Experiment: Shopping for groceries online

Posted on March 16th, 2010 by Sacha Chua

It was Friday, and I was preparing for a tea party. I didn’t have some of the ingredients I needed to make apple pie. The forecast for the weekend was rain, rain, rain. W- was in crunch mode and would probably be too busy to take the car to the supermarket, I needed more than I could comfortably fit on my bicycle, and I had far too many things scheduled for Friday to walk to the supermarket and back.

So I decided to give GroceryGateway.com a spin, encouraged by the positive tweets I’d seen. It probably took me fifteen minutes to review all the categories I was interested in and select the items. I ordered lots of groceries and set my delivery window to 7:00 – 8:30 AM the next day. I paid for my groceries online as well, although there’s an option to pay by debit card on delivery.

The deliveryman arrived with my two boxes of groceries at 7:30 AM. We completed the transaction and verification in less than five minutes.

Produce is a great way to test quality. The bagged Macintosh apples were slightly bruised, but otherwise in good shape. The Pink Lady apples were in perfect shape. The lemons were bright and shiny, but he asparagus spears were a little dry, with small indentations from a too-tight elastic.

To my relief, the eggs arrived intact.

The rest of the groceries were the same as the ones I regularly buy from the neighborhood No Frills. I was delighted to find steel-cut oats in stock online, as I rarely see them in stores.

The groceries were priced higher than the ones we buy at No Frills. GroceryGateway is run by Longo’s, which positions itself more as a premium supermarket. For example, the GroceryGateway 3 lbs bag of Macintosh apples cost $2.99, but I can get 4 lbs for only $2.49 at No Frills. My groceries cost about $110, which is probably about 10% more than I would have paid at No Frills. Add to that a $9.95 delivery charge (softened by a $5 credit for the first order), and the price of convenience turned out to be around $15, and probably $10 + 15% for future orders. We usually save even more on our groceries by shopping the sales, so the gap would be even bigger.

In terms of time and convenience, it was a good experiment. It took me about 20 minutes for the entire thing, compared to maybe two person-hours if W- and I went shopping, or 1 person-hour if I went on my bicycle. I’d save a bit more time if I bought more groceries in the batch.

I probably won’t use GroceryGateway regularly. I like shopping for groceries with W-, figuring out what to do with what’s on sale. No Frills occasionally doesn’t stock things we like (such as steel-cut oats!), but we’re pretty good with working with what’s available. It’s good to know that a service like GroceryGateway exists, though, just in case we get really busy someday.

Good to experiment!

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More posts about: cooking, lifehack // 4 Comments »

Short URL: http://sachachua.com/blog/p/7114

http://smartpeopleiknow.wordpress.com Bernie

Yes, that sounds about right for my experience, too. It’s a good service and it does save you time, but the tradeoff is money and some degree of choice.
http://kitty-toys.com Stephanie

While I love the convenience of these grocery services, I still have that desire to go and pick them myself, particularly the fresh produce. Also, if you don’t go in person you miss out on seeing the clearance items that are coming close to their sell by date, and for me that’s often a little treasure trove of bargains!
http://sachachua.com Sacha Chua

I rarely buy produce on clearance sale, as they’re usually long past yummy at that point. ;) Sometimes I’ll stock up on meat that happens to be on its sell-by date, but my local supermarket has decent turnover, so that doesn’t happen often. I do shop the weekly specials, though, and online grocery stories have that too.
http://www.trajano.net/ Archimedes Trajano

You know if you had problems even with bruised apples you can tell grocery gateway and refund the cost. Personally I only had to do that 20% of the time, but then I only used their service about 5 times especially in ice cold winter.

I don’t know how to pick fruits and produce properly, but they do a very good job.

I won’t get tofu from them though, that I have to get at a Chinese store, non-Chinese store tofu feels weird.

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