Amazon might leave it on your doorstep, but you have to be home for Peapod and other from-the-supermarket deliveries. Peapod delivers up until 9 PM or thereabouts. I think Roche Brothers (a New England chain) delivers from 9-9, too. The guy happily brings the stuff into your kitchen or where-ever you ask.
I can also think of a number of local community supported agriculture (CSA) groups that will bring the box of ripe produce to your door, too. (I’ve been looking into buying a share of a cow. Local farms are a good thing.)
It’s a paradigm shift for a lot of people who didn’t grow up with it. I wish this had been available to my nana when she got older. She had had polio as a child and had significant pain and arthritis in the leg that had been affected by the polio.
I admit, I use delivery service as much because I hate crowded grocery stores as because it often hurts to carry the stuff up two flights of stairs.
I’ve never been in a store that had that. I mean, a couple of aisles currently have cut-through to the very next aisle, but literally only 2 out of 24 in the whole store.
Another problem - compounded by clueless shoppers who don’t seem to recognize that someone else might need to shop in the same aisle - is all those displays they have blocking your way and making it harder to get around. I’m able-bodied, and nonviolent, but I am tempted to vandalize those each and every time I see them.
I thought this rant was going to be about self check-outs. Are they not common in the US yet? In the UK they’re common even in larger stores. They’re very much not disability-friendly so those in wheelchairs, with arms in slings, etc, have to join the long, long queue at the few (possibly one) remaining main checkout.
My nearest supermarket is so difficult to use in a wheelchair (very narrow - you can’t get past a powered wheelchair at all and have to squeeze past manual ones, basket-only, no scooters, vertical stacking that many able-bodied people can’t reach), that you have to report to a member of staff when you enter and they have to help you as you go round. That requires waiting. I think they might actually be employing more staff than they did before, actually.
Grocery delivery is commonplace in the UK but sometimes you need a pint of milk or fresh veg or something you’d forgotten to order or your money’s late so you’re living day-to-day. Also some older people use shopping as their way of getting out and doing stuff, and they might not be able to afford the delivery fees.
It’s not only obesity that makes people disabled and despite your later posts you must know that.
I can understand the supermarkets’ rationale, though. They really aren’t charities and their profit margins aren’t huge.
We have them in the US as well, and I hate them, though not for the reasons you cite. They just nag you to death - “unexpected item in bagging area!” That’s the REUSABLE BAG, dumbass! And god forbid you remove the bag and start a new one, it short-circuits the weigher thing under the bag and the Employee With The Key has to come and override the bloody buggery thing.
Yeah, thinking back in time, I haven’t been to a grocery with that transverse aisle down the middle that I can think of. Almost all of them are long aisles that run perpendicular with the front of the store, with transverse aisles capping the long aisles between the checkouts and the aisles in front, and between the meat/dairy and the aisles in the back.
Some variant has always been the layout of every grocery store I’ve been in- the produce, bread, beer/wine, frozen foods, deli and other stuff tend to vary by store, but the overall layout of long perpendicular aisles with transverse cap aisles has been the standard for decades.
And honestly, living where I do (an area consisting of a lot of retirees, a lot of yuppies, and a lot of really low-income people), I see a lot of old-timers at the store, and they never seem to be too bothered by it- they either just walk around, or the use the scooters.
They DO rearrange the stores periodically to keep people from knowing the layout and just going for what they need! The grocery store I go to was rearranged recently, and I suspected this was why.
Isn’t there a button to add your own shopping bags?
Self-checkouts are marvelous. At my main grocery store there’s hardly ever a lineup and I can breeze through there in a minute or two. They only “nag” people who don’t know how to use them properly.
I assume that last comment wasn’t meant nearly as bitchily as it’s coming across. I work in IT (software development currently), am generally pretty device-savvy, and can even program a VCR and the clock on the microwave if needed.
The program for self-checkout at the supermarket I go to is badly designed and executed.
You cannot tell it that you’re using your own bag up front. THE BUTTON is only available to push after you get the message “unexpected item in bagging area”. When you remove said bag (because it’s full), you get some other message about the now-empty bagging area that you have do something else about*. Then when you put your new bag down, you get the “unexpected item in bagging area” message *again *. And then after you’ve sorted the bag issue for a second or third time, when you scan something that doesn’t need a bag, the person with THE KEY has to come and tell the thing that you aren’t stealing the container of laundry soap or the 20# bag of pet food just because you didn’t bag it.
Shaws’ self-checkout isn’t worth the trouble unless, perhaps, you literally only have one or two items.
*I honestly don’t remember what other damn message you get because I stopped using self-checkout.
Sorry for the snark. Every self-checkout I’ve been to asks up front whether you have your own bags or not. Maybe because there’s a charge for plastic bags here?
Also, there is no key or anything. There’s one person looking after 8 self-checkouts who can override anything from the central console. So, if you wave ahead of time and show that you have a 20 pound bag of dog food (for example) they’ll nod and hit the override button, or whatever it is they do from the comfort of the central monitor.
I’ve been waiting in line behind some really clueless people before. A 12 year old should be able to purchase items at the self-checkout; it’s dead easy.
I had to hunt down the HEB store director today… The sidewalk is so full of metal animals/bbq pits/shelves of plants that it was a tight squeeze for the bus to let down the ramp… I explained the problem and he said he’d mark off a landing zone,so to speak.
Some are better than others. Waitrose (in the uk) has a bring your own bags option, Tesco’s doesn’t. None of them are centrally controlled - someone has to come over. And some machines are just buggy.
One of the reasons the self checkouts are quicker is because they’re not usuable for all patrons (well, actually I have seen a couple of wheelchair-friendly ones, but they’re very unusual), so you’ve got fewer people to queue behind. Kinda sucks if you’re forced into a long queue just because you’re disabled though.