This thread about milk delivery made me curious about the extent to which supermarkets offer home delivery in other countries. Here in the UK, most big supermarkets offer delivery for a small charge, £5 or so (sometimes waived if you spend over a certain amount IIRC). I get almost all my groceries delivered from Tesco. Both my wife and I work long hours and the delivery charge is a tiny amount to pay for not having to spend an hour or more at the supermarket.
Is this a common thing in America? Elsewhere in Europe? Do you get groceries delivered? If not, could you if you wanted to?
I do, but I am in the UK. Even though I live opposite a Tesco’s, it’s an Express, so it’s handy to get the occasional big shop for really cheap wine and lemonade and stuff (the Express doesn’t have the 12p 2l lemonade) or go for special offers at Asda or Sainsbury’s.
In Spain as in the UK many supermarket chains offer web-shopping, and I don’t remember a supermarket which did not offer delivery; you can take some of the shopping yourself and send the rest. I don’t usually take home delivery for groceries, but it’s a blessing for my 96yo grandmother; I’m in the process of convincing Mom to use it occasionally but she tends to go shopping every day anyway, so for her buying one brik of milk one day and another the next day isn’t anywhere near the PITA it would be for me. Weird thing is, she did convince Grandma to use it.
My local supermarket offers home delivery, which I imagine is great for the housebound, but probably not worth it for most people. You have to get your order in fairly early for same day delivery, and it’s a ten dollar delivery charge (vs. an eight dollar cab ride, for me personally). I also don’t like the substitutions they make seemingly at whim, and am not the tiniest bit interested in letting them pick out my meat or produce.
Supermarkets in Israel offer both web- or phone-based delivery (you don’t have to go into the store at all) and Home delivery of your purchases in your (relatively local) store.
Web delivery is generally free of charge IIRC (I haven’t used it in several years); home delivery of self-purchases will cost you $3-7 (it will cost more the less you spend) – or, sometimes, nothing (some chains, at some times, will comp home deliveries.)
It appears to me that home delivery after shopping is very widely used here, while Web/Phone delivery, not so much. We mostly still want to man-handle the cucumber and test-drive the apples and oranges ourselves.
Yes, I’ve had this issue too - both here in the UK and back in NZ. We’re moving house soon to a small village and won’t have a supermarket nearby, so I’m thinking of using the supermarket deliveries for the basic things, and using the nearby butcher/greengrocer for fresh ingredients.
I don’t mind a different brand of toilet tissue for a week, but getting lamb instead of beef really doesn’t work!
A delivery charge of £6 equates to about 20 minutes’ pay. I’d spend longer than that just getting to the nearest big supermarket once you take parking into account. It’s overwhelmingly worth it for me - I work long hours and don’t want to waste my weekends food shopping!
They only make substitutions on items that are out of stock, and they are put to one side when the stuff is delivered so that you can choose to either accept them or reject them.
We get maybe 1 substitution on average out of a whole week’s shopping, and often it’s as simple as a different size pack or a slightly different flavour of a product.
As for letting the store pick out produce, I’ve never noticed it to be below the standard of what I’d have picked up in store. We don’t tend to buy much fresh meat from the supermarket though as we like to support the local butcher.
I used it often when Celtling was little, and back when I worked 70+ hours per week. These days I’ve just fallen out of the habit.
It’s a funny thing in the US. There seems to be an overall attitude that grocery delivery is an unforgiveable luxury, something one “should” be doing for oneself. I’ve never understood that. Ordering groceries online is much easier, I can build and see the list easily, and our local provider (PeaPod) even allows you to choose so many green bananas and so many yellow ones. Also the online list prevents me from making those impulse buys that are so tempting in the store.
I worried at first about someone else choosing my produce, but I found that they have the produce manager doing it, and he’s actually better at it than I am. (Saying a lot, as I spent Summers on a family farm once upon a time.)
My only real complaint is that they often don’t carry the larger sizes of things. You’d think they’d grok that we’d all use the service once a month for bulk buys if they made them available, but I suppose those are the least profitable items. When they fix that problem, I’ll just stop going to stores altogether.
There are web based services in Sweden, at least in Stockholm, but I am of the same opinion as a chef I know. I want to go to the grocer and pick what I want myself rather than let someone else do it.
Quoting this one just because it’s the first to mention it…
say what?
If I ordered something and they subbed, I’d be there so fast there would be a sonic boom!
I find it absurd when I get a coupon for a brand of milk which doesn’t have lactose-free versions, since all I buy is lactose-free; milk is one of the few products I buy in large enough amounts to justify delivery. Having regular milk brought instead would Not Go Well. I’d never heard of anything like that, it’s something which wouldn’t even occur to me as something someone might think a good idea. Mistakes in delivery do sometimes happen, but subbing on purpose? Oh mama.
The store I use, you can specify – either for your whole order or for individual items – no substitutions; okay to substitute same brand different size; okay to substitute different brand same size.
For the car-free, this is totally worth it, esp. when I order a bunch of heavy, bulky stuff (cat litter, 12-packs of TP, etc.) at once.
I do buy most of my fresh fruit and veg at either the local shop or at the market on a daily basis and only add a few of those items to any grocery delivery, but that still leaves an awful lot of shopping to be delivered: frozen foods, tinned foods, baking goods, toilet rolls, kitchen towels, drinks (big and heavy), cleaning products, etc.
I have the impression that not as many Americans have a local shop that they can easily pop to for fresh veg and/or meat - by local I mean ten minutes’ walk maximum (some places in the UK don’t have that either, but most do at least a few days a week). If they’d have to go to the supermarket anyway for goods which have a short shelf-life, then I can see it being less worthwhile getting stuff delivered. Plus, of course, car ownership here is somewhat lower.
I’m in the UK and don’t own a car, but I do actually enjoy grocery shopping (I find it relaxing) so only tend to get things delivered when the house is pretty much devoid of food and there would be way too much to carry home.
I also get a weekly organic fruit and veg delivery, mostly because I tend to forget and we’d be restricted to frozen peas for our greenery otherwise.
There are a few different services in the US depending on where you live. In certain cities in Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, Rhode Island, Maryland, Virginia, Illinois, and in Washington DC there’s Peapod, which is connected to certain local grocery stores. Safeway and at least some of the companies it owns (like Vons or Randall’s) has its own service. There are a few online services like Homeland Delivery or Schwans which are not affiliated with any specific store.
I’ve never used any of them because I live right across the street from 2 grocery stores that are literally back-to-back, but I could certainly see the benefits of using such a service, especially for the car-less, the time-challenged, or if you live a far distance from the store.
I used it for the first time last week, having always been put off by the £5 delivery charge for my modest-sized order (even though that objection is indeed dubious when you factor in petrol and time and inconvenience), and also the concern about picking out produce, particularly fruit. But it was great, well worth it. Very well organised, seemed to be very easy to opt out of substitutions or reject unsatisfactory items (not that I needed to), and the guy was very helpful. I felt bad about not giving him a tip actually, but I didn’t have a penny of cash in the house. Oh, and the fact that the online system naturally remembers your favourite items is bound to be useful. And it makes it easy to see all the two-for-one offers, indeed it reminds you if you’ve missed any offers.
UK dopers, do you tip the delivery person?
We have access to delivery from Peapod and also (I think) Safeway. We used Peapod for a while and it did help with the lugging - but we still had to go to the grocery store every bit as often - just not for as much stuff. The sales weren’t as good as in-store (Peapod is run by Giant), the produce quality often wasn’t as good, the selection wasn’t as good, and we never knew which items they’d be out of that particular week.
Now, I have just recently subscribed to a produce delivery service - basically each week I get an assortment of comparatively-local veggies and fruit. I enjoy that (and it’s forced me to try quite a few new dishes).
