to schedule a pickup time usually for the next day and sometimes they have to substitute items that are out of stock. I wish I could link items so if they don't have bread don't get me peanut butter and jelly too.

monadic24• 6 years ago

Related article (cannot vouch for quality): https://www.texasmonthly.com/food/heb-prepared-coronavirus-p...

thrower123• 6 years ago

Unless I'm buying cases of canned goods or other completely fungible items, yeah.

Besides, Amazon has become so erratic with their deliveries that I feel like I'm back in the days of mail-order catalogs.

ummonk• 6 years ago

It's probably safer to shop in person from the store than to order form a delivery person / or instacart shopper who is exposed to a bunch of people.

yellowapple5• 6 years ago

For me, I just need to get out of the apartment every once in awhile, and grocery shopping's a reasonable excuse to do so. Plus I gotta run my car every few days to keep the battery from dying (I have a battery tender, but it'd involve either parking in a garage I'm currently using for storage or running an extension cord from said garage to wherever I ended up parking).

alkonaut• 6 years ago

I started shopping online during the pandemic and so far I really like it. We (I’m not in the US) have multiple huge sites that deliver directly from warehouses (all the big food chains + a few independent). Selection is massive, almost everything seems to be in stock most of the time, and prices are like supermarkets or lower. I’m especially impressed by the quality of fruit & veg. It’s like they think “we can’t deliver anything that’s less than perfect because it might turn users away from our service”. It’s the correct line of thought but I wonder what happens to all the less-than-perfect produce.

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.

sabujp• 6 years ago

ohh have we vaccinated everyone yet? i'll stay home and order as much as i can still thank you. R0 is still probably over 2 even with the increased temps.

code_duck2• 6 years ago

Grocery shopping has been one of my main forms of entertainment and socialization for the past decade. I tended to go to the market at least once a day, sometimes three or four stores.

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.

kbos87• 6 years ago

I see a lot of commentary about experiences people have had with grocery delivery services. I think this may be part of it, but it isn’t why I never have and likely never will use one.

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.

fergie• 6 years ago

Totally agree, even under COVID circumstances. If it wasnt for the weekly shopping trip I would never have realised that for a lot of people life was carrying on nearly as normal.

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.

beebmam• 6 years ago

Speaking entirely from my own experience as an American: I've had no problem at all with ordering food online, other than some shortages of certain products. Quality of produce has been high, no mistakes, with quick and kind service. I think I'll be sticking to ordering online for the foreseeable future

gniv• 6 years ago

I just realized that the "UI" presented by the supermarket shelves as you walk by them is very dense and yet we are good at identifying things quickly.

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.

gwbas1c• 6 years ago

I tried a local restaurant produce delivery service. The quality of the food was good and the prices were fine...

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.

inamberclad• 6 years ago

Much harder to discover new foods via a computer screen.

eries• 6 years ago

A lot of the issues being reported in this thread are thoroughly solved by Good Eggs. They’ve been much better for us during the pandemic, although obviously under heavy load

rglover• 6 years ago

Of course. Sometimes the convenience of ordering is great, but good lord, I don't want to live in the dystopian hell where you never go to the store. It's fun to joke with people. Flirt with the cashier. Bump into a friend unexpectedly. Human stuff.

Noos• 6 years ago

I think the real issue is probably the store hires all of one or two people to deliver food, who make really low wages and have to do a lot of orders.

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

whyenot• 6 years ago

I did the Whole Foods delivery through Amazon a couple of times, and it was fine. The only problem was that it became almost impossible to get a delivery window. Eventually, I just gave up on it. What I have been doing more recently is ordering a box of fruit and produce (+ cheese, other stuff) from the Milk Pail drive-thru in Mountain View and then every couple of weeks I go to a grocery store and buy whatever else I need. I've only been to a grocer store twice in 8+ weeks of shutdown. That's a pretty huge change for me -- I used to go several times a week.

makecheck• 6 years ago

The really impressive thing about ordering groceries online is that they actually provide multiple ways to never receive what you asked for:

- 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.

ryanmarsh• 6 years ago

Instacart sucks therefore Americans prefer to shop for themselves? I think not.

We love Shipt. They've solved the stated problems. Shame they don't get more attention.

unemphysbro• 6 years ago

As much as I hate grocery shopping. I like having control over the entire process.

Maybe, I'm neurotic?

sesuximo• 6 years ago

Americans have nothing else to do

madrox• 6 years ago

Our household does all our grocery shopping online, and I'm pretty convinced people wouldn't rather visit a store. Rather, the online grocery shopping experience is broken.

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.

Americans, it turns out, would rather visit a store than buy food online

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