Thanks for your approval.
Point being, what works for a couple of DINKs or city-apartment singles is not necessarily all that workable for a family. And an awful lot of the locavore/Trader Joe/specialty-foods/now Amazon Fresh customers are the younger crowd who grew out of fast food and box mac’n’cheese without really ever having to “grocery shop” the way most families do. Like so many things, they went from the juvenile form to the sophisticated form without ever experiencing the workaday form - and are often unaware of the difference.
Not saying any of this applies to you; for all I know you feed your five kids from Trader Joe’s. I always found it far too expensive except for one-some and two-some meals, rare in a household of five to eight.
Family of five. TJs, where I live is competitive, or cheaper, than grocery stores. I use Amazon Fresh for the things TJs doesn’t have and for things I can get cheaper there. And I use a local butcher for meat because I don’t care for TJs or Amazon Fresh selection. I spend the hour or more a week that I’m not at the grocery store with my family, and I’ve decided that’s worth the monthly cost.
But, thanks for the condescension.
I wasn’t being condescending. I was making the observation that things that work for the millennial crowd are often assumed to have universal applicability, and rarely do. Elite first-gen users of things like Uber, grocery delivery, “gig economy” employment and such often have little experience with the system being “replaced” and are confused when someone not 30, techy, urban, single, mobile, upscale, whatever can’t make good use of it.
I put Amazon Fresh in that category - as someone who’s shopped and cooked for a large family for two decades, had a very high family income for most of it, could shop any of twenty different places to get things, and is probably in the 5% of heavy Amazon users (2-5 packages most days). It will become a fixture, along with local/regional competition, for a subset of grocery shoppers. No more. And probably not for most households of more than 3.
TJ’s is optimized for couples. To buy one pack of frozen seafood skewers is competitive. To need three, just for one meal, is not.
AFAIK Trader Joe’s isn’t on the level of Whole Paycheck… er I mean Whole Foods in terms of costs. They’re owned by Aldi, after all.
This:
comes across as pretty darned condescending.
You made an (absolutely incorrect) inference about my life circumstances and decided to roll your eyes at it, and judge how I deal with “the help” when all I did was come into about Amazon Fresh to mention that I find the money to time trade off afforded by the service to be worthwhile for my family.
Thank goodness they’re not shipping gasoline yet.
I thought about using the service, but at prices this outrageous, I’ll stick to using my bike until I find a job and sign up for a credit card.
I love being able to sit on the couch with my iPad and do my grocery shopping. I mainly use Amazon Fresh, I love it. Safeway also has grocery delivery here (Seattle area), but I like Amazon Fresh better because their inventory system seems to be better - I don’t think I have ever ordered something and had them not bring it because it’s out of stock, where that happens quite a bit with Safeway. The Amazon Fresh prices don’t seem relatively high to me.
I am also totally in love with the Prime Now service. They will bring pretty much whatever you need within two hours for a minimum order of $20 (no delivery fee although a tip is suggested). If you want it within an hour it’s $8. I used this so many times over the holidays when we had house guests. No more late night runs (or trying to talk my husband into going) when I run out of butter (hate it when that happens).
AmazonFresh doesn’t serve my zipcode yet. It was below freezing yesterday–all day–and I didn’t feel like waiting for a bus. So I checked AmazonPrimeNow–I wanted to try a biscuit recipe that called for heavy cream, which I do *not *keep on hand.
Minimum order for AmazonPrimeNow is twenty bucks, so I had to add more stuff. The only fresh green vegetable was brussels sprouts–but there are some surprisingly good ways to cook them now. Other items were within acceptable price parameters. And the biscuits were good.
I already use Amazon (regular) Prime for large crates of toilet paper–bulky when you tote shopping bags. And Muir canned tomatoes–which I use a bunch.
Since I don’t have a large family to feed, I’ll continue to happily drop by favorite stores on my way home. And have stuff shipped when it makes sense. I have never had any “help.”
I just got back from the grocery store and went through my entire receipt against Amazon’s prices. Ignoring beer* and meat, it’s a wash**. Most items were cheaper or the same from Amazon, except where they were on sale at the grocery store.
There was a big difference for meat. I bought a $17 discount pack of stew beef at $5/lb. Cheapest Amazon meat was ground beef at $10/lb, out of stock. So if you buy a lot of cheap meat, that’s going to eat into the benefit/cost.
I underestimated the time spent grocerying. This was a quick trip and took me 45 min. So that’s minimum 3 h/month, more realistically 4 h. That might be different for someone who can stop on the way to or from work. 90% of my driving these days is exclusively for groceries. So I could factor in getting rid of the car, at $75/month just to park it, never mind maintenance, taxes, etc.
But if we keep everything else the same and assume if I were a vegetarian teetotaler, this service would save me 3-4 h/month for $15, or $3.75-$5/h
*No beer delivery! That kills it.
**Amazon was $0.50 cheaper, but this is hardly a random sample or necessarily a representative basket. Milk, FWIW, is $2.19 for a half gallon of 2% at Amazon vs the $2.39 I paid at Giant.
While this could be helpful for some people, I prefer to choose my own produce and meat.
We don’t yet have this where I live so I have some questions:
What keeps people from snatching it off your porch, like a Christmas package? It happens a lot with other things. And how will it not become a thing as this becomes more widespread?
What about in a cold climate? There’s a couple of feet of snow here and it’s -22C (-7F)! Anything left over night will be well frozen!
What about raccoons, dogs, cats, squirrels? How do animals not get into it?
And what if it takes off wildly and puts the local groceries out of business? And if it takes off wildly, how can it not? Now what? Don’t they kind of own your ass? Can’t they now send you anything, demand any price? Not a lot of things actually get better, if you’ve noticed. Whereas lots of things start out awesome and then start to suck. LOTS of things!
Check your location. Prices seem to vary widely.
AmateurBarbarian, these delivery services aren’t just used by millenials, and as I said, prices vary widely. Maybe they don’t work for your larger family, but we have three in our budget-conscious household and I occasionally use PrimeNow and regularly shop at Trader Joe’s. My elderly neighbors use safeway.com every week now and they’re interested in PrimeNow as well since I just told them about it.
A variation: A northwest chain called Fred Meyer has what they call Click List. Someone fills out their order on the company’s website, then they go to the store and park in the Click List designated parking stalls, and calls to tell them they’ve arrived. The store then brings their order to their car. Cost is $5 and food prices are the same as in the store. We don’t need such a service, but I’ve heard from people with kids that it’s so much better than going in.
Interesting. I recall that they delivered beer back when I used them, but that it required that you choose an attended delivery so they could check your ID. Things may well have changed though; I remember their terms shifting around several times as they experimented with different models. When I used it, there was no fee associated as long as you ordered a minimum amount monthly. Something on the order of a hundred bucks maybe. Not hard to hit if that’s your main source of groceries.
Regarding theft, if you do the unattended delivery, that’s definitely a risk, although it only happened once to me in the 2+ years I used the service. In that case, they replaced everything for free, as Amazon typically does. I suspect if that happened a lot, they’d decline to deliver to you unattended. I can’t remember what the ‘window’ was for an attended delivery other than a vague guess that it was two hours.
We rarely if ever had super cold weather in Seattle, but I can imagine that if you pick a delivery time that’s hours ahead of your return home, your shit is going to freeze pretty comprehensively.
This, by and large; while I’m sure the services (for now, at least) are being careful to ship “nice” stuff, I often choose vegetables for physical characteristics that will match the way I’m going to cook them (long straight zucchini, for example, if I’m going to grill them).
It depends on your grocery shopping habits. If the rather pricey TJ’s is on your regular rounds, the prices might seem quite reasonable. If you shop at more ordinary groceries, they might seem rather high.
All reasons and discussion aside, I don’t see it ever being anything but a niche service, and serving mostly couples/small families of above-average income.
We do buy a shit-ton of household goods from Amazon, and enough dog food for two Danes, and car parts, and so forth. Fresh food just isn’t something I can ever see having delivered, even as my family shrinks. Too many variables besides “just send me a nice one.”
Looks like it depends where you live re: beer. “We sell beer through AmazonFresh & PrimeNow only in select regions.”
I tried finding a list but only saw articles from 2015 mentioning that they weren’t going to sell beer any more.
So if anyone lives in an area that offers it, I’m curious how the prices compare.
TJs is cheaper than Giant around here. And Amazon is cheaper than Giant for non-meat goods, as I already posted.
Not available in my area yet.
My local King Sooper delivers for $10.95. I only used it once, and what a PIA sorting through the site. It’s safe to say it takes longer to do it online than stopping by the store, including driving time. I guess I really do prefer to walk around the store browsing for things. I guess it’s okay for staples that don’t change much, but I never know what interesting goodies the store might have I’d never think to look for on their website. It’s pretty handy if you buy heavy items you don’t feel like lugging around.
We’ve got Peapod and a regional chain’s delivery service in my area. We signed up for the latter a couple of years ago but have never used it because a lot of their prices are more expensive than in-store. I’ve been told the Peapod prices run neck-and-neck with in-store. I’ve never considered Peapod since our local Stop & Shop is a mere mile from us, but a lot of young families in my neighborhood use it. Our elderly neighbors seem to prefer the regional chain’s service for some reason.
My husband travels a lot for business so it wouldn’t make sense for us to use either of those services or Amazon Fresh. I have a subscription to Hello Fresh for those weeks where I’m feeling unspired. Each meal makes two servings, so there’s all my dinners for the week.
Amazon Go? Isn’t that the app where you go around with your smart phone trying to catch all the little amaz-emons? What happens when you catch the bezos-achu? Do you get a prize?