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Comment by KJKingJ | Hacker News Reader

Mine are always one off orders. I'll log on, choose an hourly timeslot for delivery and then browse down a list of products i've purchased before (both online and instore) and chose which ones I want to be delivered. It takes about 10-15 minutes to do and they will deliver everything right to my door. It ends up being a huge timesaver compared to having to go to and from the supermarket and pick everything out.

I tend to place an order about once every 2-3 weeks, and supplement it with "top up" shops for fresh items (meat, veg etc) in a mini-supermarket on my way home from work every so often.

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> then browse down a list of products i've purchased before (both online and instore) and chose which ones I want to be delivered

That's cool. So they keep a history of everything you've purchased? Do they do that by credit card or do you log in some how when you purchase instore?

Loyalty card, presumably.

You create an account on the site. Why complicate it?

All the stores have loyalty cards which link on and off line shopping.

I feel like a "mini-supermarket" is just a market; the super and mini should cancel each other out. :-)

Heh yeah, it's a bit of a contradictory term, but it's the only 'generic' way to describe it that I know of. Most of them are branded with the store's name with a suffix like 'local', 'express' or 'metro'

The US doesn't really have that class of store for some reason. Even in urban areas, there tend to be either full-fledged grocery stores or "convenience stores" like 7-11 which have minimal fresh food. There are certainly exceptions but they tend to be local one-off markets. AFAIK, there aren't any widespread versions of the express/metro markets like you see in the UK.

There are sort of tiers in the U.S. I would think of something like this for things we have in the Southeast US:

* Convenience Store

* Dollar store (a little more food options at places like Dollar General/Tree/Family Dollar, usually with a small refrigerator section and eggs and milk and juice)

* "Mini" grocery stores, like Piggly Wiggly Express or Dollar General Market

* Stores with mostly food and limited selection like Aldi

* Supermarkets like Kroger and Publix

* Supercenters like Super Walmart and Super Target with full supermarket selection and lots of other stuff

I think "supermarket" originally meant any store where you pick the goods yourself, rather than asking at the counter.

My stores would get a lot more of my business if they had better interfaces. I can pop over to the grocers, buy $200-$300 worth of grocers and be home in about half an hour. Using their website takes just about as long and then I have to wait a few hours for delivery.

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