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I've been doing grocery pickup with Superstore (large Canadian chain) for a few years now. It's $5 per order, or $100 a year to be an "Insider" member which gets you some other benefits.

Originally we started using it because grocery shopping on the weekend with our son was a terrible experience for us. Trading the extra time and hassle for paying $5 to just pull into a parking spot after work and have it delivered to my trunk was well worth it for us. Prices match exactly what is in store (they ring it through the same system,) and tipping isn't allowed.

If it were just my wife and I, or if I was single, I don't think I'd use the service, but for my current situation it's great. They also offer delivery for an additional cost, I don't know how much it is, but I do know some people who have mobility issues who enthusiastically use it.

I always assumed that, at least pre-pandemic, the primary use case was either people with young children or people who could easily drive but aren't very mobile on foot.

A number of years back when I was on crutches for multiple months, I got grocery delivery which was a mixed bag. I'd probably have used pickup if it were available. I could actually get around a grocery store fine on crutches. I just couldn't easily buy more than would fit in a shoulder bag.

So, is this just a HN thing (since engineer/STEM salaries are higher than the usual population) or do a lot of people order groceries?

I live on the East coast in an apartment building, and from talking to neighbors and seeing the trash room, I'd say it's not just an HN thing (Whole Foods/Amazon Prime, Drizly, UberEats, Postmates, FreshDirect, Peapod, etc.).

that's a lot of money vs just stopping in on the way home from work or running once on the weekend.

If you don't have a car/license (or access to a car like Zipcar), it can be hard to get to a grocery store in person.

Seems like that would make it hard to get to work, too... oh, wait.

Before COVID I was remote but took a cab to an Amtrak for an 8 hour round trip once a month to the office. But yea I've been working from home for 18 months now..

I wasn't thinking about not having a car (which is funny because at college I borrow a car, but I also don't have a kitchen so...), but that's a good usecase.

> Whole Foods/Amazon Prime

Does Prime make the fees for grocery delivery get much smaller/go away? There's a Whole Foods in my area but it's 20 minutes from my house so I didn't even think to look there.

Does Prime make the fees for grocery delivery get much smaller/go away?

If you have a Prime membership the Whole Foods delivery is free, though it's nice to tip the delivery person.

How far away are your grocery stores in a city? I've always lived within a walking distance to a grocery store, also when in a town of under 10k people. Currently I live in a major European city and have at least seven grocery stores within one kilometer radius.

That is not how American cities work at all. They are built for cars, and residents who can't afford cars have a significantly worse standard of living and access to food.

There's a convenience store (Walgreens) a couple blocks away; the closest grocery store to me is a 25 minute walk, but mostly highway/no sidewalk. I did it once when I first moved here but ended up getting an Uber back. There isn't public transit that stops there. Before here I lived in downtown Boston, and that was very convenient for walking to markets.

Right, that indeed paints a very different cityscape than what I had in mind.

Most grocery stores that offer their own delivery services do so for much cheaper than Instacart: they charge normal prices for items, and put all the delivery costs in the delivery fee where it belongs. For example, using Kroger's delivery service instead of InstaCart can be nearly 50% cheaper even before customer-card discounts because (a) Kroger charges the same price for items as you would pay in-store (and will offer sales prices if available), (b) Kroger generally charges a fixed fee for delivery, and (c) uses employees in locations where delivery is offered. The caveat is that most grocery stores have smaller delivery radiuses than Instacart.

Edit: Kroger owns a lot of chains; some of the chains might mark up prices on delivery items a bit, but the stores I have used do not.

I just do pickup. It's free usually or above a certain threshold. They deliver it to your trunk.

Grocery pickup is revolutionary when you have kids.

1. Order online, with lots of features that make re-ordering a breeze

2. Use coupons, b/c it's point-and-click, not clip-and-collect

3. Plan around grocery pickup, as opposed to rushing to the grocery store whenever you have time

4. Sit in the car for 10m and read your kids a book or listen to Mr Rogers songs until a nice person fills your trunk with your groceries

Be careful with that. Wegmans (using Instacart) has different per-item prices for pickup/delivery than if you picked yourself in-store. Sometimes it's substantial.

https://www.reddit.com/r/instacart/comments/i1uw2o/massive_m...

> The AVERAGE markup of items in my order is 35%

> The highest markup of an item was 733%. To put this in perspective, if that item had been $10, I would have been charged $83.30 for it.

> Another item was marked up 220%. This item cost $4.68, I was charged $14.99 for it, and if I look in the Wegmans website that item is listed for $8.04. How can they arbitrarily charge more than the actual listing on the website? How can they charge almost 3 times more than the actual cost?

https://www.wegmans.com/service/faq/online-grocery-ordering/

> When you shop online with us, you’ll find our prices are about 15% above in store, which includes the cost of shopping your order.

I order online for pickup through a service called Peapod (the "good" grocery store close to me is a Giant, which I think purchased Peapod at some point or at least has an exclusive partnership). I don't mind paying slightly higher prices, but I don't think they are. The pickup fee is also extremely reasonable, just a few dollars. But this is always for next day or even later in the week. I did fajitas and sides for about 15 people for a birthday party a few weeks ago and put the order in a week prior to pickup.

My question is, are people really order this stuff for pickup or even delivery and expecting someone to immediately run out of a back room and start filling the cart? I don't see the benefit to the store in offering "speedy" grocery delivery. Running out of food at home is rarely a surprise, and we're at a time now where it's no longer unsafe to go into the store even in urban areas. I'm not going to order from a different grocery store because they can have my order ready for pickup an hour sooner than a better and/or closer one.

It's like a $10 delivery fee plus tip for me using Kroger. Assuming I'm ordering plenty of groceries I easily save that much in gas and time. And as far as I can tell, there's no hidden fees and items cost the same if I were to buy them in the actual store.

My local supermarket (Shoprite) charges just $5 to order online and pick it up yourself. The only issue, which is better now, was that during the height of the pandemic you had to book your pickup time a week or two in advance.

In Mexico we use Cornershop (LATAM company acquired by Uber recently). The prices are 2% higher than in store but sometimes it has of offers on many products that makes the total cost even lower than in the store.

Got COVID recently so I was forced to use it and had the best experience so far. 5 minutes to place an order. I gladly tip $10 to someone who needs it (keep in mind the minimum wage in Mexico is like 4 dollars per day). And I save 1 or 2 hours of my time that I could read, work, exercise, practice an instrument etc.

Agreed. The one time I used it and it made sense was being home sick with kids. It was a life saver to be able to have everything delivered in that case.

In a lower cost of living region, groceries are a bigger portion of a household's budget and it pays better to be frugal with them.

On the coasts, housing dominates by so much that +/- 30% on groceries is just not a big deal.

COVID 19 made my mother discover the joys of delivery!

It's pretty cheap actually if you live in an urban area where there are a lot of customers.