I’ve gone to Fresh Direct, Peapod, Mercato, others. Nothing available for weeks. Went to Walmart.com. A package of 10 tortillas is $42! And I can’t have them delivered until April 30. Ground beef, no delivery. In store purchase only.
Are there any other options? What I’ve been doing is going to the grocery store once a week, wearing a mask, and at my local ShopRite everyone is wearing one. Staying 6 feet away from everyone.
Maybe that is OK. Relative risk low.
Instacart lead times have been about a week for us. Costco still offers delivery on one day (fresh foods) and two day (shelf stable and non-food) schedules but they are running behind by a few days. We had an Instacart delivery scheduled tonight but it was cancelled because it’s Easter and the store is closed. We have another delivery scheduled for Friday. Hope that one makes it. Good luck.
As a side note, I thought that with unemployment as high as it is, tons of people would be signing up as Instacart and Uber eats drivers. Doesn’t seem to be happening fast enough to alleviate the shortage. Perhaps the fear of Coronavirus and the enhanced unemployment benefits mean people are wisely staying at home.
Yeah, I’ve been having the same issue. Tried Lowe’s Food a couple weeks ago for pick-up and they didn’t give me half of what I ordered (didn’t charge me or anything…I guess they were out of stock and couldn’t find a close substitute). Every other grocery delivery I’ve tried since has had no available dates. I did an in person shop on Friday with the intent of having it tide us over for two weeks.
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I don’t have a lot to add, but am wondering if OP is shopping at the walmart online grocery store instead of walmart.com. On the upper left of the walmart website it should let you pick between walmart.com and walmart grocery. I think they separated the webpages when the virus took off. I’m seeing tortillas for normal price of about $2 a ten pack.
However on my website, neither pickup or delivery is available until thursday the 16th at the earliest.
BTW I am in Jersey, just across the river from NYC.
For a bit of humor, from the movie Network. I did cross the GW bridge last night, to visit my brother in his newly purchased apartment in NYC. He is islolated and getting food delivery from his local bodeaga, working from home. I drove straight there, didn’t interact with anyone. I think this is OK
Search diligently, keep your shopping options open, and expect to week to have a chance at delivery or curbside pickup. I would consider curbside pickup if delivery doesn’t work.
We finally got curbside pickup but had to schedule it 6 days out and the available times kept disappearing as we were making our order (gotta be quick, too). My wife ordered over a week ago and was told to wait 5-7 days for a usual 2-day delivery and that was over a week ago. Delivery’s a mess.
The next time I go to the grocery store I will buy mass quantities of chicken thighs, ground beef, cans of beans and and bread and cheese and peanut butter. Peanut butter toast is one of the great foods. And milk and cereal. I haven’t had cereal for years until now. Honey Nut Cheerios! Frosted Flakes!
http://www.melgotserved.com/2012/01/honey-nut-cheerios-signed-by-michael-k.html
I too noted the lack of availability for delivery slots with Walmart here in the Upstate of South Carolina. At the time their grocery.walmart.com website only showed options for Today and Tomorrow.
The trick I found was to go ahead and build at least a minimum order, $30 I think, and then log on just before midnight. When the clock struck midnight that opened up slots for a new day and I was able to secure a delivery slot. I could then go back and edit my order as needed until 1:45am on the day of delivery.*
Since that delivery Walmart has expanded the dates you might can select so that there are about 5 days to choose from. There were many open options on multiple dates. I was able to secure a slot for Wednesday pickup (not choosing delivery this time) when I logged on mid afternoon on Sunday. Still, if all slots are taken try the midnight thing again.
*FWIW, the website checkout allowed me to pay with my credit card but did not mention any option for putting a tip for the driver on my card. After the delivery I got a prompt on the website to ask if I wanted to put a tip for the driver on my card. It would be a separate charge. However I had already tipped him in cash.
You need to distinguish perishables and general non-perishable pantry stuff.
Perishables depend on the city.
General pantry stuff try amazon.com, costco.com, samsclub.com, target.com, walmart.com, Google Shopping: https://shopping.google.com/u/0/
What would help right now is if we could try and reserve the delivery and pickup services for those in high-risk groups, and the rest of us go to the store at most once a week buying enough supplies to last as long as possible.
That’s for 10 packets of 10 tortillas each or 100 tortillas, it looks like. There’s a question in the reviews section. Still high-priced but not as crazy sounding as 10 tortillas for $42. They look like a specialty brand.
Sometimes the prices on certain items will be really out of line high. Those can be reported easily online, but Walmart’s pricing system can go off sometimes because I think they often match Amazon which is high for food items.
Hard to enforce, though - and even someone “low risk” could carry the virus from one place to another.
We’ve had 3 deliveries since things started to get bad. Each one has had a longer lead time and varying amounts of “couldn’t get x, y, and z”. Delivery 1 was pretty complete, delivery 2 was missing a LOT of things, delivery 3 was somewhere in the middle. Delivery slots have been more and more challenging; when I logged on immediately after the most recent order was closed out, I tried to reserve a spot for the next one and there was nothing available for the 2 weeks they showed. They had just restarted their curbside pickup service (suspended due to supply issues early on) so I was able to get a spot; hopefully we’ll get most of what we need then.
If you need a delivery (or pickup) spot, the best advice I’ve seen is to just keep trying and trying and trying. Sooner or later you’ll nab one.
Home delivery is not an option for MrsRico and I. Even FedEx sometimes gets lost. I drive downhill to the little county seat for incomplete no-contact market pickups (much is unavailable) with 10-day lead times. MrsRico sanitizes all items. I check our post office box; USPS doesn’t serve our rough road. We quarantine all mail in the laundry room for 3-4 days before opening. So we can order stuff online but I generally must schlep it home. We eagerly await delivery drones.
Thanks for the list. A couple anecdotal experiences. I used to order a bunch of canned goods on Target.com. About 90-95% of the cans arrived dented. At the time, I thought that they got dented in shipping, and there was no way around it. But when I ordered those same cans at Walmart.com, about 90-95% of the cans were NOT dented, leaving me with the speculation that the cans were dented before shipping. The packing is definitely worse at Target, but I’m not sure it would account for the differences in dented cans. I would also get an average of one expired item per order with Target. That hasn’t happened once with Walmart. I really like Target’s selection and the in-store experience better. I have had horrible experiences in the store with Walmart, but Walmart’s online experience is much better in some ways. On the downside, Walmart’s inventory fluctuates wildly and the prices are inconsistent and can change by the second back and forth every time you refresh the page.
Yaas! Self-disinfecting delivery drones. 
We have used the local grocery store delivery option for a few weeks. We shop for the items on the grocery store website, and they use Instacart to do the shopping and delivery. Initially we were frustrated because the earliest delivery was 5 days away. So we had to focus on planning out our meals and ingredients. Then we discovered that we could reserve a delivery date/time but keep adding to our shopping cart up until that time. That made the process a lot easier, as you discover things along the way that you might not have thought of initially.
The actual shopping experience went well, the shopper was texting with me the whole time and if they couldn’t find a specific item they would text me a photo of an alternative to ask if that one was OK. This gave me the option to say no in some cases and just drop the item from the list. This also gave me the opportunity to guide them (“if the shelf is empty, look for an endcap display near the kosher foods…”). It was a teeny bit frustrating because as a cook and shopper I know what to do when they don’t have the item I’m looking for (no brussel sprouts? Ok, green beans it is! No chopped walnuts? Fine, I’ll get whole walnuts and chop them myself.), whereas the instacart shopper shouldn’t be expected to make those calls.
So, we’ve gotten into a rhythm and it is working well for us.
We have staggered orders from two stores, both of which are about a 5 day lead time unless you hit it just right. Had two orders canceled on us. One was a late delivery (6-7 p.m.) that apparently got delayed and ran out the clock. They don’t reschedule you, so you have to go to the end of the line again. None of it was needed immediately, so no stress.
Until last month I never knew that Pop Tarts were cheap a.f. and that they last forever!
Instacart prices are insane, and my friends who use it are reporting that it’s almost impossible to get a delivery slot. I just tried Mercato.com for the first time today - it isn’t available everywhere, but it’s the same idea as Instacart, for independent and local grocers. The first order worked well, and I have an order scheduled for Thursday from a local bakery that needs more lead time.
I also signed us up for a CSA that delivers to our door. You can search CSAs that serve your area at Localharvest.com. For regular groceries, I have done a couple of rounds of curbside pickup at a local place that offers that service. Availability of some things has been spotty, and their website needs some work (it’s unclear for produce whether you are ordering 6 apples or 6 lbs. of apples, for example). My sister has done a couple of orders from Imperfect Produce - she was previously a customer, which is lucky because they are so slammed that they aren’t accepting new customers right now!
Anyway, there are lots of options at various price points and PITA levels.
UPS left a box with six packs of Dinty Moore stew from Walmart on our back porch yesterday. It’s a start. :eek:
I’ve been having good luck with instacart. I’ve been starting an order a few days before I really want it, to reserve a delivery time, then filling up the order over the next few days. However, the last two times I ordered I got same-day delivery, which I wasn’t expecting, and had to scramble to complete my order. I’m not sure if I just got lucky by getting in when there was a cancellation or something, or maybe it was related to the fact that I increased my tip from the default 5% (really?) to 15%.